Earth Music

Conductor, John Warner (2007) explains how his founding of the Orchestra for the Earth provides an important emotional link between classical music and the pressing issue of climate change.

The road to becoming a conductor is a long and winding one. Unlike most instruments, practising at home doesn’t get you very far, and orchestras are expensive. In the early stages I was lucky: I had some inspiring and supportive teachers at Radley and was even given the rare chance to have a go in front of an orchestra. I then went on to set up my own at university, trying my hand at a wide range of music from Handel to Wagner, most of it wildly beyond my skills or knowledge but nonetheless making for terrific learning experiences. That orchestra, then just a group of students making music for fun, became Orchestra for the Earth.

Like many of my contemporaries, I left university struggling to reconcile my chosen vocation with a deep concern for the state of the planet. The world I see around me is already less beautiful, less biodiverse, and even less safe than that which my parents knew at my age, thanks to humankind’s obsession with extraction and exploitation for monetary gain. The very ecosystems that support life on Earth—us included—are being pushed to dangerous tipping points. It was (and still is) a heart-stopping realisation, one that makes me either want to grab a plane ticket and see the world before it’s too late, or never take a flight ever again because of the planet-wrecking consequences. Either way, I wanted to do something to help. Armed with a baton and a pile of scores, not many options immediately presented themselves. It’s hard to convince an orchestra to hire you before they’ve seen you conduct another orchestra—understandably, and so I realised that the orchestra I had set up at university, to which I expected to wave goodbye as I graduated, was the solution to all my problems.

It could give me the chance to keep conducting, while also becoming a way to make a positive change for the planet. As a kind of last hurrah, I’d organised a concert tour of the Alps after our final exams, following in the footsteps of one of my favourite composers, Mahler, who spent every summer up in the mountains soaking up inspiration for his music. The little huts where he shut himself away to put pen to paper still stand, surrounded by the same stunning mountains, lakes, and valleys he loved. On tour it became clear that this was the start of an orchestra, not the end.

Before we set off, I knew that the beauty of nature was important to composers and musicians, but it wasn’t until we were out there, playing concerts and stomping the hiking trails, that it became real. Without these places, most of the music we know and love simply would not exist. In an increasingly fast-paced and divided world, we need the arts more than ever to help us make sense of it, to decompress, to bring us together; nature performs much the same function. A world with neither nature nor culture would be a bleak one. So, the concept of Orchestra for the Earth (OFE) formed in my mind: we could use our vocation as musicians to share our love of the natural world and inspire others to protect it.

Music has a long and successful history as a catalyst for social change. Live Aid is one of the most famous examples among many, but in 2018, when I founded OFE, there was little focussing on the climate crisis. This seemed to me a huge missed opportunity. Music inspires and unleashes the most extraordinary emotions in us, making us cry, laugh, and dance—even against our will. Few things in society wield that power and it is no wonder that at points in history it has been treated with suspicion and even fear. The toolbox of the climate movement is well-stocked with powerful facts, images, and reasoning: why not add music to that, the one tool we possess with the ability to access the deepest recesses of the human heart and mind?

The communal aspect of music is also vital to what I have tried to achieve with the orchestra. The usual channels through which we learn about climate issues—documentaries, newspaper articles, podcasts—we experience alone. The result is that it can feel utterly

OFE performing at the Gustav Mahler Concert Hall in Toblach, Italy, July 2019. One of the Orchestra for the Earth musicians playing next to the Großglockner Glacier, Austria.

Taken at Keele Chapel, Staffordshire, the OFE playing underneath Luke Jerram’s GAIA artwork, November 2021.

overwhelming, isolating, and paralysing: “how could I ever do anything to avert such a massive problem?” A year of lockdowns only compounded this effect. Concerts, on the other hand, are the opposite. They are shared spaces, opportunities to connect with other people, to socialise, to share ideas, to feel that you are part of a community. We need such occasions now more than ever, not just for our own happiness but to allow us to see that we are not alone in worrying about the planet, or in our efforts to protect it. Concerts are also memorable occasions, likely to leave a strong impression on our hearts and minds, rather than a momentary headline on the screen of a smartphone, forgotten as soon as it scrolls out of sight. And, as I have said, they connect with our emotions, collectively and individually. We use music to help process everything from grief to joy. Getting our heads around how we feel when we see the Amazon cut down, unique species driven to extinction, and even whole nations dragged into famine by climate-change-induced drought (as is happening in Madagascar) is a crucial step on the journey to knowing what to do about it. If we are not in touch with how nature makes us feel, we will never want to save it. The cool rationalism of climate science is utterly essential, but we need to think emotionally as well, and that is what culture is for.

