There’s a low upper limit to the climate news can I take in.
A Horrifying New Stat? I’m already as horrified as I can be without breaking down completely bla bla bla.
That Asshole Again? Do I really need more agita? I’m already as angry as I can be bla bla bla.
I don’t have the bandwidth to understand the science in more depth, so if Pakalolo or FOOW or one of our other climate-science heroes tells me to be alarmed about something... well, I just put it on top of the to-be-alarmed-about pile which accumulates just over there on the right-hand side of my mental desktop.
I click on depressing articles and read the headlines and then leave them open on my browser, meaning to get around to them so I can stop feeling guilty about not reading them. They gradually accumulate until I have five browser windows open, each with 27 tabs, each with an article I’m supposed to read. Then in a late night frenzy I’ll bookmark them all (because that way I’m sure to get around to reading them soon, right?) and banish them from my screen. I can haz Netflix, pleax?
Somehow I think I’m not alone in this.
But climate news doesn’t affect my work as a climate activist. I get up every morning and do my vigil, write it up, and get on with my day. Which includes climate work pretty much every single moment when I’m not tied up with teaching, domestic exigencies, or goddamned politics.
This fall’s climate work — beyond the vigils and the postcards and the petitions and the demonstrations — is aimed at COP-26, and my connection with the last best hope of our species and our civilization.
Because I’m a fortunate man. To my own surprise, I have something that I love and something I’m good at and something that just might have a big impact on our world and its future.
This November the delegates and politicians and policy-makers and general hangers-on at COP-26 will be witness to what will almost certainly be the most diverse musical event in human history.
Hundreds of musicians. And it’s my job to find them, to pester the performers until they come through, to find the right people and the right music and the right spoken messages.
On November 4, Music For Climate Justice (aka M4CJ) will present a sort of benefit concert: 40 hours of music, raising awareness and funds for climate action, while making the case to Glasgow attendees (and everyone around the world) that climate change won’t just destroy our infrastructure and our agriculture and our biodiversity (and our coffee and beer and wine)..it’ll also tear asunder the fabric of our civilization — our culture, our art, our dances and stories and songs.
The folks from M4CJ contacted me out of the blue sky earlier this year to tell me their plans and to ask for my help.
Could I use my worldwide network of musical contacts and my decades of experience as a concert producer to help them make an event that’d really stretch the boundaries of the possible?
Why, yes.
Yes. I could.
And that has defined my days in the months since then.
I did something like this in 2014, on a much smaller scale — just me and my friends and their friends — making short video messages that combined performances with short statements about climate change and the need for action.
The musical excerpts in this diary are from the 2014 project; the material we’re collecting for the M4CJ event won’t be released until November.
But I’ll tantalize you with some of what we’ll be offering in Glasgow.
Some coming attractions:
The third movement of the Brahms Horn Trio…
An Australian Aboriginal rock band…
European Renaissance music…
A dutar master from Tajikistan...
Rice farmers’ music from Indonesia…
A blues guitarist from Mississippi…
A South Indian veena master…
A blues-rock band from Meghalaya, India…
A singer-songwriter from the Dominican Republic…
A virtuoso guitarist who’s also a research diver — in Antarctica!…
Contemporary Western classical solos for viola...
Elizabethan madrigals…
A pair of subsistence farmers from Rwanda…
A jazz violinist from Tunisia…
A klezmer trumpet virtuoso…
Swedish folk songs for accordion and voice…
Italian hurdy-gurdy music…
Iranian classical music for tar & voice…
A virtuoso of the Korean Gayageum…
Zimbabwean mbira masters...
A Sanskrit invocation to Shiva…
Traditional songs of the Solomon Islands…
A Hindustani sarod master…
A jazz big band from NYC…
A Ghanaian atsimevu drum master…
A folkloric ensemble from Kathmandu, Nepal…
A poet from Papua New Guinea…
...well, you get the picture. There are lots more in the pipeline. It’s pretty exciting.
Why am I doing this? Will this help? Is it a waste of time?
I don’t have a clue. But it feels right.
Why?
The science doesn’t seem to change minds (though it should).
The economics doesn’t seem to change minds (though it should).
The food insecurity doesn’t seem to change minds (though it should).
The geopolitical instability doesn’t seem to change minds (though it should).
Maybe, just maybe, music can change minds?
Can They
Unclench And Listen?
