COP26 – what should I do?

In the aftermath of COP26 I have been wondering what I can do to ‘make a difference’ to the climate crisis. As a musician, as a composer, what can I possibly do that will have any impact?

We are not the policy makers – we are not the green tech engineers or the renewable energy designers – but are there ways in which composers can use their music to try to shift attitudes, to encourage greener practices and to inspire others to do the same? I’ve been exploring this in my own compositions and discovered there are other composers active in the UK making this a driving factor for their creative work.

Jenni Roditi is a composer, director and vocal improviser based in London. She told me about her recent large-scale work Land Mass, a music-film project that celebrates nature in a surreal, hyper-real, very earthy way. Roditi comments: ‘My awareness is being called towards this issue more and more; expressing the natural cycle of the land, from the physicality of the plough to the gifting of the yield. Land Mass cycles intuitively through the four seasons. Theatre-maker Simon McBurney describes the singing in the piece: 'It’s as if the voices are rising up from the land itself’.

This thought-provoking work was created by Jenni using her hand conduction method and it is now an hour-long music-film available here through OnJam.TV. Described by one viewer as ‘nature organising itself through human beings’, the choir’s voices almost erupt as the improvisations flow, like flocks of birds in murmuration.

Jenni is passionate about finding ways to support campaigning and lobbying groups by creating works that inspire, change and enhance our awareness of environmental issues. ‘The point for me is not to get into proselytising or catastrophising. I want to play an illuminating role and touch people on an unconscious level. That’s where I believe real change starts, from within the core of one’s being.’ 

Graham Fitkin is a composer/pianist based in Cornwall. Having worked for Greenpeace and the Green Party in the late 80s he has been concerned about the issues of environmental biodiversity, climate change, soil erosion and aqua. The book Small Is Beautiful by E F Schumacher was an important find for him at this time, as it helped to shape his thinking. He is deeply concerned about the impact of oligarchic capitalism, in which large proportions of society feel disenfranchised and bereft of hope.

In the 2000s Graham thought humanity was ‘doomed whatever we decide to do’, so didn't explore these extra-musical themes in his musical output. However, more recently many of his creative projects are driven by examining how change is impacting our world: from human perceptions of how the world 'should' be, to the effects of deep-sea dredging and hyper-capitalism.

One long-term project, Birch started out as an orchestral piece for Umeå, the European City of Culture in Sweden, based on scientific data collected from a single birch tree in the city’s forest. With the help of the university there, information for this tree about yearly growth, snowfall, etc. was collected and transformed by Graham into an entire piece.

Graham had also planned a series of concerts to celebrate the 150^th birthday of the birch tree, which unfortunately had to be abandoned due to the pandemic. His plan had been to cycle the 2000 miles through seven countries: from Sweden, through Denmark, Germany, Holland, Belgium, France and England, crossing all those increasingly fractious national borders, performing solo piano gigs en route and planting 2000 trees with local communities as he went. The culmination of this journey was intended to be a final concert at the Proms in the Royal Albert Hall earlier this year, with a performance of the updated orchestral piece that had started it all off.

He tells me: ‘I liked the idea that music and trees and communities were being involved together. I wasn't just performing to music afficionados, but to communities.’

Supriya Nagarajan is a composer, performer, CEO and mentor. Based in Yorkshire, Supriya’s artistic work focuses on finding ways for the community to engage in climate issues by ‘giving the mind some space to breathe.’ She draws strongly on the great south Indian musical genre of Carnatic music and her experience as a girl growing up in South India, where she developed a keen awareness of sharing and conserving resources and the importance of growing your own food, water use, mending and recycling, all as a normal part of daily life.

Supriya’s community action research projects gently promote better understanding of environmental issues, exploring different aspects of our natural surroundings: organising sound walks in the countryside, creating music-making events outdoors in gardens and other outdoor spaces. She says: ‘I want to raise people’s awareness of the natural world, so that we do not take it for granted’. 

As a judge in the ‘Tune Into Nature Music Prize’ Supriya is actively supporting and encouraging young music writers to engage with the natural world. Research at the University of Derby has found that the connection between young people and nature dips during teenage years and that references to nature in contemporary music have decreased consistently since the 1950s. This matters, as a close connection with nature helps both the wellbeing of people and our planet, and people who are tuned into nature are more likely to care for it (more information about this can be found at The Oak Project).

In her Life of a Bee project, Supriya was resident artist at the beautiful Kingsbrae gardens in New Brunswick, Canada in summer 2017, where she did preliminary composition work on her album highlighting the dwindling bee population. She is currently composing new work based on studies on collective intelligence of bees and its application in the field of Artificial Intelligence. She has worked in her local community where children learnt not just about honey-making but also about bee society, how bees work as a collective and how bee societies are structured within a hive. She explains: ‘The leader sets the tone for the hive. If the queen is calm, the hive is calm, if the queen is aggressive, the whole hive picks up on that energy.’

Mairi Campbell is a Scottish composer, performer and theatre maker. She says that, due to the pandemic, most of her live work has ‘gone up in smoke. I'm not travelling, I'm at home most of the time and my two events a week are on Zoom – a traditional Fiddle Slow Session and an online performance event called Campbell's Ceilidh.’

Nonetheless, Mairi’s voice and music were heard at COP26. The Vision Mechanics team first contacted Mairi in 2019 to create the sound element of their ten-metre tall ‘goddess of the sea’, called STORM, made from entirely recycled materials. Two years in the making, STORM’s eyes are the colour of oyster shells, her hair thick strands of kelp, her voice the chorus of the waves. STORM made her journey across Scotland with the aid of eight highly skilled puppeteers starting from the inaugural Coastal Connections Day in 2020. Most recently she walked the streets of Glasgow as part of COP26. STORM encourages us all to celebrate our seas, care for our coastlines and empower us all to put the environment first, with Mairi’s haunting and evocative music as STORM’s voice. Mairi’s album ‘Storm’ is now available on Bandcamp.

Mairi has always wanted to understand the healing properties of music, the effect of frequency. She says: ‘As musicians we have not learned or been trained in the deeper purposes of music, so we're going to have to fly by the seat of our pants and it seems no one can teach us.’ She admits it feels scary, but sometimes she is able to enjoy aspects of the freedom that lockdown has offered, saying: ‘The only way forward to is have as few expenses as possible and live on little. I suppose some would say that's good for the climate - I'm not so sure.’

It is heartening to discover all this work and I would be very interested to hear about more projects like these, happening in smaller communities or stretching across continents, that encourage people to engage creatively and positively with the ecological challenges that face us.

For myself, I decided to make my own mark by using the words of environmental activist Greta Thunberg as part of a large-scale new choral work that has been described as ‘a love song to the planet’. Entitled I Stand At The Door – a cantata for our time the piece uses the same instrumentation as Bach’s cantata Nun Komm, der Heiden Heiland (BWV 61). In my piece, the choir and soloist sing texts from different sources including the Book of Revelation and the story of Kurt Masur standing up to the Stasi in 1989. One of the most compelling moments centres around Greta’s words: ‘You have stolen my childhood. You have stolen my dreams. People ask me - what should I do? And I say: do something. Act. Once we start to act, hope is everywhere.’

Liz Dilnot Johnson’s I Stand At The Door is being performed by Ex Cathedra as part of its Sleepers Awake – Bach & Dilnot Johnson concert at Birmingham Town Hall on December 5^th.

Visit insideoutmusician.com for events and courses for musicians and creatives hosted by Mairi Campbell, Jenni Roditi and Liz Dilnot Johnson.