In Focus: The Climate Agenda 01/05/2024 – 02/05/2024

Tumblebird Contrails is inspired by a single moment I experienced while backpacking in Point Reyes, sitting in the sand at the edge of the ocean, listening to the hallucinatory sounds of the Pacific (the keening gulls, pounding surf, rush of approaching waves, sizzle of sand and sea foam in receding tides), the constant ebb and flow of pitch to pitchless, tune to texture, grooving to free-flowing, watching a pair of ravens playing in the wind, rolling, swooping, diving, soaring—imagining the ecstasy of wind in the wings—jet trails painting never-ending streaks across the sky. The title, Tumblebird Contrails, is a Kerouac-inspired, nonsense phrase I invented to evoke the sound and feeling of the piece.

—Gabriella Smith

I wrote Carrot Revolution in 2015 for my friends the Aizuri Quartet. It was commissioned by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia for their exhibition The Order of Things, in which they commissioned three visual artists and myself to respond to Dr. Barnes’ distinctive “ensembles,” the unique ways in which he arranged his acquired paintings along with metal objects, furniture, and pottery, juxtaposing them in ways that bring out their similarities and differences in shape, color, and texture. While walking around the Barnes, looking for inspiration for this string quartet, I suddenly remembered a Cézanne quote I’d heard years ago (though which I later learned was misattributed to him): “The day will come when a single, freshly observed carrot will start a revolution.” And I knew immediately that my piece would be called Carrot Revolution. I envisioned the piece as a celebration of that spirit of fresh observation and of new ways of looking at old things, such as the string quartet – a 250-year-old genre – as well as some of my even older musical influences (Bach, Perotin, Gregorian chant, Georgian folk songs, and Celtic fiddle tunes). The piece is a patchwork of my wildly contrasting influences and full of weird, unexpected juxtapositions and intersecting planes of sound, inspired by the way Barnes’ ensembles show old works in new contexts and draw connections between things we don’t think of as being related.
– Gabriella Smith

Tectonic movements caused by the insects.

Walden for wind quintet was written in 1978 and commissioned by the Funen Wind Quintet. The title is taken from the American philosopher and poet Henry David Thoreau’s novel from 1854 about living in the woods, which Thoreau did for two years.

His stay there was an experiment, an attempt to strip away all the artificial needs imposed by society and rediscover man’s lost unity with nature. In that particular sense his novel is a documentation of social inadequacy and a work of poetry (Utopia) as well.

All thought Thoreau himself never completed any actual social analysis he was way ahead of his own time in his perception of the economy and cyclic character of Nature, today known as ecology. His ideas are particularly relevant now that pollution caused by society has reached alarming proportions.

Walden was written in a style of re-cycling and “new simplicity”. A lot of superfluous material has been peeled away in order to give space to different qualities such as identity and clarity. Various layers are encountered in the quintet such as the organic (growth, flowering, Decay), concretism (mechanical patterns) and finally the descriptive (distant horn calls and other ghost-like music of the past enter our consciousness like a dream). Walden consist of four movements.

In 1995 another version for reed quintet was written to the Calefax Reed Quintet.

– Hans Abrahamsen

Pulsing is the seventh movement from Dessner’s dance piece Impermanence/Disintegration

Dessner originally composed Impermanence for the Sydney Dance Company and choreographer Rafael Bonachela, which the company performed as a new work with Australian String Quartet.

The concept for the music draws inspiration from the tragic fires in the Australian bush and Notre-Dame Cathedral, exploring the juxtaposition of beauty and devastation.

Born in the San Francisco Bay Area, polymath Gabriella Smith began composing at the age of 8. An outdoor enthusiast, she can often be found backpacking with her ukulele and drawing musical inspiration from nature. Loop the Fractal Hold of Rain is based on a poem she wrote in her youth. In the composition, Smith imagines “interlocking loops and patterns and textures and rain” and incorporates structured improvisatory elements, as well as a glass slide for glissandi and a moment of “wild, crazy, vibrato.”

Nunataks are mountains that rise up out of icefields and glaciers. The jagged contours of nunataks contrast sharply with the smooth whiteness that surrounds them.

As the ice melts and the sea rises, these solitary peaks stand as stark reminders of human isolation and vulnerability.

—John Luther Adams

The Yellow Cake Revue is a sequence of cabaret style numbers, first performed at the St. Magnus Festival, Orkney, by Eleanor Bron, with the composer at the piano, in June 1980.

It takes its name from the popular term for refined uranium ore, and concerns the threat of the proposed uranium mining to the economy and ecology of the Orkney Islands which islanders are determined to fight, down to the last person.

Stromness, the second largest town in Orkney (pop. 1,500) would be two miles from the uranium mine’s core, and the centre most threatened by pollution etc., Yesnaby, is the nearby clifftop beauty spot under whose soil the uranium is known to lie.

Wharbeth beach is the most popular beach in summer for Stromnessians. The “Dounreay dragon” refers to British Nuclear Fuels’ establishment at Dounreay opposite Orkney on the Scottish Mainland coast.

