An Eco-Musicology and Sustainability Advocacy Playlist

Christiana Fortune-Reader

SUNY New Paltz

Sustainability Learning for Action and Community Engagement

OPEN ACCESS BOOK CHAPTER
Psithurism: What Musicians and Other Artists Bring to the Climate Justice Movement

RELATED CHAPTER
What Are We Hoping to Sustain? A Personal Ecology

With an invocation of his sister’s and father’s piano playing, Eric Keeling offers a focused discussion of sustainability in the context of carbon and climate....

Resource for this chapter, below...

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After reading this resource, please refer to the bottom of the page for self-reflection questions to assist with your next steps!

Interested in exploring eco-musicology and sustainability advocacy through the study of composers and their works? Whether in a music history course or a survey course for non-majors, a sample syllabus might include:

🌸 ☀️ 🍂 ❄️ Antonio Vivaldi, Four Seasons (1720):

Before there were nature documentaries, there was Antonio Vivaldi. The Four Seasons, written around 1720, is one of the earliest attempts to paint the natural world in sound. Imagine spring birds and buzzing flies, a summer thunderstorm rolling in, hunters and dogs in autumn, teeth chattering in winter ice... Each season gets its own concerto; each concerto comes with a short poem describing exactly what you're supposed to hear.

It's been played so many times that it's easy to take for granted. Try not to. Listen for the moment the storm breaks in Summer, or the way Winter somehow feels brutal and beautiful at once. Vivaldi was doing something radical: insisting that nature itself was worth this much attention, craft, and ultimately, awe.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 6 “Pastorale” (1808):

Beethoven wrote the Pastoral Symphony in the same year he was coming to terms with his deafness. That fact changes how you hear it. Finished in 1808, it's his love letter to the countryside, to long walks, open fields, streams, birdsong, and summer storms. He was unusually specific about it, labeling each movement: arrival in the country, a scene by the brook, a gathering of villagers, a thunderstorm, and finally, a shepherd's song of gratitude after the storm passes. He called it "an expression of feeling rather than painting," meaning he was trying to capture what nature does to you. What's striking is how unhurried it is. Beethoven, who could be fierce and monumental, slows all the way down here.

For a man losing his hearing, this was also an act of memory: holding onto a world of sound he loved before it was gone. That gives the whole piece a tenderness that's hard to shake. And more. It's gratitude, rendered in music, for the simple fact of being alive in a world so beautiful.

🐚 Claude Debussy, La Mer (1905):

Claude Debussy wanted to be the sea. La Mer, finished in 1905, is like stepping into water: immersive, shifting, impressionistic, and never quite the same twice. Debussy painted with music to evoke color, texture, and movement. The orchestra becomes a living surface: light catching a wave, dappled deep currents underneath, the horizon dissolving into haze. He reportedly said he felt more at home with the sea than with people. You can hear that intimacy in this music.

🏜️ Ferde Grofé, Grand Canyon Suite (1931):

Ferde Grofé had actually been to the Grand Canyon to create Grand Canyon Suite. He sat with its vistas and tried to answer an almost impossible question: how do you fit something that large into an orchestra? His answer: shrink the frame. Instead of attempting the whole canyon, he gives you specific moments: sunrise over the rim, a painted desert at midday, a mule train picking its way down a trail. You can actually hear the hooves and the bells, a dramatic desert storm rolling in, and finally, sunset. Each one is almost cinematic in its clarity. Grofé tried to let this grand place speak.

🎶 John Cage, 4'33" (1952):

Experimental musician John Cage's most famous piece might just be 4′33″, written in 1952. The performers take the stage and remain present for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The music? Whatever sounds occur in the room and in the world outside during that time: a cough, a passing car, the hum of an air conditioner...The piece asks: What even counts as music? And listening? What might we tune out, sometimes even if it's with pleasant nonchalance, that we can begin to tune back into?

Olivier Messiaen, Oiseaux Exotiques (Exotic Birds) (1955):

Olivier Messiaen spent his life listening to birds. He traveled the world transcribing birdsong by hand, and he believed birds were the greatest musicians on earth. Oiseaux Exotiques, written in 1955, is a gathering: birdsongs from Asia, the Americas, and beyond, woven together for piano and small orchestra. What you hear is an attempt to translate birdsong; one musician's attempt to let other species speak through him. It's a strange and joyful piece. A beguiling reminder that music didn't begin with us.

