An Eco-Musicology and Sustainability Advocacy Playlist

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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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Iris Murdoch posited “a deep motive for making … art of any sort is the desire to defeat the formlessness of the world and cheer oneself up by constructing forms out of what might otherwise seem a mass of senseless rubble” (1999).

She continues:  

"Art is mimesis and good art is, to use another Platonic term, anamnesis, 'memory' of what we did not know we knew. … Great art is liberating, it enables us to see and take pleasure in what is not ourselves. A social theme presented as art is likely to be more clarified even if it is less immediately persuasive. And any artist may serve his society incidentally, by revealing things which people have not noticed or understood. Imagination reveals, it explains."

The musical works below can be considered great art in this context. 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.

Contemporary Activist Musicians 

More groups of musicians and composers have assembled to create ecologically driven works. Pop groups such as Coldplay limit their tours’ carbon emissions with eco-friendly choices like using bicycle-generated power and electricity-generating dancefloors, building sets from bamboo, and planting trees for each ticket sold. Multi-platinum-selling indie pop group AJR invites arena audiences to do “the wave,” a vast, coordinated ripple as concertgoers instantly throw their arms up, uniting the room as a vision for harnessing mass, coordinated energy. The band collaborates with local nonprofits in each city to inspire concertgoers to take local, policy-based action to help reduce the impacts of human-caused climate change right there in the arena. Nonprofit organizations such as Sustain create partnerships between the music industry and environmental organizations to promote environmentally sound practices across all aspects of the industry. They pair hikes with acoustic concerts on public lands, and support musicians’ residencies and music videos. Landscape Music, a consortium of musicians and composers, plans to deepen public appreciation of the natural world by providing a platform for contemporary composers and performers whose music engages with landscape, nature, and place. One of their composers, Ryan Suleiman, questioned the role composers play when writing about his piece, Burning (2017), dedicated to Californian firefighters, first responders, climate scientists, and wildfire victims:  

So what does it mean for our art when the environment's natural balance is in crisis? Should we continue writing pieces about the idyllic beauty of nature in its most pristine form in order to encourage people to value it? Should we write protest pieces criticizing governments' inaction and corporations' elaborate cover-ups? Should we write pieces about the environmental catastrophes we see in front of us? Should we put our pencils down and become activists? What is our responsibility? 

Similarly, composers and performing musicians are collaborating actively with other artists and scientists. The Fry Street Quartet based in Utah developed the Crossroads Project: Rising Tide and Emergence together with physicist and educator Dr. Robert Davies to address pressing issues of global sustainability. Titled for a time and place where the scientific ability to identify unprecedented risk intersects with a societal inability to respond, this features an experimental, ongoing collaboration between science and the arts. 

These original multi-disciplinary performance pieces are meditations that integrate visual artists, filmmakers, actors, and composers. Libby Larsen’s score assumes the role of one person’s inner voice in Emergence, featuring video projections and a Shakespeare-inspired soliloquy by Davies to take audiences from understanding to action. Rising Tide combines music, information, and imagery along with original works by painter Rebecca Allan and internationally recognized environmental photographer Garth Lenz. The music is composed by Laura Kaminsky and is sectioned into four movements: H2O, Bios, Forage, and Societas. Kaminsky says, 

I was motivated to bring together artists and scientists to create a compelling work of art that incorporates scientific research and inspires deep reflection and, ultimately, action among those who experience this performance. In addition, I was greatly enriched by working with a quartet as artistically rigorous and intellectually vibrant as the Fry Street Quartet. My goal was to create a work with a persistent, and at times subliminal, pulse that carries through the four movements, making the quartet itself a symbol of the measure of life.

 Where Rising Tide is about what we know, Emergence is about coming to terms with this knowledge on a deeply personal level. Continuing in this vein, the Crossroads Project invites audiences to engage with activism to make eco-friendly choices and then share them on social media via the #makeityoursxrds and #makeityoursusu hashtags.

In this same vein, the Brooklyn Rider Quartet pursued a major new commissioning and programmatic venture in their 2022-2023 season, The Four Elements. It explored the four classical elements (earth, air, water, and fire) as metaphors for the complex inner world of the string quartet and the current state of Earth. It included new commissions, each based on an element by Andreia Pinto Correia, Conrad Tao, Dan Trueman, and Akshaya Tucker. This project also featured existing works from the repertoire including Shostakovich’s 8th String Quartet (fire), Dutilleux’s Ainsi la Nuit (air), Golijov’s Tenebrae (water), and American folk music collected by Ruth Crawford Seeger (earth), newly arranged by Colin Jacobsen. 

Composer Gabriela Lena Frank developed a commissioning initiative, Composing Earth at her Creative Academy of Music in Boonville, CA. Its composers recognize that climate disruption is a bona fide civilizational emergency. In the first year, composers receive a study stipend to participate in a monthly discussion group with peers, physicist Davies, and Frank herself. These meetings provide opportunities to review articles, books, documentaries, and online resources on the climate crisis, allowing participating composers to find personal stories to inspire their commissioned work in the second year. Through the marriage of scientific knowledge and artistic imagination, composers become climate-aware, informing themselves and stirring their creative psyches. With a great range of genres and instrumentations, Composing Earth achieves broad dissemination of these necessary stories of protecting the earth, avoiding cultural and socio-economic niches that limit exposure.  Frank writes:  

The very interdependence of musical life and our longstanding custom of listening to and conveying human stories will be our community’s strength in navigating the elusive space between alarm and aspiration as we face the environmental crisis. It is indisputable that change is upon us, but we can be the stewards of that change if we dare to imagine and propose alternative actions even if they eventually prove to be wrong, ineffective or outdated. The point is to move, to act, and be ready to discard what doesn’t have a meaningful impact while demonstrating compassion towards one another.