— Peter Maxwell Davies

Tourist Board Song

Oh come to sunny Wharbeth
And sport upon the shore
The loveliest beach in Orkney
Could Heaven offer more?
Just a mile or so from Stromness
And the wild Atlantic’s roar.
Here of a summer weekend
Stromnessians flock in droves.
But help! What can have happened
To Wharbeth’s sandy coves?
How Heaven can to Hell transform
So fast God only knows.

Oh, the beach that we played on
Is fanned by the breath of radon
And the sand dunes where the lovers hide
Are point two five percent uranium oxide.
And the little stream for our ablutions
Burns your skin with acidic solutions.
While the rocks that we swam from
Are pulverised by the megaton.
We can’t fly our kites still
They’d tangle in the rod and ball mill
Where the chimneys and the fume stacks
Belch sulphuric acid on the train tracks
Which has scorched the grass and leaves for miles around
And killed off all the crabs and fish in Hoy Sound.
Now you can’t hear yourself speak or think
In the squalor waste and dust and smoke and noise and stink.

Oh come to sorry Wharbeth
And look upon the shore
The saddest beach in Orkney
Could ever Hell blight more?
Just a mile or so from Stromness
And the uranium crater’s core.
Just a mile or so from Stromness
And the uranium crater’s core.

Patriotic Song

You’ve heard of the man with the pacemaker
Containing a quarter of a gram
Of plutonium, which the terrorists
Cut out to make a bomb.
Well, here’s another act
Of sabotage on a patient
Perpetrated by the mining corporation,
On behalf of your elected government.

Two church steeples skewer his eyes
Pinning his head in Stromness
The right wrist trapped by the Brig of Waith
The left by the Bishop at Breckness.
One leg stuck under Yesnaby Stack
The other at the Ring of Brodgar;
The patient’s prepared for surgery
To be performed on his uranium corridor.

No anaesthetics are in use here
We doctors don’t stand to gain.
The patient must feel each probe and cut
And his blood the Iochans stain.
His lungs we will eviscerate
To transmute into nuclear fuels.
Admire how we cut the living ribcage out
With our life destroying tools.

The flesh and bones are crushed to dust
Listen to the mighty churn
Of mile high machinery all night long;
A new style Orkney quern.
The resultant mush will be dissolved
In H₂SO₄
To ensure that all Stromnessians
Breathe poison for evermore.

What we don’t want, we’ll leave for you
A legacy of guts and pluck
Contaminating the land and sea
With radioactive muck.
Sadly here’s another case
Where the patient’s beyond our care
Screaming his final threnody
While to safety we repair.

Your farms and fishing are all gone
Your town is killed by our greed.
But wave a cheerful little Union Jack
For the greater national need.

Texts

One of the great things about Earth as an imagine is that… it’s too much. It helps me to think about how we share the planet, and the fact that it’s always half day and it’s always jalf night. Your midnight is someone else’s noon. It doesn’t work in language: I try to talk about it, and it comes out as clichés. But this is seeing it.

Robinson Meyer
‘A New and Stunning Way to See the Whole Earth’
(The Atlantic, 26 January 2016)

Prompted to seek my Bliss above the Skies
How often did I lift mine Eyes
Beyond the Spheres!
Dame Nature told me there was endless Space
Within my Soul; I spy’d its very face
Sure it not for nought appears.
What is there which a Man may see
Beyond the Spheres?
Felicity.

Thomas Traherne
(from Poems of Felicity)

Whether the emergencies of the coming century arrive in the form of fires, or floods, or plagues that rise invisibly from the ground, they’re likely to become more and more extreme and less and less familiar. Even in its quietest places, the world will become newly hostile.

Robinson Meyer
‘The Zombie Diseases of Climate Change’
(The Atlantic, 6 November 2017)

No empty Space: it is all full of Sight
All Soul and Life, an Eye most bright,
All Light and Love,
Which doth at once all things possess and give,
Heaven and Earth, and All that therein live;
It rests as quiet, and doth move;
Eternal is, yet Time includes;
A scene above
All Interludes.

Thomas Traherne
(from Poems of Felicity)

Maré is the Portuguese word for tide. I wrote Maré while in residence at Instituto Sacatar in Bahia, Brazil. The artist colony was right on the beach of a beautiful island in the Bahia de Todos os Santos called Ilha de Itaparica. The slope of the beach into the ocean was very gradual, so the horizontal distance between low and high tide was extreme. When the tide was high it would come all the way up almost to the gates of the artist colony. And when it was low it would retreat far away leaving behind a huge expanse of beautiful beach. So the rhythm of the tides became integrated into the rhythm of our daily lives. Maré is inspired by these tidal movements and the way in which they became a part of me during my time there. Many thanks to Instituto Sacatar for hosting me as I wrote this piece.

– Gabriella Smith

This piece was commissioned in 2024 for a concert series at the RNCM titled The Future is Green. Rather cynical in tone, it was written in musical response to an original epigraph concerning the sobering potential for our planet, should humanity continue to repudiate the consequences of environmental neglect, beginning in quiet anguish and disintegrating into turmoil piecemeal as time wastes away.

