Dr Rowan Bayliss Hawitt
Heritage Collections Fellow, February - July 2025
Home institution: KU Leuven
Rowan Bayliss Hawitt is a musician and academic working at the intersection of ethnomusicology and the environmental humanities. She is currently an FWO Postdoctoral Fellow at KU Leuven, Belgium, researching historical and contemporary connections between music, sound, and energy industries in Scotland. Prior to her appointment, she was a 2024 Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Rowan completed her PhD in Music at the University of Edinburgh in 2024, drawing on ethnography with environmentally-motivated folk musicians in Scotland and England to explore how their practices refract changing understandings of time occasioned by the climate crisis. To date, her published work addresses musical ‘ecological thinking’, humanities-based contributions to the scientific field of phenology, ecological grief in popular music, and musical incursions into anthropogenic extinction. As a saxophonist, cellist, and singer she has performed across Europe, East Asia, North America, and New Zealand. Rowan has a particular love for improvisation, Renaissance polyphony, and folk and traditional musics of all kinds.
Project title: Hearing Scotland’s Petrocultures
Since at least the dramatic surge in coal production in nineteenth-century Europe, social and cultural interactions with fossil fuels have been articulated through music in Scotland. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century workers’ songs contain reverberations of daily life in Scotland’s coal, oil, and gas industries. In the second half of the twentieth century, folk music revivalists addressed the changing nature of the fossil fuel industries. More broadly, Scotland’s musical practices and infrastructures have been shaped fundamentally by fossil fuels: various instruments are made from petroleum-based materials and musical institutions were often supported by wealth derived from early energy industries. Each of these facets of musical life are ‘petrocultures’, inextricable from the extraction and use of fossil fuels.
This project investigates such musical petrocultures within the University’s Heritage Collections. I consider – on the one hand – song repertoires, recorded oral histories, and radio broadcasts and – on the other – musical instruments and musical patronage at the University. Adopting a historical ethnographic and political ecology lens, I therefore trace how music articulated life in Scotland’s fossil fuel industries and how Scotland’s musical institutions are intertwined with fossil fuels, both materially and economically. Paying attention to the disparity between lived, working-class experiences of extractive industries and the ‘invisibilised’ role of fossil fuels in musical collections and institutions, I seek to uncover the plurality of petrocultural experiences across Scotland.