Michalsen.
Appreciation of nature. Acknowledgment of change. Grief at what’s being lost. But also, hope for the possibility of adaptation. These are the themes of a new set of climate concerts being organized by Dignity Music, a nonprofit helmed by musician and educator Ravenna Michalsen. The first one — slated for Saturday, Sept. 17 at Bethesda Lutheran Church — is intended to stir heart and mind together to action.
“The pieces on this program were not written about climate change, but I wanted to do something about climate change,” Michalsen said.
She has been no stranger to combining music and social causes. She started Dignity Music in 2016, organizing musicians to play in soup kitchens.
“As a classical musician I tend to play in extraordinary and sometimes rarified places. I didn’t get to intersect with certain parts of my city,” Michalsen said. So “I started cold-calling these places” — Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen, Fellowship Place, Sunrise Café, and others — asking if they would be interested in having musicians perform while they served their food. The kitchens were interested. Michalsen then secured grants from the city’s mayor’s office to fund the performances. The idea was simple: “go and play duets for an hour,” Michalsen said. “You set up in the back and you just play. People jam out as they’re eating. A lot of people come up and chit-chat.” As places have reopened, she has begun scheduling these concerts again; she is planning to play at Fellowship Place in two weeks.
But the pandemic lockdown forced Michalsen to innovate. During lockdown, the soup kitchens kept functioning. “Their work didn’t grind to a halt, but my work certainly did,” she said. Especially before vaccination, for her fellow musicians, the risk of playing was deemed too high for the reward. Meanwhile, “I got very interested in the planet,” she said. “I woke up a lot to how much was happening in terms of our climate, in terms of how far the devastation had come.”
She learned a lot about the accelerating scientific estimates of how climate change is likely to affect our lives, and affect biodiversity on the planet. And she asked herself hard questions: “I’m not a scientist, a billionaire or a politician. What can I do?”
She hit on the idea of expanding Dignity Music’s mission, and set about organizing music concerts centered on the theme of climate change. She established herself as an official nonprofit and secured a grant from the state’s Artists Respond program.
In researching music to perform, she discovered that many contemporary composers are “writing music about climate change,” she said, “but some of it was unlistenable.” She didn’t want the concert itself to be harsh or difficult. The music, instead, was intended to help people work through their own thoughts and feelings about it. “When I actually programmed the concert, I wanted it to be beautiful music so no one feels overwhelmed or attacked,” she said.
She settled on the work of three composers. First comes Amy Beach, a Boston-based composer who was born in 1967 and died in 1944. She composed in her youth, but after she was married, Michalsen said, her husband forbade her from performing. “She wrote music that for a long time wasn’t considered serious,” Michalsen said. In recent years, however, her music has gone through something of a rediscovery.
“One of the pieces is about water and the other is about flowers,” Michalsen said of the Beach music she has chosen. “I see things through the lens of gender.” Years ago, writing music about flowers may have been “considered not serious or girly, and that’s the reason why certain types of music are dismissed. But I think they’re beautiful.” In the context of the concert, Michalsen sees Beach’s music as helping cultivate an appreciation of the natural world.
Next on the program is a string quartet from celebrated contemporary composer John Luther Adams, whose major orchestral work, Become Ocean, is explicitly about climate change. Michalsen declared she would love to perform that piece, but “I don’t have 50 grand” for an orchestra. The technically demanding and emotionally satisfying piece has three movements — “Rising,” “Crossing,” and “Falling” — that for Michalsen are about “acknowledging that the change is happening.”
Third is a requiem for three cellos and piano from David Popper that is “about grief. I know that I have been absolutely plagued by grief over the biodiversity crisis.” Michalsen grieves the large and the small. “People may not know what it is to build a snow fort. Species are going extinct because people refuse to change anything about their lifestyle. Climate change totally disproportionately affects certain parts of the world. We’re in a heat wave because of rampant consumption of fossil fuels.” And “trees and animals are way more affected than humans. We share this grief.” Three poets will read pieces on the concert’s three major themes as well.
The point of the concern isn’t simply to make people feel bad, however, or to inundate them with the scale of the problem. Rather, it’s intended as an act of community, to encourage people to do what they can. The program, in addition to having information about the music, will contain ideas for activism large and small, to provide a sense of direction.
“I think helplessness and overchoice has been on either side of the paralysis” people feel in the face of climate change, Michalsen said. She has found that accepting it and taking it on has changed some of her own behavior. “During the lockdown, I had read about the notion of not shampooing my hair,” she said. “I refuse to buy another plastic battle of shampoo.” Instead, she makes her own, and has found that “my hair is so much healthier now because I’m not stripping it.” She thinks about other changes on the horizon, like bringing reusable portable cups to coffee places. “Every time I go out for coffee I’m going to save a cup.”
She has seen changes in her family and friends, too. One friend has stopped buying new clothes, opting for repairs or buying secondhand. A sister is meat-free two days a week. “Is it a radical change? No. Is it going to affect a few animals a week? Absolutely.” Other, larger actions involve petitions to city governments to change local environmental policies, and pushing back against removal of healthy trees for construction projects by calling local tree wardens.
She sees a direct link between the climate change concerts she is organizing and the ongoing work of playing at soup kitchens. “More people are economically disenfranchised because our lifestyle is deeply unaffordable,” Michalsen said, in addition to being unsustainable. And “the hotter the summers get, the more intense our storms get — people who are unhomed are going to suffer a lot more.”
The emotional core of Michalsen’s idea, however, isn’t simply guilt or sadness. It’s also about making deeper connections with nature and with her neighbors. “I believe we need to have some experience of wonder in the natural world,” she said. Music can help with that.
“If I could do four climate concerts a year I’d be pretty happy,” she said. “Maybe you’re not reaching the biggest audience, but you’re reaching somebody.”
The first Dignity Music Climate Concerts will be performed in New Haven on Sept. 17 at Bethesda Lutheran Church, 305 St. Ronan St., at 6:30 p.m., and in West Hartford on Sept. 18. Visit Dignity Music’s website for details and further information.