This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

By Guest Blogger Joseph Makholm

Revelations don’t come very often, but when they do your head is never quite the same.

In the fall of 2014, a revelation came to me in the form of Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything. It confirmed what I suspected to be true about climate change, which is that no attempt to deal with it can succeed without challenging the economic system that created the problem and brought us to where we are today. Science, politics, economics, culture all had to be considered at once if there were any hope of confronting this potential apocalyse.

Her thesis is logically and brilliantly argued, and a pleasure to read. It reminded me of two other books, among many I’ve read over the past decade, which are revelations in their own right. Whereas Ms Klein’s book considers climate change through an economic and political lens, Bill McKibben’s Eaarth examines it from a cultural orientation, and Dr James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren from a scientific perspective. Taken together, they’re an impressive trio.

I’m not a scientist, not a journalist. I’m a musician – composer, pianist and trombonist, specializing primarily in jazz. There are lots of trios in music, and, for a composer, just the idea of something in three parts can be an inspiration. I noticed an interesting three-part structure in Eaarth/This Changes Everything/Storms of My Grandchildren, with the middle section a sort of fast movement vis-à-vis the other two. Medium? Symphony, or sonata, or song cycle? That would work itself out. The real dilemma was how to adapt a book on current affairs into a piece of music.

What I did have was a potential deadline. The international climate conference COP21 was taking place here in Paris in November/December 2015. It would be great to premiere a piece during the conference, but by the time I got down to really thinking about it, it was only six months away. With that time frame the simplest option would be my own jazz ensemble, the Paris Jazz Repertory Quintet (PJRQ), whose repertoire is oriented toward classic compositions from the hard bop era.

I made a few phone calls to people whom I thought might have some influence, some useful suggestions. Nothing came of it, and the summer was spent on other projects.

Then, in late September I happened to be at the Sunside, one of Paris’ major jazz clubs – the PJRQ has played there often – and I asked the owner, in an offhand remark, what he thought of a climate concert during COP. His response: “Sound’s great. Send me a proposal by email.”

Oh, shit! Now I’ve got to do it, and I only have two months.

The first thing was I knew we’d have to expand the ensemble. The quintet already had excellent soloists and a fine rhythm section, but this sort of project would need a broader orchestral pallette. Two additional horns would do it, and fortunately my first choices – trombonist and second saxophonist – were both available. We were now the Paris Jazz Repertory Septet.

But I still had to tackle this book adaptation thing. I knew I wouldn’t have to reread the books in full, but I would have to dig in to find ideas, phrases, images that were evocative musically.

First in line was Eaarth, and the book’s central premise – and it’s title – was a workable point of departure. McKibben argues that the planet we now inhabit is not the same as the one we knew during millenia of human development. The stable, welcoming, nurturing world that brought about the flourishing of human culture has already become a harder and less accommodating planet, the result of a relentless exploitation of natural resources, industrialization, and the like. For us as a species, our earth is now a different place, i. e. “Eaarth.”

The dichotomy could become the basis of a balanced musical narrative: the reality of the new planet/memories of our former world. I couldn’t resist the double-A in McKibben’s title. The opening uses those two notes as a bowed ostinato in the contrabass beneath a procession of stark, dense chords in the brass. An anguished melody in the alto saxophone – improvised – emerges from the other horns in response to threatening gestures from the percussion.

The piano, absent in the opening, is the vehicle for an over-the-shoulder glance at what used to be. The dark A-minor harmony suddenly becomes a bright, colorful E-major – again from the title – with a warm, Ellingtonian richness. But it’s only a momentary reverie that can’t reverse the inevitability of the inhospitable new planet Eaarth.

