See the interview with Dr. Steve Everett

If a tree falls in the forest with no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? And if someone does hear it fall, could the listener’s cultural identity affect the way he or she perceives the sound?

Steve Everett, Professor of Music, ponders questions like these. Everett’s research and teaching interests include composition, computer and electronic music, cross-cultural influences in music, philosophy of art and technology, and technology and real-time interaction in live performance. He has an expansive range of composition styles, including live computer interaction in performances, mixed media, and acoustic concert works. His research interests center on an overall quest to explore the deeper meaning of music: “I am trying to understand why music is so critical to people’s lives. Why do people place such a value on it? Why is music so pervasive in human culture?”

The importance of sound in both the animal kingdom and humans inspires Everett. In the wild, young animals recognize their mothers’ voice, so subtle differences in sound play a critical part of an animal’s survival. Humankind, too, depends on sound. Explains Everett, “When you look historically, there has so far been no culture that people have ever studied or discovered in modern history where there has not been something in that culture that operates like what we would call a type of music.” This observation beckons the question in Everett’s mind: “Is music an evolutionary adaptation? Is it something that is necessary for our species that we have never fully acknowledged? Or does it principally serve only social and aesthetic functions?”

Everett’s curiosity about the deeper meaning of music began while studying in England under Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, an esteemed composer and conductor. Curious to press beyond musical performance and explore music as a means to learn about the world, Everett set out on a journey that took him to the far corners of the world, including India and Indonesia. While in Java, he immersed himself in the study of Javanese and Balinese gamelan, a traditional music ensemble of most Southeast Asian cultures that consists mainly of percussion instruments and, more recently, flutes, some string instruments, and voice. The humbling effect of gamelan is what attracts Everett. He recalls the lessons of his Javanese instructor: “It is an ethical training system more than just a music system. The whole purpose of gamelan is to teach you respect, tolerance, openness, gentility, softness, and refinement. When you have learned those qualities, then the music will sound correct. You cannot focus on the music itself without focusing on those qualities.’” These attributes struck a chord with Everett, who started a gamelan ensemble at Emory in 1996. The ensemble has continued in recent years under ethnomusicologist, Tong Soon Lee.

All these activities have shaped Everett’s understanding of why music matters, and how it matters differently in different cultures. “What you create sonically is a statement about who you are and your history, and so forth. When you go to another culture, they have a whole different set of priorities and you see an entirely different formula for what makes an ideal sound. I suspect that when we listen to sound, it is not the melodies of the scales and the harmonies that distinguish the cultures, it is the timbral quality of the individual sounds which can probably be recognized in the first few milliseconds.”

When composing, Everett strives to accommodate diverse cultural predilections. One of his most recent compositions, Ophelia’s Gaze, offers a prime example of how he combines various cultural influences into one piece. Parts of this chamber opera are based on a gamelan structure, but it retains an overall Western appeal; only those familiar with gamelan would be able to recognize its influence. Everett felt compelled to write the piece because of the intriguing story behind a photograph of an unknown woman taken by photographer E.J. Bellocq in 1912. These photographs of the turn-of-the-century New Orleansean prostitutes initially enraptured Emory poet Natasha Tretheway. As Everett describes, Tretheway saw the photographs of these women, and something about them captured her. She didn’t know the women’s names or life circumstances, but she wrote about what she envisioned their story might be. Tretheway named one particular woman Ophelia because the photograph stirred images of Shakespeare’s Ophelia from Macbeth. Everett read Tretheway’s poetry collection, Bellocq’s Ophelia and, in turn, felt compelled to compose the opera to set the story to music. For the next two years, he “lived” with Trethewey’s Ophelia story and imagined her world. The final product: a passionate piece reflecting the life of Ophelia, a woman held captive by a gaze.

Everett credits Emory University’s progressive artistic and intellectual culture with providing an environment that fosters his ability to engage in such creative work and to explore the deeper meanings of music. He teaches in a manner that challenges his students’ basic assumptions, often pressing his students to identify their musical preferences and the reasons behind these preferences as a way of helping them understand the cultural influence of all music. He also encourages other philosophical explorations, including the brainteaser about the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it. However, his teaching methodology and the exchange of knowledge is not one-way. Says Everett: “Students help me re-evaluate what I think music is, and how it operates. I don’t feel like I am teaching the students, rather, I feel like I am engaging them in a kind of exploratory dialogue. Their aesthetic and their views of music are equally as important as mine.” Everett also appreciates Emory’s support of interdisciplinary collaboration: “Emory’s humanities environment permits me to ask critical questions and to think through music within a broad array of approaches,” he says.

A native of Atlanta, Everett recalls what it was like to live in a segregated Atlanta. He remembers Jim Crow laws in effect when he was a child, and now, “in one generation, one lifetime, we… have President Barack Obama. Emory has been part of a fabric that provides a place where people can ask questions surrounding humanity’s existence and evolution.” Emory is a place that welcomes diversity and inspires deep thought and philosophical exploration. Everett is proud to call Emory – and Atlanta – his home.

So what really does happen if a tree falls in the forest with no one around to hear it? Everett has a simple answer, and one that might surprise you: “If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one around to hear it, then there is no sound.” Everett’s own life’s work, however, is anything but silent.