ATTENTION GRABBING HEADLINE
What do photos of a wildfire’s aftermath and the saxophone have in common?
There’s a particular photo in Ruth Morgan’s exhibit Requiem: Remains of the Day of a freestanding chimney—all that’s left of the house it once heated. When I look at this photo, I’m transported to the aftermath of the Caldor Fire near South Lake Tahoe, where a similar chimney was the only evidence left of one of the towns I visited and drove by often as a child. It’s impossible to look at these images and not be confronted with both the power nature holds over our lives and how climate change is shifting the balance of our relationship with it.
As an artist, I’m always looking for music that tells an emotional story. Classical music has a deep history filled with moving music, but I find the viewpoint of composers walking the world at the same time as me to be especially powerful. I wanted to create a program that explores our unique 21st-century relationship to our natural world, and I believe that Ruth Morgan’s Requiem is telling the most important part of that story. And so Echoes of the Wild was born.
The first work on my program is called “This Earthly Round (Redux)” by Australian composer Miriama Young. The piece is over 10 years old, dedicated to climate change deniers. In essence, the piece is a musical “round,” similar to childhood tunes like “Row, row, row your boat” and “Frères Jacques.” As the melody repeats around and around, it slowly deteriorates. “This is our earthly round—a musical round; Our joyous, brief moment of habitation; On a fragile sphere known as Planet Earth, held in the balance.” -Miriama Young.
While Australia and the American West are across an ocean from one another, the same climate change struggles have hit both. Australia’s wildfires have also intensified, with some of their worst fires on record occurring since this piece was written in 2014. I’m originally from Carson City, NV and (like everyone else in the American West) I’ve watched the forests I grew up in burn. My childhood summers were not defined by wildfire smoke and unhealthy air quality. But I can’t say the same for my son.
What gives me hope is that we are not helpless. Engaging with art about the climate crisis can help us see things in new ways and perhaps feel the grief of our situation that so many of us try to avoid in order to keep our lives running. My hope in sharing this program and combining it with Ruth Morgan’s arresting photos is to empower each of us to examine and perhaps to repair our relationship with our natural world.
I look forward to sharing more about the program with you between now and the performance on June 27. Other works explore struggle, wonder, and solitude. I warmly invite you to join me that evening to see the exhibit one last time before the museum’s new season and to hear this musical program performed live in Bonner Auditorium.
-Jessica Dodge-Overstreet