Music and Climate Emergency

If you want to change the world, start with yourself.

This past Thursday, April 22, marked Earth Day. Much of my research and creative practice engages with themes of environmental justice and climate change, so I’ve been involved in a number of Earth Day-related events. All last week I was in digital residency at the University of Texas at Austin, speaking about my work on Tar Sands Songbook. On Wednesday, I moderated the webinar about climate emergency for the League of American Orchestras.

I’ll share the video of the webinar as soon as it’s available. In the meanwhile, here is the speech I gave as an opening provocation at Wednesday’s event.

I’ve got one more webinar next Wednesday April 28 at 3 PM, this time as a guest. I’ll be talking about my work as artist-in-residence with Climate Action Network Canada in the FUTURES/forward mentorship program.

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“Music has nothing to do with oil”

When I was 14 years old, I decided I would become a professional musician because it had nothing to do with oil. I was born in Fort McMurray, Alberta, home to Canada’s “tar sands”—the world’s third largest oil reserve. For a time, I lived in a neighborhood called Petrolia. Our hero was Wayne Gretzky of the Edmonton Oilers. The local McDonald’s had a pumpjack in the playground.

Since then, the tar sands have grown into one of the largest and most destructive industrial projects in the world, and I’ve become a professional musician. In my role as a faculty member at the Mannes School of Music and the New England Conservatory, I prepare the next generation of musical leaders. 

On the surface, there isn’t much that connects my two lives. But 15 years ago, clashes over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline made Fort McMurray front page news as the source of the “dirty oil” to be carried through the United States to the Gulf of Mexico. The images of surface mining were shocking. Vast lakes of toxic process water. The biggest trucks in the world. The earth skinned alive.

I knew it was time to connect the dots. The scientific evidence is in—climate change is caused by human activity. Exxon knew in 1977. I’ve known since I was eleven years old. But for most of my life I used music like a shield. When the news troubled me, I’d tell myself that my response would be, as Leonard Bernstein once said, “to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”

Leonard Bernstein’s speech

But as I prepare students to enter a precarious profession on a precarious planet, I know this is not enough. So I’ve started to tell a new story about music and oil.

In 2016, I began going back home, for the first time since my childhood. . I wanted to understand my role in the story. I sat in a wood-paneled kitchen as a fisherman incanted the names of lost species like the names of friends who’d passed on; I sat on the porch of an elder who listed the neighbors who’d died of rare cancers; I stood at the counter of the local RCMP detachment, requesting a report on my stepbrother’s death in a pipeline explosion when I was 11. I spoke with people on all sides of the issues: engineers, oil patch workers, indigenous elders, activists, pro-industry influencers, and members of my own family.

I’ve woven their voices together with my story and my music, in a multimedia performance called Tar Sands Songbook. It’s designed to be performed over ten years, in community residencies along the rail, truck and pipeline routes that carry Alberta crude into the global market—each performance bookended by storytelling workshops where people speak and hear their stories about oil. The play is my personal reckoning with my implication in an environmental, social, and economic disaster; my way of grieving what’s been lost and defending what’s essential. I do it so that others can do the same. I do it to renegotiate my relationship to home.

From a 2019 performance of “Tar Sands Songbook.” Credit: Reuben Radding.

The social license to operate

Many people in Alberta don’t want to talk about oil. The oil and gas sector is the province’s largest industry and when you pull on the thread, the social fabric puckers. People are pragmatic: for decades, there was a strong global demand for the energy we produce, and the Canadian economy depends on it. People have pride: for many families, like mine, oil paved the road to a better life.

Oil fueled my􏰀 family􏰀􏰎􏰄’s a􏰄cen􏰃t 􏰃􏰁into the middle class. My father, stepfather, brothers, uncles, cousins, and nephews all found work in the oil patch. Even though I chose a different path, oil was the condition of my choice. Oil money (royalties, industry donations) brought the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra to a school gymnasium in Fort McMurray, where my mother sat in a folding chair, reverent as she experienced an orchestral performance for the first time. Oil money built the schools and convened the teachers who nurtured my talent. A grant fund from oil royalties paid for a trip to NYC, to audition for Juilliard. 

Think about it. My mother grew up on a subsistence farm without oil or electricity or running water. I got into Juilliard. 

