Our Crises Are Connected: COVID-19's Lessons for the Growing Climate Emergency
This piece was first printed in the Fall 2020 issue of Chamber Music Magazine.
by Gabriela Lena Frank and Rebecca McFaul
———————————
We just can’t catch a break. That’s the thought going through every Californian’s mind in 2020, a truly unbelievable year. In this state, a long-time “contested Eden” of opportunity, Californians have been engaged in an awful feat of juggling: COVID-19, long overdue racial reconciliation, its senator in a brawl of a presidential race, and otherworldly wildfires… Wildfires in canyons, wildfires from freak dry lightning storms, wildfires lining major freeways and incinerating urban neighborhoods, wildfires that cast a smoky dark red glow of alarm over the entire West coast. The haunting rain of ashes—remnants of ruined homes, schools, cultural centers, and dreams—is not entirely filtered by the dutiful face mask encountering virus and soot.
This type of calamitous pile-on—unreal and unnatural—has been long predicted by those who study climate distress. California might be on the frontlines, but a full suite of ecological and social disasters will soon hinder the cultural life and safety of all communities whose economies depend on compromising the planet’s health. Tellingly, while ample evidence exists that health epidemics are much more likely on a warming planet, COVID-19 has generally been framed as a unique beast, a once-in-a-century horror to be tolerated through gritted teeth until a normalcy-restoring vaccine appears. Emotionally, the pandemic thus stands apart from the disasters of wildfires in the West, hurricanes in the Southeast, derecho wind storms in middle America, and ice sheets melting in the so-very-far-off Antarctic, all with their overwhelming and less-than-clear remedies.
But they are not separate from one another. Now also in the form of a global virus rather than a motley crew of regionalized disasters, the climate crisis has the entire planet in a vise. Even as we face the economic fallout of canceled concerts, our beloved music profession is not immune: Caught in a web of interconnected emergencies, vineyards in California that could host chamber music recitals have burned while Orchestra Iowa's music library was obliterated by a late summer Midwest derecho wind storm. Elsewhere, panicked industry professionals narrowly escaped their own brand of disaster, as in flood-prone Houston, TX, where Hurricane Laura spared its downtown Theater District, an area heavily damaged by Hurricane Harvey just three years earlier.
Yet, for all of its harm, the pandemic-induced "pause" from normal routines also presents a rare opportunity for reinvention. Such efforts are already underway. In addition to programming more artists of color and revisiting contracts to better protect freelancers vulnerable to economic distress, music lovers are also beginning to come together to address the climate crisis.
Music Declares Emergency, one of the most visible organizations specifically addressing environmental distress in our field, describes itself as a “coalition of artists, music industry professionals, and organizations that stand together to declare a climate and ecological emergency and call for an immediate governmental response to protect all life on Earth. We believe in the power of music to promote the cultural change needed to create a better future.”
The group’s goals are simply stated on their website:
• Jointly support one another, sharing expertise as a collective industry and community.
• Speak up and out about the climate and ecological emergency.
• Work towards making our businesses ecologically sustainable and regenerative.
Music Declares Emergency is a solid place to start for anyone seeking a practical assist in charting a new path precisely at a time when musicians and presenters are facing an increasing deluge of emergencies. The gratifyingly robust "Resources" section offers ideas according to the perspective of various roles in the profession: artist, label, manager, festival, venue, fan, and more. Artists can find templates for green riders, tools for routing tours more efficiently, and suggestions for how to offset air travel. For managers, there are guidelines for writing an environmental policy and action plan. For festivals, there is a link to “The Show Must Go On” report which offers research on what we can do as an industry to affect change. One can also find a link to a carbon calculator that was developed to measure common practices in our profession. Checklists with detailed step by step guidance for transitioning to greener practices can be helpful in getting a difficult project started.
