An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Rowan Bayliss Hawitt (Heritage Collections Research Fellow, 2025)
Hearing Scotland’s Petrocultures
Scotland is a country shaped profoundly by both an extensive history of fossil fuel extraction and by a rich cultural heritage. Since at least the dramatic surge in coal production in nineteenth-century Europe, social and cultural interactions with fossil fuels have been articulated explicitly through music and sound. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century workers’ songs contain reverberations of daily life in Scotland’s coal industry, while in the second half of the twentieth century, folk music revivalists addressed the changing nature of hydrocarbon extraction. More broadly, the country’s musical practices and infrastructures are embedded with 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 paper unearths such sonic petrocultures within the University of Edinburgh’s Heritage Collections. I consider – on the one hand – song repertoires, sound recordings, and oral histories and – on the other – musical instruments and musical patronage at the University. Adopting a historical ethnographic and political ecology lens, I will trace how music and sound refracted 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 sonic petrocultures which echo across Scotland.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/83015772676
Passcode: b1QpaAD7