In the arts-and-education sector, they call that “a pipeline.” In the language of Corporate Social Responsibility, it’s called a “Social License to Operate”—an essential strategy for securing local trust and legitimacy.

Consider this text from Shell’s website about its sponsorship of the New Orleans Jazz Fest:

Shell continues to invest billions of dollars into safely running and growing our operations here. We can do this because people know us and trust us— Jazz Fest is a big part of how we earn that trust.

Eight Provocations

We live in a time of climate emergency, when the topic of human extinction regularly appears in our news feeds.  

Now I know that music has everything to do with oil. And when we know differently, we can act differently.

Knowing that music has everything to do with oil changed how I see my role: not just as a violist, or a teacher, or as a scholar/activist, but as someone who can use all of my skills to mobilize musicians, musical organizations, and their audiences to meaningful action in the climate emergency. 

I want to offer a series of critical provocations about the arts and social engagement. I want to do this both to enlarge our imagination and understanding about what's possible, and to get more specific about how we understand and describe our impacts.   

Dispense with magical thinking about music.

We commonly speak of music as though it were a divine machine—a universal apparatus that builds bridges, gives hope, builds peace, ennobles us, empowers us, expresses the inexpressible, and transcends all time. Music is not a divine machine, but a complex set of social practices hardwired into every human culture. 

There is no such “thing” as music, and we are all musicians.

The musicologist Christopher Small wrote that music is not a noun, but a verb. If we want to understand the fullest value of music we must look to the musical things people do. Singing, playing, whistling, choosing a song to change your mood: these are musical acts. We use music to know our place in the world. We use music to pierce the veil of the everyday and shape the world in which we wish to live. Music lives in musical practices enacted by individuals, alone and in concert with others.

Art does not effect social change. People do.

Society is a construct: art can’t impact a construct. Artists can impact individuals, who then act to impact society. Artists create a model representation of how the world could be. We help people to imagine revolution (to know why we need a revolution, and what a revolution could look and sound like). We create the conditions for material change to happen.  

History is a weapon against hopelessness.

History is full of examples of seemingly hopeless causes (same sex marriage, voting rights for women) and cultural shifts (tobacco, women in the workplace). We are in the midst of a revolution of energy consciousness and energy alternatives. To believe things are hopeless is to ignore our own story.

A social license can be revoked.

Oil companies funded the creation and spread of climate denial. Oil companies fund the arts as a strategy to secure local trust and legitimacy. They’re strategies from the same PR playbook. (For more on that, see the 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, or the 2015 documentary by the same name.)

Arts organizations can help dismantle the social license to operate by divesting in fossil fuels. To those who fear the loss of donor/sponsor relationships, I implore you to imagine this: What kinds of new relationships might you secure if you were to act out of a commitment to deeper, more inclusive, more sustainable concept of well-being in your community?

We have little time to waste.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that we have less than a decade to control unstoppable climate change. It’s scary and we desperately need to act. We need a suite of practical solutions. We need an “emergency mindset:” to mobilize in common cause across class, race and gender, and entirely retool our economy in the space of a few short years. This requires all hands on deck.

We have the power of trust.

Art museums and performing arts organizations are represented under the category of Visitor-Serving Organizations—spaces that function as learning venues; facilitators of shared experience.

Recent data from IMPACT’s National Awareness, Attitudes and Usage Study shows that people trust VSOs have the power of public trust. People trust museums more than newspapers, government agencies, and newspapers as sources of unbiased information about complex, politicized, issues like climate change.  As such, institutions can play a big role in helping the public understand climate science and inspire action-oriented solutions. What if an orchestra were more like a museum? What creative possibilities might you imagine for mobilizing musicians, music organizations, and their audiences to meaningful action in the climate emergency?

Source: Collen Dielenschneider, Know Your Own Bone.

If you want to change the world, start with yourself.

All of this—and more—came from one insight: If you want to change the world, you must start with yourself. I had to recognize and confront my own climate denial. Knowing about the oiliness of music—and the musicality of oil—made all the difference.

When I thought that music had nothing to do with oil, I saw climate change as something that would happen to someone else, somewhere else, some other time. Now I see that it’s the story of my life.