Earth’s company beseeched, heed Its call:
‘lest your self-invested greed should fall
down to depths so sunken that I may
after time, turned, gone; green to grey’.

Earth Canticle is an elegy and a lovesong, written over the course of a week when my ecological grief was more intense than I have ever experienced before. It is dedicated to a monkey puzzle tree that used to grow near my family’s home, and to all the trees felled solely for human ends or lost in storms made stronger and more likely by climate change. I think of what trees give us: the alchemy that breathes in sunlight and breathes out air; of the histories written deep into their roots and bark, the meanings they have held for countless peoples across time and borders, and the cures awaiting discovery in their sap and flowers. I think of the acres of ancient forest that will be brutally destroyed over the course of today’s performance, and of lyrebirds, renowned imitators of sounds in their environment, who after millennia of preserving sonic histories have now learned to mimic chainsaws. I wrote this piece in an attempt to make sense of such unfathomable loss, and to find new meaning and rootedness in what I experience as an increasingly barren and rootless world.

The piece opens with a cornet melody which returns at different points, the last time only in part, as if the music had begun to melt away. A `rocking` refrain hovers between more tense and fleeting musical moments. Its final iteration leaves the piece suspended before finally melting into the air.

Asteryth Sloane, 2024

Commissioned by The Schubert Ensemble with funds gratefully received from The Schubert Ensemble Trust, Spitalfields Festival New Music Commission Fund and The Steel Charitable Trust. Premiered by The Schubert Ensemble at Queen Mary University London during the Spitalfields Music Festival on Monday 13th June 2016.

I am lucky to have a wonderful park just ten minutes walk from my house: I can leave home and be back within the hour having walked around a lake and under what I imagine to be vaulted roofs made only from trees. I like to walk the same path every time I go, paying attention to the many changes that can occur suddenly (such as the weather) and gradually (such as the changing colour of the leaves). Today, when much of the Earth is being polluted, fracked and deforested, it seems particularly important to really notice and respect the land, to feel a connection to it.

Two poems, entitled Thistles and Ferns (both from Wodwo) by Ted Hughes also inspired my work, and added a resonance to the thistles and ferns that I see nearly every time I walk. The Whole Earth Dances is a single, slow movement divided into five continuous parts: thistles, ferns, thistles, ferns, thistles. Hughesʼs description of the former (ʻEvery one a revengeful burst of resurrectionʼ) and the latter (ʻHere is the fernʼs frond, unfurling a gestureʼ) influence all the musical material in the work, and I have tried to imbue the piece with the sense of timelessness that I feel when walking with his poems (with their allusions to Vikings and ʻwarriors returningʼ) in my head.

The Whole Earth Dances is dedicated to the memory of my friend Becs Andrews, a fiercely talented Stage designer and Visual artist who passed away at the beginning of the year.​

— Cheryl Frances-Hoad, 2016

In 1987 a recording was made of a Male Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird, the last surviving member of its species, singing out to a mate that did not exist. This proved to be the final ever recording made of this bird, and in 2023 after numerous searches it was officially declared extinct.

This work draws on the pitch content from the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō’s final song, and explores it in two contrasting sections: one dense, hectic and colourful, the other sparse and lonely.

This is a piece about life that goes unseen; roots, lichens and fungi that grows in the smallest spaces, insects and rodents that make homes beneath our feet, and the once-living cells that make up the wood of floorboards.

The soft impact of brushes on strings and percussion evoke tiny movements of tiny things, with heavier sounds evoking the creaking of the wood itself. The piece uses timbres that are neither totally continuous nor totally disjunct, with this relationship being in constant flux. The texture evolves through different stages, building from a series of rapid flurries into constant creeping movement, before falling away into individual staccato impacts. A quiet melodic line emerges occasionally, as if rays sunlight were peeking through the gaps in the texture.

Anthozoa is inspired by a series of underwater recordings I made in the coral reefs of French Polynesia. In the summer of 2018, I had the opportunity to spend two weeks on a sailboat there, and whenever the conditions were right, I would go out on the paddle board and drop my hydrophone into the water amongst the coral and listen. Most people think of the ocean as a silent place, but in reality it is incredibly noisy and vibrant with many species making sound just as we do on the surface. In coral reefs, one can hear the constant crackling of shrimp like a background static, the grunting sounds that various species of fish make for communication, and a crunching noise that is the sound of parrot fish eating algae off the coral. (The coral later goes through their digestive system and is ground into smaller and smoother bits and pooped out which, over the course of thousands of years, accumulates to create the beautiful white-sand beaches of the tropics.) The piece is filled with these popping, creaking, crunching, and grunting sounds, but my overall goal was not to simply transcribe this soundscape but also to capture that glorious feeling of awe and wonder at dropping my hydrophone down into the water and hearing for the first time this completely new sound world.

– Gabriella Smith