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Today’s composers should stop trying to be eco-warriors

Tackling climate change through music is a noble idea, but the results rarely catch fire

Sublime vision: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818 (oil on canvas) by Friedrich, Caspar David (1774-1840)
Sublime vision: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818 (oil on canvas) by Friedrich, Caspar David (1774-1840) Credit: Bridgeman

Musicians and composers have never been more keen to involve themselves in the burning issues of the day, and there’s none more burning – literally – than climate change. It’s a trend that showed itself first in pop music, where artists now vie to display their environmental credentials. Two years ago, the band The 1975 featured a song that included a recording of a speech by Greta Thunberg, then 16 years old. 
In July of the same year, 200 bands joined Music Declares Emergency, a clarion call for humanity to address the climate “emergency”.

Classical music is not far behind in showing a desire to save humanity from sleepwalking into disaster. There’s a small but increasing stream of pieces about the environment, one of which crossed my path just a couple of weeks ago. Gabriella Smith’s Anthozoa alerts us to the perils facing marine life, with percussion sounds that the programme note told me were accurate portrayals of the sounds of shrimps popping and parrotfish nibbling on coral reefs. A piece that was similarly focused on distant places of which we know little was Kieran Brunt’s The Rising Sea Symphony, which was broadcast by BBC Radio 3 in December 2020. This mingled orchestral electronic and vocal music with field recordings of people in Ghana, Switzerland and the North Pole. They described ways in which life has already been affected by climate change, while the music sketched a paradisiacal landscape in harps and swooping strings.

One can’t question the sincerity of these composers, but it has to be said that the musical results are mixed. The documentary parts of The Rising Sea Symphony are a lot more affecting than the tinkling prettiness of the music, and Anthozoa is shockingly thin. The problem with both pieces is that they feel essentially touristic. The middle-class Western composer flies out to some exotic locale (at considerable cost to the planet), records some evocative sounds and interviews, and flies home again, without pausing to investigate the messy political realities that come to bear on the environmental issue.

If composers really want to draw our attention to, say, the plight of poor people in India, they would do better to focus on the continuing power of the caste system and oppressive landlords. But to do justice to that theme would need the bitter scorn and anger of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, and the result would be something genuinely uncomfortable. Composers nowadays would rather focus on rising sea-levels and temperatures, because those threats are distant and vaguely defined, and can be illustrated with wincingly cute nature pictures set off against doom-laden scenes of apocalypse. What both those scenes lack is the sharp edge of reality. They are pitched at the level of fantasy.

The contrast with the way in which composers approached environmental themes in the past is striking, and the reason isn’t hard to find. They lived so much closer to nature than we do; it was just a few hundred yards away, beyond the city gate. Like everyone else, composers were keenly aware of the changing seasons, and they were vulnerable to nature’s caprices. If there was a bad harvest that year, it would impinge on their lives in an immediate way; for us, it’s just a blip in the price of bread – if that.

In the music of composers up to the 19th century and even later, nature seems familiar and everyday, because that’s exactly what it was. Beethoven never tried to picture coral reefs or the ice-caps in his music; he evoked the forests of the Wienerwald (Vienna Woods) where he liked to go walking. The storm that lashes the peasants in his Sixth Symphony feels real because he must have been soaked to the skin in such a storm himself.

Another thing that makes the portrayal of nature so different in pre-modern times is that people’s experience of it was communal and active. It’s only from Beethoven’s time onwards that the natural world is passively contemplated in music; before that, it was a faithful reflection of the fact that humanity had to work tirelessly to wrest an existence from nature. The sounds and rhythms of hunting and sowing and harvesting and the characteristic sounds of domesticated animals are what you hear in “nature” music, as well as the lilt of rustic songs and dances. All these things had their proper season, whose eternal round was marked out by festivities. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons captures this rich and now vanished tapestry, which is surely one reason it keeps its magic year after year.

Compared with that, today’s environmental music feels both detached and solipsistic, and also bloodless. It’s about how nature looks and feels to me – “me” being a composer at a safe distance.

Beautiful metaphors: John Luther Adams is one of the few composers who makes successful compsotions about landscape
Beautiful metaphors: John Luther Adams is one of the few composers who makes successful compsotions about landscape Credit: Donald Lee

It’s no accident that the one composer who’s succeeded in rising above the limitations of “eco-music” doesn’t hold himself at a safe distance. John Luther Adams is an American composer who is happy only when living in extreme conditions, close to nature. For decades he immersed himself in the wilds of Alaska, where he worked as an environmental activist before dedicating himself to music. A few years ago, he decided that it was time to try the opposite extreme, and took himself off to the Mexican desert. His music is saturated with keenly observed particulars: wind through trees, water over rocks, ice cracking, and above all birdsong.

All that might seem merely picturesque, but it isn’t so. Luther Adams has a deep respect and love of music per se, and he insists that his compositional processes are as abstract and intellectual as anything you’ll find in Bach. This matters. It’s because one feels the presence of a penetrating musical mind that his pieces are so moving. And there’s another reason his music is treasurable. Much environmental activism these days puts forward a depressingly prejudiced view that the planet would be better off without humanity. Luther Adams’s music offers a beautiful metaphor for human culture and nature in harmony, a hopeful message that is worth more than any number of doom-laden prophecies.

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