To tell the story of the single most thrilling concert I have ever sung in, first I have to go to the dark places – to discord and dread. I’m not talking about music now. I’m talking about the human and the natural world we all live in.
There we face any number of threats that weigh on our spirits even if we’re the lucky ones who haven’t been dealt the hardest blows. But the overarching threat to humankind is climate change, a blow none of us can dodge. It has been gradually remaking the world for generations, and now its effects are growing dramatically more severe, as anyone knows who’s watched the ocean come ashore or smelled burning forests on the wind.
This is the danger that for years has had me logging long hours in climate action meetings, writing letters, marching in the street, and lying awake at night.
It’s also why I sing.
I often tell people singing is my antidepressant. We know that’s literally true – it boosts endorphins and lowers cortisol, rather magically, because no one knows quite how. But comparing music with a mood-boosting drug is flippant and trivializing. Drugs work on a biochemical level, but music sounds through us body and soul.
The joys of choral singing arise from its beauty, from the full engagement of mind and body, and from the rapport it allows us with composers whose emotions and even culture we inhabit when we sing their music. But perhaps above all it lies in the ensemble – that wordless connection in which the choir is like a single organism, with a single purpose. I love the people I sing with, even if outside the choir room we’re very different. I go home from a choir rehearsal happier, wiser, and kinder.
Why can’t the world be like this? Why can’t we build this sense of common purpose into our daily lives?
In the autumn of 2018, the fourth-warmest year in recorded climate history, in addition to being a worried activist, I was also the president of two boards: one of a nonprofit called Hybrid Vigor Music, that supports the work of composer Geoffrey Hudson, and one of an excellent choir I also sing in, the Illuminati Vocal Arts Ensemble (IVAE, since renamed Illumine). Geoffrey and his wife Alisa Pearson are also climate activists. We’d been running into each other at protest marches for years. And Geoff and I had often wondered together why the musical world seemed oddly silent on climate change. Where were the anthems, the symphonies, that would give this terrifying situation its true emotional weight and meaning?
So by 2018, Geoff was hard at work on A Passion for the Planet, which he called a climate oratorio. I hadn’t heard a note of it yet, but the idea was hugely exciting: a choral work that would tell the story of the climate crisis, not the way news coverage does, which is either dry and abstract or unbearably depressing; and not through a political lens, as though it were a matter of personal opinion – but a story about the earth, our home, everyone’s home. He was setting texts from all kinds of sources. There would be a children’s choir. There would be a chorale tune the audience would join in singing, as in Bach’s Passions. The musical message would be one of stark warning, but also a call to commitment to solving the problem, and an affirmation of hope.
Geoff would need to find a choir to premiere the piece when it was done, and I had just the one. Part of our mission in IVAE was to perform new works by local composers. My board, and our visionary artistic director, Tony Thornton, agreed to premiere the piece in June of 2019.
This would be the most ambitious project our choir had ever undertaken, and also the most collaborative. We booked ourselves into a large, beautiful concert hall we couldn’t afford. We would also need funds to pay for the small orchestra. We recruited singers from other local choirs to join us for the performance, because we needed a big sound. We had to coordinate with a children’s choir. We partnered with local climate and conservation groups to promote the performance. We hosted parties for potential donors and sang them excerpts. We sat down with radio hosts and reporters to talk about what we were doing.
And we had to learn and rehearse an hour-long, demanding, but very moving and beautiful piece of music without recourse to any previous interpretations or recordings, because of course there weren’t any.
Learning and living with this music was in itself a profound experience. As we grappled with the texts and their meaning, and the ways the music brought them to life, singers found themselves deeply moved and often in tears. Among us were scientists who were familiar with the data of climate change and skeptics who were not, new parents of young children and grandparents of adults. None of us, I think, had ever sung a text so specifically addressed to our own historical moment and its anxieties. We became very passionate about this piece; we felt it was important that people hear it.
In the final days before the concert we kept an anxious eye on ticket sales. Would we have an audience? Would we break even? Would people respond to this music as we had?
The answer came early, as we waited in the green room for the cue to go on stage. Our box office was overwhelmed. The lines went out the door and down the sidewalk. We were going to have to turn people away.
When we finally could go out onto the risers, we looked out on a packed house. As planned, before we began the concert, Tony Thornton taught the audience their chorale tune, which was printed in the program, and we hoped they’d still remember it an hour later.
And then we sang.
From anything we say about music, the music itself is absent. There are no words that truly convey the pang of a plangent chord or the haunting recurrence of a theme. But I will say that the power of this piece was everything we had hoped for, from its opening song of praise, through its accounts of climate damage, sorrow, anger and terror, to its poignant children’s question – What have you done with what was given you? – to its affirmation that nothing that is worth doing can be accomplished alone, and therefore we are saved by love.
And then it was time for the chorale. The house lights went up. About half the chorus on stage filed down into the aisles to sing with the audience, because we’d thought they might be shy about singing with us and be grateful for the support. But they were already on their feet. “Let us sing, all as one, in the great human choir,” sang this chorus of 800 people, weeping visibly; and then they gave us an ovation that seemed to go on forever.
The thrill of that moment, when we were all singers together, all moved by the same love and hope, has remained with me ever since. I thought of it often in the months that followed, when the pandemic silenced choirs and darkened concert halls everywhere; and when, very briefly, the stilled engines of industry allowed us a glimpse of clean blue skies.
Biography
Sarah Metcalf is a writer and a member of four or five choirs. She is currently nearing completion of a long fantasy novel for young adults which is set not in an imaginary world but in this one. When she gets tired of sitting at her desk she likes to ramble local hiking trails.