I\u2019ve been compiling a list of questions that I\u2019ve received over these past 18 months in various interviews, panels, etc., since I began publicly communicating my environmental alarm in earnest, not just casually. I\u2019ll share two such questions I\u2019ve received, one that comes up a lot, innocently, and one that has come up just once, hostile.<\/p>\n
Innocent: \u201cWhat projects do you have coming up?\u201d: I love this one. It\u2019s a customary way for interviews to end, and without being explicitly asked about the crisis, I have an opening to talk about my concerns. \u201cWell, my husband and I are deep in fire preparation mode. I just spent two symphony commissions on a fire-resistant stucco exterior for the home, water tanks, etc, etc.\u201d or \u201cI have to confess that for all of my work studying my mom\u2019s culture, what really consumes me is the climate crisis and the perils it poses. How will music connect communities fractured by environmental collapse\u2026 etc, etc.\u201d <\/p>\n
And the hostile: \u201cWhat if you\u2019re wrong?\u201d This was asked when I did a virtual Zoom panel about \u201ccomposing in the anthropocene\u201d for a group in Europe not too long ago. We had a few hundred people in the webinar audience, and I was rather unclear about what I was supposed to address. A scientist spoke before me, impressive but unsettling, with a presentation about people becoming cyborgs after a violent era of survival of the fitness weeding out climate deniers as well as believers. I was rather taken aback by how impersonal and fantastical, both, that presenter\u2019s talk was, and felt like a fish out of water. <\/p>\n
Nevertheless, I spoke about my own feelings and experiences, the actions I was taking with my platform, such as it is, and how much I was learning from peers similarly concerned, including you all. It was horribly early for me, around 6am PT at this point to accommodate the time zones, but I gave it my best. And when I got this question, which was posed to me and not to the scientist before me (??), precluded by what can only be called a cynical exposition on music as a prestige object, for a brief moment, I did hesitate. <\/p>\n
Then this, from the transcript, my answer: <\/p>\n
\u201cListen. If I\u2019m wrong, and that\u2019s a big if, I\u2019ll shout it from the rooftops, and post all over Facebook. I\u2019ll get on the radio and take out a billboard. I\u2019ll happily confess that fires, floods, derecho winds, bee die-offs, diminishing crops and heat waves are at best a figment of our imagination and at worst, boringly normal. I\u2019ll call up journalists who have profiled me to recant, newspapers across the US, filled with relief that my family and I are not in danger after all. Scholars later will describe this phase in my compositional output as my ‘Era of Great Disillusion’ or ‘Wow, Was She Wrong.’ But until I\u2019m proven wrong, wrong to believe in the science and the evidence of my eyes, wrong to celebrate my neighbors coming together for our mutual survival, this is what I\u2019ve got, all I\u2019ve got. I believe in the science, and I believe in the music. In the process, I have finally fallen in love hard, with Mother Earth, appreciating what I have now that I\u2019m in danger of losing so much. Wrong. I would love to be that.\u201d<\/p>\n
And so it goes. Sometimes in panic, comes a moment. I delivered the above with a smile and a laugh, although it reads strong in the transcript. <\/p>\n