Another group, Ocean Music Action, presents multi-sensory concerts centered around a shared love of the ocean, collaborating with and commissioning new works from diverse artists. Concerts are paired with a volunteer waterway cleanup or other activity in partnership with a local conservation organization, giving audiences and musicians the opportunity to work hand in hand toward the common goal of cleaner oceans for all. The UK-based groups Julie’s Bicycle and Music Declares Emergency provide a treasure trove of resources to build a community of support among artists, music industry professionals, and music fans alike for climate change advocacy at the policy level. Finally, San Francisco-based artist Stephan Crawford’s group, Climate Music, combines the talents and expertise of world-class scientists, composers, musicians, artists, and tech pros. The group aims to “harness this universal language [of music] to tell the urgent story of climate change to broad and diverse audiences in a way that resonates, educates, and motivates.” Their growing portfolio includes science-guided original compositions, science-informed collaborations, and music campaigns.

Integrating Music and Sustainability into Higher Education Institutions

Sample assignments for a science class could ask students to bring music playlists by musicians involved in climate action and to write a brief justification for their choices. Recommended student learning outcomes (SLOs) could be oriented towards communication, with a portion of the course framed around environmental literacy.

Students could be asked to articulate their views on specific sustainability topics, with the long-term goal of becoming effective communicators about their chosen topic if they care about it. Students might interview and report on a peer or family member about their understanding of climate and sustainability. A syllabus could include writing a piece of music, a letter, or a poem to the future for two generations hence, with an option to present their creative responses.

The ultimate desired learning outcome of all of these activities: Enable the student to become a citizen in the world. 

Integrating Music and Sustainability Across the Higher Education Curriculum

One way to begin incorporating music and sustainability in HEIs is to add a single module to a semester and gradually work towards an arts-integrated approach across the curriculum, integrating arts and science to move towards action. By way of an introductory course, students could study the work of Susie Ibarra, who takes underwater microphones to the Himalayas to record the sound of glaciers breaking and melting, using that recorded experience as the immersive backdrop for her compositions. The resulting album, Walking on Water (2021) became an elegy to the climate crisis and an homage to human resilience in dire circumstances. These field recordings are part of an ongoing project, Water Rhythms: Listening to Climate Change, a collaboration between Ibarra and Michele Koppes (a climate scientist, glaciologist, and geographer). Together, they have sonically mapped changes in glacier runoff from the source to the sink, from the glaciated mountains to the ocean, from some of the world’s most important water towers, including the Coast Mountains of the Pacific Northwest, the Greenland Ice Sheet, and the Indian Himalayas. The sonic installation, an enclosed listening and meditation space, minimum 20’ by 20’, houses 14 speakers and comfortable lounge chairs or pillows, allowing a limited number of people to sit. The sonic installation, accompanied by a projected slide montage, has been installed at TED Countdown Edinburgh, Scotland (2021); ARKO Art Center, Seoul, Korea (2021); Fridman Gallery, Beacon, NY (2021); and the San Francisco Exploratorium (2022).  

Water Rhythms is a story told by ice and water, about the dualism of water, the universal connector of nature and humans, an intergenerational story of the rapid change and depletion of our glaciers and freshwater sources worldwide. Ibarra writes: 

Humans are inextricably connected to the Earth’s freshwater; the same rhythms of glacial meltwater that flow from the mountains to the sea flow through our bodies, our histories and our music. In recording the sounds of glacier melt, we discovered that these sounds were not simply ambient, but indeed very musical. They have precise rhythms, a precise tempo/bpm (beats per minute). These tempos match the sweet spot at which pieces of music from all over the world are created and played. They also match our heartbeats at birth. Our connection to water is hence so much more intimate than we think. A world losing its flowing freshwater is not only a world of increasing ecological precarity, it is a world losing its music, its culture, and its humanity. 

Other works of Ibarra’s include Sky Islands, a musical tribute to the earth’s rich and fragile ecosystems inspired by the distinct rainforest habitats of Luzon, Philippines. This work integrates Western European string quartet instrumentation with traditional Filipino instruments and sound sculptures. The premiere was presented as an associated event with COAL + ICE, an exhibition of photography and videography at the Asia Society Museum of New York that aims to visualize the climate crisis. The title “Sky islands” refers to distinct ecosystems in high-altitude ranges, known as hotspots of biodiversity and unusual forms of life. Geographically isolated with few or no outside predators, sky islands are habitats home to many rare and diverse species found nowhere else in the world. They are eco where evolution is “sped up”. These ecosystems are under threat because of rising sea temperatures and faster warming rates at higher altitudes, similar to the planet's poles.

As a performative sonic installation, the piece explores Ibarra’s percussion sound language, featuring interlocking rhythms and melodies in the Philippine Northern style, found in bamboo, gong, and flute music of the Kalinga and Cordilleras Region in Luzon. Sky Islands is a musical call to action, highlighting Luzon’s rainforests—an endangered region with thirty-one endemic species, including the Philippine Eagle, and a region that has both volcanic and non-volcanic mountains amidst diverse fauna—with the aim of connecting people to our fragile and beautiful ecosystems and drawing awareness to the changing climate and global community practices.

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?

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