This became the first section of “Eaarth.” I could continue with a detailed account of the words to music process, but there isn’t the space here. Suffice it to say that the full program of “Eaarth” would ultimately follow a three-section narrative:

1.  The New Planet, and Memories of Our Former World

2.  Nature Pushes Back
Melting Ice Caps—Rising Oceans
Drought—Crop Failure
Migration—Resource Wars

3.  Surviving, Not Thriving
Memories of Our Former World (reprise)
A Durable, Stable, Robust Future
The New Planet (reprise).

To give a sense of scale, each of the subsections in the text is a separate jazz theme – six in all – which are connected with transitional passages. The entire suite is 45-55 minutes in length without a break.

The second suite, “This Changes Everything,” came together in much the same way, and was finished only ten days before the premiere. It had become clear a couple of weeks earlier that I’d never get around to composing the third suite, but that was fine. The music had grown into something much bigger than originally planned, and we already had enough material for a full concert.

The unfinished “Concert Climat” was premiered at the Sunside/Sunset on 1 December, shortly after COP21 opened in Paris. The house was full, and the reaction from the audience was, to say the least, positive. Next step was to complete the third suite, “Storms of My Grandchildren,” and arrange for a performance of the full trilogy. That took place in Paris on a rainy Sunday afternoon in late May. The concert lasted four hours, and the room was full from start to finish. (Video clips from the May concert are available via this link.)

The piece is scheduled to be played again by the PJR7 at the Sunside in three separate concerts this season beginning on 13 November, each concert focusing on one of the three suites. Full details are available at the club’s website as well as our own Concert Climat website.

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Jazz pianist/trombonist and composer Joseph Makholm has been active in Paris since 1982.  He currently teaches composition at the Bill Evans Piano Academy. Much of Makholm’s music draws on the rhythmic and harmonic character of modern jazz.  His “Three Impressions for Solo Piano” is listed on the syllabus of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in the United Kingdom. In the spring of 2013 “Five In One (Monk’s Moods),” a symphonic portrait of Thelonious Monk was premiered by the Turning Point Ensemble in Vancouver, Canada. He performs regularly in small groups and with the Paris Jazz Repertory Quintet.

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Filed under: Guest Blog Series, Music

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

By Guest Blogger Christina Catanese

Featured Image: River print (detail) by Kaitlin Pomerantz & John Heron.

In Going Up: Climate Change + Philadelphia, eight artists from around the country – Daniel Crawford, Lorrie Fredette, Jim Frazer, Eve Mosher, Jill Pelto, Kaitlin Pomerantz and John Heron, and Michelle Wilson – explore the future of a hotter, wetter Philadelphia.

Several of the artists use data as a point of departure, and others suggest imaginative ways of thinking about problems and solutions, even considering the responsibility of art to reduce its own carbon footprint. The gallery contains artwork made for indoor display as well as pieces that document social practice or conceptual art that happened outside the gallery or studio, less focused on the product than the process. Many help us to notice our surroundings more closely, observing the small and incremental changes around us that track global change.

Going Up opened on September 24^th at the Schuylkill Center, and runs through December 2016.

Artist duo Kaitlin Pomerantz & John Heron explored waste and water pollution, presenting an imaginative way to think about the problem and potential solutions.  They created handmade paper works they call river prints during a residency at Recycled Artists in Residence, a program which gives artists access to the waste stream at a Northeast Philadelphia recycling facility.  The fourteen-foot-long piece in our gallery was made from discarded paper and denim, and then dipped into a polluted estuary in the Delaware watershed, drawing up oils and residues from the water surface to “print” on the surface of the paper.  Pomerantz writes, “Though I wouldn’t venture to say that our river prints did anything real in the way of remediation, for me, they began to suggest new ways of thinking about how to act on the messes we’ve made of our planet’s water…Our river prints project got me thinking about the value in making people actually see pollution, as a way to spur more conversations about new ideas in remediation.”  These artists also raise the question of the responsibility of art to reduce its own carbon footprint – their work is created entirely from found materials with no new art products needed.

Other artists in Going Up are interpreting dimensions of climate change related to health, biodiversity, water, waste, and food – encompassing of a broad range of kinds of climate change impacts.

