Climate Music

PRiSM Artist in Residence Sarah Nicolls is a pianist and composer, whose artistic work often responds to the climate and ecological emergency.

An Innovate UK Women in Innovation award winner in 2022/23, she invented the ‘Inside-out Piano’, or the ‘Standing Grand’, revolutionising the design of Grand Pianos that fits in modern homes without compromising on sound while reducing the weight and carbon footprint by 60%.

Four years on since co-leading the PRiSM Changing Music in a Changing Climate collaboration, here Nicolls reflects on a series of musical activist works leading up to her most recent composition, Dreams in Flux (2024). She shares with us how her engagement with climate change has connected deeply with her being an artist, a parent, as well as becoming a farmer in rural Gloucestershire.

Making music about the ecological situation we face is hard. Music is non-specific in its meaning, but it carries emotion powerfully and immediately. It exists over time, giving it the power to take the listener on a journey from A to B. There are many choices about what else to visit en-route and how to specify or signpost what those places are.

I grapple with how to focus the listener’s mind on precisely what I want to communicate without lecturing, dictating, controlling. I have to lead them where I want to go but give autonomy and space, so that when it’s received there’s space and sympathy, room to get it for themselves, react for themselves. This is the challenge.

I began making my first climate recital-story in Autumn, 2018.

It was a year of change, events conspiring to a crescendo of activism and public debate in the UK. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published research that said we needed to halve emissions by 2030, so that it would be possible for Global Warming to stay under 1.5 degrees. There was a huge, devastating wildfire in Paradise, California, a big report about insects dying out on a mass scale, Greta Thunberg appeared on the steps of the Swedish parliament and then Extinction Rebellion (XR) burst onto the bridges of London.

People were affected; my favourite feedback was “this was the first time I *felt* climate change”.

When it came to writing the piece from my PRiSM research, Dreams in Flux, I had moved on a long way.

It no longer felt appropriate to be anything like didactic. The facts were all familiar now, repeated in headline news but somehow still lacking the bite needed to create a big enough response. We’d also collectively lived through Covid. Fear had been brought to the fore. We didn’t need more of it: we’d had a wake-up, thanks.

But also, I had changed.

Being a parent is both easy – accidental, almost – and the biggest responsibility I have. It’s creating the ultimate safe space – the foundation of someone’s whole life – while also offering some suggestions – moral compass, values; these are things we’re showing all the time, in our patience or lack of it, our kindness, or frustration, or annoyance, or help.

My kids had reached the age where I wasn’t just protecting them anymore, I was co-existing. They were seeing the world for themselves. I know I want them to be happy and stable.

I also know that I really want to have a fun, fulfilled life. I want to bring people together and have a laugh. I still don’t want to lecture.

But I do somehow want to share this private pocket of deep anxiety that I’m scarcely brave enough to look at. Have you read about the AMOC recently? If this is what happens at 1.5, then what happens at 3, within my daughter’s lifetime?

So instead of a piece which said “feel this!” “know this!”, I wanted to make a piece which said “I am really confused. I know what’s real. I am trying to do what I can but not to prove something, simply because *doing* feels better/more useful to me than talking. I want to collect and connect. I’m terrified but I want a happy home and wow, isn’t the world beautiful.”

Dreams in Flux was made through voice notes recorded on my phone whilst wandering around our land, and improvising on my Inside-Out Piano, exploring its vast, strange sounds. I wanted to share my ridiculous beginner status of someone attempting to look after 14 acres of land with no prior experience, in a stunningly beautiful valley in Stroud.

My wandering and wondering intertwined: looking, observing, learning, trying, going this way, then that. Finding the challenges, the beauty, the lushness of simply looking at my natural surroundings. The trees, their forms, the structures of the world around me.

I somehow wanted to make a piece that shared the most inquisitive, honest, deep, loving, questioning look, not a shrug because that’s too far from caring: I wanted to compose a deeply felt question.

I wanted to say “I don’t know the answer now. This is what I see. This is what I’ve learnt recently about trees and plants and trying. How do you find it? How do you cope with this discomfort – of being caught between knowing and at the same time living in the world? Needing to get to the school gate, or get the deadline done, save money on the shopping, stay warm (please don’t make me cycle in the wind and rain) but wanting your kids to be safe to have their own kids, a future which isn’t completely broken? How do you hold it all? And isn’t it amazing, still?”