Limitations of the Research 137

A fundamental limitation of this research, with regards to the Immersive Listening research project, is its small and specific sample of participants. All the participants were, to a certain extent, familiar with the Finnish wilderness, and had had previous experiences with improvisation. While this meant that it was easy to maintain a sense of safety within the group while in the forest, it also means insights from this project might not so readily apply to people who do not feel de facto comfortable in

such an environment. There was also a gender imbalance within the group, with five females and only one male, and the majority of the participants (80%) were Finnish.

Another limiting factor is the fact that I was involved with this project as both a facilitator–leader and as artist–participant. While any role hierarchies within the group were less imposing, it also meant that I may have influenced the group dynamics, discussions, and direction because of my personal beliefs and expectations.

The particularity of the wilderness environment in which the group spent time is also a limitation. The wilderness area can be characterised as a boreal coniferous forest, with soft, mossy swamps and broad-leaved patches around lakes and more wet areas, typical of central Finland and other temperate countries of northern latitudes with not much mountains, such as central Sweden or Siberian taiga forests.

The project further took place at the end of summer, and the effects of each season’s qualities, as well as the range of difficulty in facilitating a comfortable and safe experience for the group from one season to the other, are variables which would inevitably change the outcome of this research, had the case study taken place in another location or season. The findings are thus limited to the specificities of the environments in which we worked.

E. New Questions—Where to next?

In the late seventies, Christopher Small indicated that “nowhere is our unwillingness to let nature, especially human nature, alone to work out her own processes in her own time more apparent than in education” (1978, p. 11). Fifty

years later, and though a lot of things have changed for the better in that time in education, this is still very underdeveloped. Certain initiatives have explicitly tried to reinstate such an awareness of our inherent connection to the natural world. Lifelong Integrated Education, a framework developed by Yoshiko Nomura and whose

principles are based on an “oriental view of nature, in which all things and matters in nature are integrated” (Nomura, 1998, p. 102).

It would be interesting to study how, embracing the wilderness as part of education can potentially open up new directions in music education, supporting artists in connecting their work to global issues such as climate change.¹¹

Another interesting direction would be to see the educational potential for wilderness experiences in young people’s art education. In ten years of data collected during the Outdoor Challenge Program, Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) note that the positive effects of being in the wilderness were more strongly evident in youth with problematic behaviour than in adults.

One possibility for future research, which was touched upon in the discussions between, and reflections of, the participants of the Immersive Listening project (Alicia; Katarina; Laonikos) would be a comparative study of the specific effects that the different varieties of wilderness areas have on music-making: Lappish tundra, Algerian deserts, the Appalachians, a small island in the Pacific, and so on.

Investigating, in other words, music-making as a function of the local fudo and exploring the specific differences.

A related question would be in a sense the reverse: rather than have one artist explore different fudo, to take a number of artists who live in various fudo and bring them all to experience one fudo. Investigating, thus, how our deeply embodied fudo from the place where we come from influences the ways we perceive and interact with a new fudo. How is an artist from an Algerian desert, another from Borneo, and a third from north Greenland experience a Siberian old growth boreal forest?

Perhaps the most interesting question personally is practising cosmopolitan listening through familiarising oneself with the fudo of potential collaborator. In other words, assuming that one’s sum of views on music (Musikanschauung) is, to certain degree, a function of fudo (“climate as a factor within the structure of human

existence,” Tetsurō, 1961, p. 1), to investigate how immersing oneself physically in another person’s climate can be a way of constructing an embodied understanding of their Musikanschauung (music-view), and, therefore, facilitate collaboration.

Shakuhachi player and author Christopher Yohmei Blasdel describes his

experiences of learning the shakuhachi from sitting and listening to the soundscapes in the mountains near Ikenodaira shrine:

“It was as if nature were busily whispering her secrets through her sounds—all we had to do was quiet ourselves and listen. Learning to discern the myriad tone colors of Ikenodaira’s natural environment helped me later to appreciate the rich timbre in traditional Japanese music.” (Blasdel, 2005, p.14)

The thought of investigating how immersing oneself into the soundscapes surrounding Ikenodaira shrine could be a way of understanding Blasdel’s Musikanshauung, as an alternative to talking about music.