George Crumb-Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale) for Three Masked Players (1971)

In 1971, George Crumb wrote a piece for three musicians and asked them to perform it wearing masks. In the dark, lit only by blue light, they play flute, cello, and piano. The cello opens the piece by imitating an actual humpback whale song, recorded and released to the public just a few years earlier. Most people had never heard anything like it. The masks are a signal that something ordinary is being set aside. Identity, maybe? The assumption that humans are the main story?

The music moves through deep and strange, ancient-feeling sound. Crumb structures it like geological time: movements named after eras of the earth, stretching back before us. The effect is humbling in the best way. You are briefly invited to hear the planet as something vast and alive and playful, of which whales, and we wee humans, are small, temporary players.

Late Music Ensemble: Pauline Oliveros 'Sonic Meditation I' (1971)

Pauline Oliveros was interested in performing music to get you to actually listen, and more. To go outside, find a comfortable position, and close your eyes. Then, listen to everything you can hear: near sounds, far sounds, the boundary where near and far blur together. In her words, a sonic meditation.

Toru Takemitsu, From me flows what you call Time (1990):

Toru Takemitsu grew up in Japan during World War II and came to detest loud sounds that evoked militarism. When he found his way to composition, he went in the opposite direction, toward music that breathes, leaves space, and which doesn't demand anything from you.

From me flows what you call Time, written in 1990, is for five percussionists and orchestra. The title comes from a poem by the American poet May Swenson, and it's spoken from the perspective of water. Here, water is a teacher; it moves without forcing anything, taking the shape of whatever holds it, and connecting everything it touches.

The percussion instruments include bells, and you feel their resonance the way you feel a stone dropped in still water: the sound spreading outward, overlapping, and then fading into silence. Then you follow the song like you would a meandering stream. Takemitsu was deeply influenced by John Cage and also by traditional Japanese aesthetics. Here, silence is full. There's a difference between no thing and nothing, and in this spirit, silence is the place before and after sound makes its presence felt.

John Luther Adams, Inuksuit (2009):

The title of this piece comes from the Inuit word for the stone figures built across the Arctic as landmarks, waypoints, messages left by people for people who would come after. Inuksuit; they point the way. John Luther Adams wrote this piece for nine to ninety-nine percussionists. And they play outdoors, spread over a landscape, sometimes so far apart you can barely see them. The audience can't sit so they walk. They move through the sound the way you move through a forest, hearing different things depending on where you stand, what's nearby, and which way the wind is blowing.

Adams has lived in Alaska for much of his life, and his music comes from the experience of feeling small in a place so enormous. The music follows this feeling. The percussion begins like weather gathering and builds to near-overwhelming, then slowly releases back into the sounds of the actual world around you, to wind and bird and wending water and whatever the day has brought.

John Luther Adams, Becoming Ocean (2014):

John Luther Adams and his Become Ocean won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014. It does something that very few pieces of music attempt: it makes you feel the scale of something that will outlast us. The orchestra is divided into three overlapping waves of sound, each moving on its own slow cycle, rising and falling, like real ocean systems. Adams has been direct about what the piece is about. Sea levels are rising; Arctic ice is melting. The ocean is reclaiming land it once covered, as it did long ago, when the ancient common ancestor of all back-boned creatures once lived. Creatures like us. Adams asks us to become immersed in Planet Ocean again.

🌊 Forty Minutes Without a Screen: How Listening to "Become Ocean" and Nature Helped Students Reimagine Their Role in a Changing World

The following excerpts come from final papers written by Engineering students in a music course taught by Professor Fortune-Reader. For their final assignment, students went outside, left their phones behind, and spent forty uninterrupted minutes listening to John Luther Adams' Become Ocean. The goal was simple and unusual: to practice paying attention, listening deeply, and being present in nature.

Many students noted how rare it felt to spend that much time outdoors without scrolling, multitasking, or looking for something to do. They found the musical interlude in nature refreshing. It helped them slow down, notice the world around them, and feel more connected to themselves and to nature. Some also made connections between the music, the environment, and their own sense of responsibility during a time of ecological and social change.

These excerpts show how an arts-based experience can help students connect with and care about sustainability.

