Ann McCutchan

River Music: An Atchafalaya Story
June 2011

I have a new book coming out September 9 that focuses on Louisiana composer/soundscape artist Earl Robicheaux and his work to preserve south Louisiana's natural environment in sound. As a writer, musician, and champion of new music and the natural environment, I look for ways to highlight creative musical activity through the written word, and if nature is involved, so much the better.

The idea for River Music came about in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina wasted New Orleans. In my search for friends there, I discovered that one of them, composer Earl Robicheaux, had watched the storm from an ICU bed in Charity Hospital and barely made it out via Navy helicopter. It turned out that Earl had been undergoing chemotherapy for Burkitt's lymphoma, a rare illness probably caused by environmental pollutants. The link? The Atchafalaya River basin, North America's largest rain forest and Earl's home territory (aka "Cajun Country") has been increasingly compromised by industrial development since the late 19th century. Toxins abound. Activists like chemist Wilma Subra point to environmental racism and discrimination in and around Morgan City, where Earl grew up. As Earl puts it, "My species is gradually losing its home."

I hadn't been in touch with Earl in some time, and when I drove over from Texas after Katrina to visit him, I learned that in the intervening years, he had become a sound preservationist and soundscape composer, recording nature sounds, oral histories in vanishing populations (Houma, Chitimacha, Acadian) and folk music in the Atchafalaya. He had contributed to several important public art and cultural history projects, added to Cornell's Lab of Ornithology holdings, and composed several moving, provocative soundscapes for his own pleasure. All of this he produced in a tiny studio in his childhood home, where, since 1998, he had cared for his elderly mother, who suffers from dementia. Even as his and his mother's fortunes declined, he made it his mission to chronicle the Atchafalaya in sound.

Earl's cancer, and the subsequent discovery of brain lesions (also with possible environmental ties), rendered him officially disabled, yet he continues to trek all over south Louisiana with a 45-pound pack, recording birds, animals, church bells, fog horns, people, and other unique markers, like the squeak of shrimp boat rigging rocking in the breeze. His creative activity in the face of death mirrors the Atchafalaya's regenerative qualities in the face of environmental ruin.

It is also a powerful statement about the artist's role in society. Only a few composers garner towering world premieres in major cities; many more work hard, and faithfully, on the ground, honoring less glamorous, but no less important, callings. My own calling here was to bear witness to one of these grounded individuals and the extraordinary world of his work.

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Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Release date: September 9, 2011
Pre-order through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local independent bookstore.

Louisiana's Atchafalaya River Basin, the heart and soul of Acadiana, or Cajun country, is the focus of this compelling narrative by Ann McCutchan. A masterful weaving of cultural and environmental history, River Music also tells the life story of Louisiana musician, naturalist, and sound documentarian Earl Robicheaux.

With Robicheaux as her guide, McCutchan embarks on a musical, visual, literary, and historical tour of the Atchafalaya, where bayous, swamps, marshes, and river delta country have long sustained nature and culture, even as industry has changed both the landscape and the people. Along the way, she and Robicheaux pay homage to distinctive voices of the region's singular soundscape, including Acadian and Native American elders, birds, frogs, alligators, wind, water, and weather, which Robicheaux chronicles in archival recordings and musical compositions for museum exhibits, radio programs, and repositories such as the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. In counterpoint, McCutchan recounts Robicheaux's remarkable struggles as a jazz and classical artist, Katrina victim, cancer survivor, and steadfast son of the Basin devoted to remembering, preserving, and sounding out the ecological and cultural riches of his home.

An original blend of nature writing, music history, biography, journalism, and memoir, River Music: An Atchafalaya Story eloquently celebrates the one-and-half-million watery acres that have shaped the lives of the people there-and been transformed by them in return. An epilogue written in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and the disastrous oil spill that followed provides a fitting and poignant coda to this memorable book.

River Music also includes a CD of Atchafalaya soundscapes recorded and composed by Earl Robicheaux.

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