Resources and communities like Music Declares Emergency lend confidence and resolve to those seeking to reduce their carbon footprints and be vocal about it. This includes the Fry Street Quartet, one of whose violinists, Rebecca, shares the writing of this article. With a multi-disciplinary performance piece in the quartet’s repertoire that confronts the sustainability crisis called Rising Tide: The Crossroads Project, the quartet had recently begun to ask for carbon considerations from presenting societies it contracts with. For instance, during the previous pre-pandemic season, a concert tour was organized with an efficient routing allowing for driving (instead of flying) a significant portion of the tour, effectively cutting emissions by half. And the quartet’s tech rider now routinely asks presenters to refrain from supplying single-use bottled water. Closer to home, using a template from the Music Declares Emergency website, the quartet's proposal to green the NOVA Chamber Music Series, a series it currently directs in Salt Lake, Utah, was accepted by its board. Meanwhile, at the quartet’s home institution of Utah State University, the pandemic has actually hastened efforts to expand technological capabilities allowing for more meaningful and frequent zero-emissions interactions with guest artists, a practice that will likely continue in the future.
Direct experience with climate disaster affected the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, a non-profit founded in 2017 by the other co-author of this article. Based out of two small farms in northern CA, the Academy's programs for its emerging composers interested in writing chamber music was imperiled by wildfire from its inception. Each year, as the Academy grew in activity, so did the dangers of fire, ultimately compelling the creation of the Academy’s Climate Commitment shortly before COVID-19 darkened the lights of concert halls across the United States. A primary focus of the Academy’s pledge is reducing its air travel footprint to 10% within three seasons through increasing the length of its residencies while decreasing their numbers and utilizing more distance learning; creating a “de-carbonized” commissioning program whereby multiple performers are contracted around the world to give regional premieres of a composer alum’s work in their home towns with the possibility of the composer video-conferencing in; creating satellite locations elsewhere in the US for residencies that draw more heavily on local talent; and focusing on collateral benefits such as notifying local music societies as to the availability of the Academy's out-of-town performer faculty for additional gigs, making it more possible for the performers to maximize income and turn down other contracts requiring air travel. As an educational institution, the Academy has also contracted scientists to lead an ongoing curriculum for its composers on climate action specifically for creatives, begun a monthly book/video club on this topic for its alums and former/upcoming performer faculty, and created a fund to pay its staff to educate themselves on climate change and research further solutions for the Academy.
While it’s true that individual actions won’t get us where we need to go without systemic change, these actions can help to pave the way by modeling the world we want to see and encouraging others to the conversation. The same imagination we employ to re-interpret masterpieces and compose new ones can also be put to use to reinvent a profession we love. In California, the state government and citizens are already embracing wildfires as a way of life with an eye to keeping them from dramatically worsening in the immediate future, and to actually become beneficial in the long run. Even in a year as difficult as this one, and perhaps especially because of its multiple calamities, the time to pivot is upon us, in this very moment, so that we can make music and create for the ages.
Gabriela Lena Frank is the director of the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music. Included in the Washington Post's list of the 35 most significant women composers in history (August, 2017), Gabriela was born in Berkeley, California. Winner of a Latin Grammy, she has composed for leading orchestras and worked with luminaries like cellist Yo Yo Ma, soprano Dawn Upshaw, the King’s Singers, and the Kronos Quartet. She also is a passionate believer in service, and has brought her love of music into hospitals, schools, and prisons. Learn more on Gabriela's bio page.
The “freedom” and “brilliance” (New York Concert Review) of violinist Rebecca McFaul has fashioned performances that “glide through with a dancer’s grace” (Charlotte Observer). As a founding member of the Fry Street Quartet, Rebecca has spent years in an actively concertizing string quartet while expanding the role of the arts in society. Collaborations with composers, across disciplines, and with community partners have marked the career of the Fry Street Quartet throughout its existence.
Active collaborations with composers Laura Kaminsky, Libby Larsen, and Gabriela Lena Frank, involve commissioned works as well as larger-scale transdisciplinary efforts. Most notable is the quartet’s Crossroads: Rising Tide performance piece on global sustainability with physicist Robert Davies, which has been performed more than 40 times in 3 different countries and was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition. The Crossroads Project album featuring quartets written for the FSQ by Kaminsky and Larsen was released by Navona Records. The FSQ also premiered and recorded Laura Kaminsky’s groundbreaking chamber opera As One. Programming standard works is also a priority, with cycles of the Beethoven, Bartok, and Britten quartets in their repertoire. The Fry Street Quartet is represented by Jonathan Wentworth Associates, Ltd.
The quartet holds the Dan C. and Manon Caine Russell endowed string quartet residency at Utah State University’s Caine College of the Arts, where Rebecca is an Associate Professor of Professional Practice.