Excerpts from two student papers:

📝 Paper 1

As I pursue a path in electrical engineering, the idea of being able to listen is also important. The primary purpose of engineering is to solve the various problems present in society. To effectively do this, I must be able to determine the root of an issue. As issues become more prevalent, politics and social aspects often distract from the actual cause of the issue. The ability to drown out noises and find the true cause of a problem is the first step in solving it. As an electrical engineer, locating issues in areas such as renewable energy to further improve the efficiency of a given energy source would make me feel successful in my field.

Adams defined his job as an artist as the ability to “inspire people to listen more deeply to this miraculous world we inhabit.” Similarly, my purpose as an engineer will be to listen to the world and, more specifically, society so that I can identify the problems within it. The ability to develop or improve technologies that better society, and the future of our planet is something that would give me a sense of purpose in this world. For example, improving the designs of electric vehicles or researching alternative sustainable fuel options would fulfill this purpose.

Music is often an escape for me, but it can also help enhance my thoughts. This class helped to illuminate that the music I listen to does not simply exist as the audio file on my phone. The music is a time era, a historic struggle for equality, a warning for things to come, the ideas of some of our greatest thinkers, and so much more. As I expand my knowledge of music beyond just the technical aspects of its sound, I have come to find a much deeper appreciation for the art itself.

📝 Paper 2

The exercise described above where one sits down and writes about the sounds they experience was inspired by contemporary composer John Luther Adams. Upon beginning to listen to his piece Become Ocean, it made more sense to me why he does this exercise. Become Ocean blends the sound of an environment and music almost to the point that there is no distinction between the two. I noticed that Become Ocean has very few patterns. Sounds blend into each other over long stretches of time without a central tempo, like an ever-morphing stream of consciousness. I found this difficult to grasp since the human mind is designed to find patterns in any way that it can. However, I soon learned that fitting this piece into any of my preconceived notions of how music is ‘supposed’ to sound wasn’t the point. I eventually relinquished my brain's attempt to control the music and allowed myself to be carried wherever it took me. What I found was that the music actually did have many patterns, they were simply stretched out over long periods of time and as such were harder to detect. I believe this is supposed to represent how just about everything in nature, while seeming random and chaotic on a micro level, patterns tend to emerge all over the place given enough time or a large enough sample size. I also found that this music felt, for lack of a better term, big. [...]

When imagining things that are incomprehensibly big, people tend to think of outer space. However, it’s not necessary to go out that far from home. Up to 95% of the ocean remains unexplored, even despite the advancements of modern technology. There is a whole other world with which we coexist with on the Earth, and it is unfathomably large. Become Ocean is able to reproduce this sense of scale, and does so beautifully.

One aspect that makes John Luther Adams a successful composer is that much of his music draws from nature as inspiration. Of course, as living beings, we are intimately familiar with nature, which makes his music surprisingly accessible. Any listener with enough patience could listen to and enjoy Become Ocean. Along this line of thinking, he does not make the message of his music blatant, which would likely turn away some listeners. Adams revealed in an interview that one of the major themes of Become Ocean is climate change, an unfortunately controversial topic in the modern world. However, instead of revealing his hand by making the message obvious, he instead instills in the listener an appreciation for the oceans, its scale, and all of the life that lives there. Gaining the audience's appreciation for the oceans implicitly helps his cause without driving away those who would otherwise refuse to listen. As Adams states, “If my music can inspire people to listen more deeply to this miraculous world we inhabit, then I will have done what I can as a composer to help us navigate this perilous era of our own creation.” To me, it seems that Adams believes that actions speak louder than words, and this is a philosophy that I try to implement into my own life. I try to act with generosity and understanding in the hopes that it inspires others to do the same. This applies to my work as a computer scientist as well.

Gabriela Lena Frank, Apu: a Tone Poem for Orchestra (2017):

Gabriela Lena Frank grew up in California and Peru. She has spent her career asking what it means to belong to two countries. Her music holds these two places together. Apu, written in 2017, takes its name from the Quechua word for the sacred mountain spirits of the Andes. Indigenous communities have understood for centuries that the Andes are living, breathing, protective beings. The mountains themselves watch over the people who live in their shadow.

The orchestra becomes that landscape. You hear altitude in it: something vast and ancient and not entirely welcoming, but magnificent. Frank weaves Andean musical traditions into Western orchestral form without flattening either one. The result feels like two ways of knowing the same mountain, played all at once.