Daniel Crawford created a string quartet composition from climate change data that uses music to highlight the places where climate is changing most rapidly.  In Planetary Bands, Warming World, each note represents the average temperature of a single year of four regions of the globe, demonstrating change over time and inspiring listeners to use different senses to understand these warmer years.

Lorrie Fredette presents a ceramic installation responding to Lyme disease, which is projected to spread as climate change increases the range of suitable tick habitat. Made up of 685 individual ceramic pieces referencing the form of the Lyme disease bacteria, the shape of the installation responds to the shape of the Schuylkill Center’s zip code, one of the highest incidences of Lyme in Philadelphia.

13×19 – Glyph 16 by Jim Frazer

Jim Frazer’s paper works are derived from bark beetle chewing patterns, an issue for forests which is expected to increase with a warming climate.

Jill Pelto uses climate change data as a point of departure for her watercolor works to communicate scientific research visually.  In addition to three works exploring global trends, Pelto created a new work for Going Up interpreting four sea level rise scenarios for Philadelphia.

Eve Mosher’s High Water Line (in Philadelphia and other cities) engaged communities with local issues of sea level rise and flooding. In 2014, Eve Mosher used surveyor’s chalk to mark ten feet of storm surge, the level to which water would rise in particular Philadelphia neighborhoods under certain climate forecasts.

Michelle Wilson’s Carbon Corpus project explores the implications of individual food choices for global climate change. A conceptual project, she shows a video documenting the project along with an 8.5 foot cube, which occupies the space that 35 kilograms of CO₂ takes up in the atmosphere, the amount saved by eating a vegan diet for one week.

Landscape of Change by Jill Pelto.

Dichotomies of scale pervade the gallery space. The colors and forms of the works, though, have a quietness and subtlety to them. In this way they are analogous to climate change itself: massive in scale but local in effect; happening gradually yet creeping up on us; a dominant presence, yet allowing us to move through and around it without making much of a change to the path we are on, at least for the present.

The show’s title references this trajectory along with scientific trends which often point in a terrifying upward direction. Yet, in invoking rising movement, we also pull hope into the climate change conversation. Climate change doesn’t only present challenges and doom-and-gloom scenarios, but also opportunities for innovative solutions, cooperation on an unprecedented scale, perhaps even a more sustainable and equitable society. These eight artists turn our focus both inward, toward the impacts in our own lives and communities, and upward, toward what we can do about them.

Eve Mosher and assistants draw the High Water Line in Northeast Philadelphia.

In 2014, Zadie Smith wrote on climate change that, “In the end, the only thing that could create the necessary traction in our minds was the intimate loss of the things we loved.” Art can be an anchor for this traction. Though art about climate change often contains elements of loss, the end result somehow feels more optimistic. Smith continues, “I found my mind finally beginning to turn from the elegiac what have we done to the practical what can we do.” Artists today have the unique potential to help more minds make this same, critical turn.

Together, the artists in Going Up have created a new avenue into the tangled knot of climate change. Instead of bombarding us with data, the information is transformed into beauty, into innovative communications and evocative images that stand in their own right as works of art, but which also invite the visitor to understand our warming world in new, personal ways.

Going Up is supported in part by a grant from CUSP – the Climate & Urban Systems Partnership, a group of informal science educators, climate scientists, learning scientists and community partners in four Northeast U.S. cities, funded by the National Science Foundation to explore innovative ways to educate city residents about climate change.

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Christina Catanese is the Director of Environmental Art at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education.  Founded in 1965, the Schuylkill Center is one of the first urban environmental education centers in the country, with 340 acres of fields, forests, ponds, and streams in northwest Philadelphia. We work through four core program areas: environmental education, environmental art, land stewardship, and wildlife rehabilitation. The environmental art program incites curiosity and sparks awareness of the natural environment through presentations of outdoor and indoor art.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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