“The 9/11 workers themselves felt compelled to sing. One night during the recovery effort, I was helping serve meals down at St. Paul’s Chapel when one of the soot-covered rescue workers sitting in the pews looked up at the ceiling and started to sing. I don’t recall the song, something properly respectful. But everyone froze. Volunteers stopped pouring coffee and scooping pasta onto dishes, and men paused with food halfway to their mouths. Fires were burning yards away, so close you could smell exactly what was burning down there, and all through the day and night, the following scene played out: the church would be relatively quiet as the workers ate or slept, and then suddenly the firemen’s shoulder mics would go off. There’d be a tremendous rustling and banging as all the men jumped to their feet, grabbed their gear, and quickly left the church. A body or a body part had been found. Everyone was on 24-hour death-call alert, knowing that at any moment they’d have to retrieve some precious but mangled piece of flesh — and in the midst of that wretched vigil this guy was singing. No one knew how to respond. We all just stood there like statues, looking at each other for cues. Was this okay? Slowly we all unclenched and listened. Upstairs in the galleries some men cried. Soon after, volunteer musicians began showing up daily to play instruments or sing. The music wasn’t always solemn. Diene Reiners, one of the volunteer coordinators, remembers when Sister Helena Marie sat down at the piano and played Jerry Lee Lewis’ song, ‘Great Balls of Fire.’ I personally remember a lot of Sinatra.”
Stacy Horn “Imperfect Harmony,” pp. 74-75.
Dare we hope that the power of the world’s music could make some folks at Glasgow “unclench and listen”?
Could an Irish fiddle tune played by a young woman facing an uncertain and scary future be the One Small Yopp that put it over the top?
The Press Release
Today at Climate Week NYC, a group of influential business leaders and activists came together in radical collaboration to announce Music4ClimateJustice, a marathon concert that will take place on COP26, 2021. The event will include top performers, breakout musicians and indigenous artists, all coming together to fund-raise for climate justice, which frames climate change through a human rights lens.
Music4ClimateJustice will be produced by the award-winning producer Ivan Dudynsky of LiveAnimals, the co-creator, executive producer and director of NBC’s Songland. The event will stream live on broadcast and digital platforms, global media network FINTECH.TV and on Dakia Digital’s TRIBES Music platform. After the event, the music and performances will live on as a film, album and other expressions. The group will also partner with The United Nations Sustainable Stock Exchanges Initiative to “ring the bell” from stock exchanges across the world.
“Solving the climate crisis is a massive ambition, but the stakes have never been higher,” said Michele Bongiovanni, CEO and Founder of HealRWorld and founding partner ofMusic4ClimateJustice. “I’ve dedicated my career to the UN Sustainable Development Goals because they are a blueprint to create measurable change for our future through inspired action.This global event is not just another concert, it’s the start of a movement to ignite radical collaboration between artists, athletes, change-makers, activists, brands and organizations coming together to save our planet.
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The chances of success are slim to nonexistent. The forces arrayed in opposition are overwhelming.
So we shall sing.
And perhaps some in the halls of power will be moved to action.
Because music is what we turn to when the world is too much, when there’s nothing else left.
Three days passed and the lights gave out
When Caleb Rushton got up and said,
“There's no more water nor light nor bread,
So we'll live on songs and hope instead,
Live on songs and hope instead.”
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This Saturday I sang at a memorial gathering for the mother of an old friend.
There were a lot of old hippies in the room, telling stories about how it was back in the day. I started and ended the ceremony with a song, marking the community’s celebration of Sheila’s life and work.
My friend asked me if I wanted to be paid. I told him, “make a donation to 350.org in the names of your mom and me.”
“John MacLay wrote to us in an email, ‘The passage of a life, as no other event, causes human beings — and humanity generally — to reflect on life and the nature of the human spirit as no other event. There is nothing more primal, more communal, than the death rite. It is universal to all times, all cultures. It is equal parts sorrow for the departed, relief that we are still here, a more general celebration of the human spirit and a reminder of our common bond. To the extent that art is a distillation of life and the human spirit (and I believe that it must be), a Requiem cannot fail to motivate the best of the best — often at the worst of times.
“Through the course of a single year (at Theresienstadt), the concentration camp was alive with the Verdi (requiem), learning it by rote, and singing it numerous times for their torturers. The membership of the choir was replaced four times during that year, but they persisted, and etched out an indelible example of the power of art and the human spirit’.”
Stacy Horn — Imperfect Harmony, pp-18-19.
Okay. That’s all for today.
Songs and hope.
Peace out.
WarrenS