What makes this piece matter in the context of sustainability is its underlying premise: that the natural world is not a resource to be managed but a presence to be respected. Indigenous communities across the Americas have understood this for a very long time. Apu asks the rest of us to listen. The mountains were here before us. In Frank's telling, they have something beautiful to say.

Takuma Itoh, Symphony of the Hawaiian Birds: Vanished Voices: a farewell to the Oʻo (2018):

The Kauaʻi ʻōʻō is extinct. The last one died sometime in the late 1980s. But in 1987, a researcher recorded one: a male, singing into an empty forest, calling for a mate that would never come. That poignant recording still exists. You can find it online. Takuma Itoh built a symphony around it.

Vanished Voices, completed in 2018, weaves that actual recording of the last ʻōʻō into an orchestral landscape of Hawaiian birdsong — some species still living; others, already gone. Extinction is almost impossible to grieve properly because it can feel abstract. When we lose a species, there's no funeral, and no ritual of any kind that holds the loss and transforms it into something a community can gather up and carry. Often, we don't have the relationships with the animal, with their place, and with each other that would help grief do its work and eventually lead us back toward love, care, and action. The loss just sits there, unprocessed. That's what Brené Brown calls disenfranchised grief: a grief that has no recognized place to go.

When that recording of the last ʻōʻō plays here, however, we hear a voice calling out one day in the forest and hearing nothing back. Maybe that can help us process what we've lost and what we must save.

Szymon Weiss and Szymon Sutor, Lost Seasons (2018):

Vivaldi gave us four seasons; Lost Seasons asks what happens when we start losing them. Polish composers Szymon Weiss and Szymon Sutor wrote this piece in 2018 as a direct response to climate change, specifically, to the way seasons are shifting, blurring, arriving late or not at all. The familiar rhythms that humans have organized their lives around for thousands of years are becoming unreliable. Spring comes early. Winter barely shows up. The calendar says one thing; the planet says another.

The music takes Vivaldi's structure and destabilizes it. Recognizable patterns drift out of place. What makes this piece unusual is how it uses our existing love for Vivaldi against us — or rather, with us. You already have a relationship with the Four Seasons, even if you don't know you do. That music is so woven into the culture, and when Lost Seasons unsettles it, you feel the loss in your body before you understand it in your mind.

Susie Ibarra, Walking on Water (2021):

Susie Ibarra grew up between two worlds, the Philippines and the United States. She has spent her life listening to each world. She's a percussionist, a composer, and an activist, and for her, sound is how she pays attention. Walking on Water, created in 2021, emerged from the climate crisis facing the Philippines—one of the most disaster-exposed nations on earth, battered by typhoons, rising seas, and flooding that displaces millions of people who have done nothing to cause the problem. The piece is built from field recordings, indigenous music, and original composition, layered together into something that feels at once ancient and urgent.

Walking on water is, of course, impossible, and yet communities across the Philippine archipelago are doing something like it, rebuilding on land that is disappearing, holding on to place, culture, and memory while the water rises around them. There is resilience in this music, but Ibarra doesn't let that resilience become a story that washes away hard truths.

Caroline Shaw, And So (2022):

Caroline Shaw wrote And So in 2022; it's a short choral work that sits with grief and uncertainty without trying to fix either one. She stays in the middle of the feeling, somewhere in that long, unresolved middle many of us know from daily life. The title says everything about her approach. And so. Just: and so. We continue even if we don't always know why or toward what.

Caroline Shaw & Attacca Quartet - Three Essays: First Essay (Nimrod) (Official Audio)

This is music about how we carry what we've loved and lost, which, in the context of sustainability, is not only about people.

🌍 Earth, 🌊 Water, 🌬️ Air, 🔥 Fire: Joshua Bell - The Elements (2023)

Violinist Joshua Bell's The Elements, released in 2023, is a collaboration: Bell working with composers, scientists, and environmental advocates to create music organized around the four classical elements. It's a grand gesture, and intentionally so. Bell has spoken about wanting to use his platform and his instrument to do something that matters beyond the concert hall. The violin turns out to be a remarkable instrument for evoking the qualities of earth, water, air, and fire.

What's notable about this project is its ambition to build a bridge between the arts and the urgent realities of a planet under stress. Bell's argument, implicit in every note, is that musicians have something to contribute to this moment that scientists and policy makers can't provide alone. What is it? Beauty, for one thing. And the particular kind of attention that beauty demands. We protect what we love, and we only love what we truly listen to. The Elements is an invitation to love the planet.