For the past few years I have tried to put this theory into practice. We have returned to the Alps every summer and built close relationships with communities in Austria, Germany and Italy based on music. Our concerts have proved important stimuli for building cross-community support for conservation projects: on the shores of a lake just outside of Salzburg we have worked with local landowners to establish a new nature reserve. We also run an annual children’s event in northern Italy, bringing together outdoor activities and music, inspiring the generation below us to be custodians of these two critical aspects of their heritage. The tour has also been a great chance to carve out a vision of how orchestras can tour sustainably. Music is a very international profession, and the air miles quickly reach alarming levels. We travel entirely by land, something we believe improves what we do as well as reducing the carbon footprint substantially. It’s far less tiring than flying and allows us to reach venues away from the 'airport circuit’ of major cities, most of which already have perfectly good orchestras of their own. Instead, we visit smaller towns and villages where international musicians rarely pass through, and this gives us more opportunity to get much closer to nature.

In the UK, we’ve experimented with a number of new concert formats, integrating our environmental message with the music we have to offer. To start with, there is a tremendous list of gorgeous repertoire to choose from, from Debussy’s lush evocation of the sea, La Mer, to Beethoven’s much loved Pastoral symphony. We often collaborate with scientists, charities, and other artists to create integrated events that bring these things together in what I hope is a meaningful way. One of the most striking is our annual Earth Hour concert, which we perform entirely by candlelight, creating an almost vigil-like occasion. This has proved a very effective fundraiser for WWF, but more important than that is the impression left on the audience: one of shared responsibility and the need for action.

John conducts the OFE at Delabole Wind Farm in Cornwall, September 2020.

Reaching young audiences has been especially important. We are all musicians in our mid-twenties and connecting with audiences in our own age-bracket and below is key. It’s these younger generations that often need the most convincing that classical music is interesting or relevant to them, so putting it in the context of the issue they care about more than anything else—climate change—is an effective way of shifting opinions. One of my favourite children’s events was a residency at the Eden Project in Cornwall, during which we created a special interactive performance for orchestra and narrator, with a DIY percussion instrument-making workshop for young families alongside. The performances were in the middle of the Mediterranean Biome, surrounded by a dizzying array of plants and with birds singing overhead.

The pandemic dealt a brutal blow to the whole arts sector, and it was not easy finding our feet again. We created a number of performances completely remotely, each musician recording themselves to a mastertrack from their own home, painstakingly mixed together. Many of these performances were with the SelfIsolation Choir, involving literally thousands of musicians from all around the world, raising money and awareness for charities like BirdLife and Rewilding Europe. It proved an unexpected and extremely powerful way of getting our message across and allowed us to connect with other people at a time when everything sought to keep us apart. Our online presence was given a huge boost as a result, and we’ve gone on to create studio recordings and films, such as one in support of a campaign by the World Land Trust, which has raised over £1m. Our first concert postlockdown was in the middle of a wind farm in Cornwall—fresh air and ventilation wasn’t a problem for that one. Since then, we’ve been busy again, heading out to Austria in July 2021, playing at St Pancras Station to greet delegates arriving for the COP 26 summit in Glasgow, and performing under Luke Jerram’s astounding GAIA artwork (a scale model of the Earth).

We are still in our early days, and I am excited for the projects to come. In the grand scheme of things we are a small organisation fighting a big problem, but I believe our contribution is both effective and vital. Climate change, and our maltreatment of the natural world more broadly, is a particularly divisive issue. The solutions involve changes to the way we all live our lives, in particular the rich and powerful. The richest 1% of the global population (those earning over $172,000 a year) are responsible for 15% of carbon emissions. In contrast, the poorest 50% produce less than half of that. Many of this top 1% are patrons of the arts: generous, thoughtful, cultured people without whom the creative sector would collapse. The chance to communicate and engage about climate change with this highest echelon of society in a neutral forum like a concert, bonding over a shared love of music rather than fighting over politics, is a valuable one—a route to consensus. It has been said that politics is downstream of culture, and I firmly believe that it is in the cultural sphere, not the political, that the battle for a habitable planet will be won or lost.

www.orchestrafortheearth.co.uk