Other Relevant Songs

The songs below could serve as prompts for class discussions on sustainability themes and music. They can also be used to represent a full spectrum of Climate Emotions and spark reflection about how students are feeling and what resonates wth them.

These songs are classics in environmental folk music and advocacy.

Joan Baez, What Have They Done to the Rain (1962): A song about nuclear fallout contaminating rain, soil, and the food chain. Baez sings it like a gentle lullaby, drawing you to what's been pushed beyond the frame and disavowed as ever having happened.

Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin' (1964): Dylan demands change; the song rings like a warning and an invitation at the same time.

Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi (1970): Joni Mitchell watched paradise get paved over and wrote a song about it in about five minutes. Big Yellow Taxi is deceptively cheerful, a sing-along about loss. You don't notice what you have until it's a parking lot. The song feels more resonant than ever.

Songs of the Humpback Whale (1970): Roger Payne spent years listening to humpback whales in the ocean and realized what he was hearing was structured, repeated, and even evolving. In short, music! In 1970, he released a recording of it to the public. Millions of copies were distributed. It's widely credited with launching the "Save the Whales" movement that no policy paper could have launched.

You can explain that humpback whales are intelligent, communicate, and were hunted to the brink of extinction. Or you can play their song, and something else happens. A recognition, maybe, that there is an individual soul home in that enormous body, singing into the murky water, and that we had nearly silenced that soul forever without ever truly listening.

Payne understood that we can find wonder in data, too. If you want people to protect our animal kin, sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is simply let them speak.

Beach Boys, Don't Go Near the Water (1971) The Beach Boys built their whole identity on the soft-rock of the ocean surf: imagine the idyllic beaches in Bermuda, the Bahamas, and Kokomo. They also wrote a dissonant song about how we've poisoned the ocean and our experience with it.

Beach Boys, A Day in the Life of a Tree (1971): A tree narrates her own slow demise from pollution. Strange, mournful, and surprisingly moving. The Beach Boys at their most vulnerable and their most ecological.

John Prine, Paradise (1971): Prine grew up hearing stories about a Kentucky town called Paradise that a coal company stripped from the earth. This song is about a son's grief, a community's memory, and ultimately, an indictment.

Marvin Gaye, Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) (1971): One of the most beautiful songs ever written about environmental destruction. Gaye sings with a personal intimacy of oil, radiation, and vanishing wildlife, over a slow musical arrangement.

In Metallica's Blackened (1988), we're bombarded by zombie nouns, which are nouns that could have been lively verbs: "Opposition / Contradiction / Premonition / Compromise / Agitation / Violation / Mutilation / Planet dies." A fitting choice for a crushing lamentation on war that recognizes the stakes for Mother Earth. The song opens with a guitar solo played backward, a sonic evocation of progress reversed.

Jack Johnson, The 3 R's (2006): Reduce, reuse, recycle, set to a gentle acoustic groove, written for kids. Disarmingly simple. But Johnson understood something important: if you want values to stick, you teach them early, and you make them feel like play.

OneRepublic, Truth to Power (2016): Written for a climate documentary, this is arena rock as a call to action: big, earnest, and unapologetic. It asks who you want to be when the stakes are this high.

"Feels Like Summer," by Childish Gambino (2018), seems like a mellow, summery melody; it's actually a meditation and a melancholy realization that we're drifting toward a climate disaster.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Planet B (2019): There is no Planet B. King Gizzard delivers that message in the form of a thrash-metal assault. Where other eco-music mourns, this one rages.

SELF-REFLECTION: INVITATION FOR EDUCATORS:

1) Selecting and Using Music Intentionally

• What criteria will you use to choose a piece (e.g., length, emotional tone, or connection to your subject)?
• Will you use the music as a central activity, a short listening moment, or background context?

2) Structuring Student Engagement

• What is one clear prompt you can give students while they listen (e.g., “What does this piece make you notice about nature?”)?
• How long will students listen, and what will they do during that time? Could they write, sketch, reflect, or discuss?

3) Connecting Music to Course Content

• How will you make an explicit connection between the music and your course topic, even if you do not teach music?
• What is one sentence or question you can use to bridge the piece to themes like environment, sustainability, or human-nature relationships?
• How will you support students who feel unsure about how to “analyze” music?

4) Using Music to Shift Classroom Atmosphere

• At what moments in your lesson could music help students slow down, reflect, or reset?