In the 1970s and ’80s, John Luther Adams, like so many composers, had a day job. Unlike many of his peers, however, Adams considered that day job — working for environmental protection nonprofits — every bit as central to his identity as being a musician.
Eventually, Adams, who went on to win the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for music, walked away from life as a full-time activist to dedicate himself to music. “I took a leap of faith, in the belief that music and art can matter every bit as much as activism and politics,” he wrote in his 2020 memoir “Silences So Deep.”
Over time, Kirsten Hedegaard, Loyola University’s director of choral and vocal activities, has come to share Adams’ conviction. In 2021, Adams’ music inspired her to co-found the New Earth Ensemble, a chorus drawn from freelance singers in the Chicago area. It would be the first seed of the teeming garden that is now the EcoVoice Project, a nonprofit presenting choral works related to climate change.
“We all know that climate change is happening — how urgent it is, how much suffering is happening now, how much more suffering is inevitable for the most marginalized communities. And yet, there’s a paralysis,” Hedegaard says. “Clear communication needs to happen; communities need to come together. These are things that music and the arts do exceedingly well.”
On Oct. 13, EcoVoice presents Reena Esmail’s “Malhaar: A Requiem for Water” (2022), which the New Earth Ensemble performs alongside Hindustani vocalist Jai Sovani, tabla player Kalyan Pathak and percussionist John Cornell at Loyola’s Mundelein Center. Esmail was born in Chicago but is now based in drought-stricken Los Angeles. The work’s title references a class of Hindustani raags (characteristic melodic patterns) associated with welcoming rain. Like much of Esmail’s music, “Malhaar” merges European and Indian classical traditions; its words reap from not only the traditional Latin requiem mass but also original Hindi texts and poems by Wendell Berry and William O’Daly.
“Malhaar” is part of a “positive trend” Hedegaard has observed in recent years of composers penning works on climate themes. But a decade ago, when Nancy Tuchman, the founding dean of Loyola’s School of Environmental Sustainability, invited the Loyola University choirs to perform at a climate change conference, Hedegaard found only a slim selection of relevant pieces. Adams’ music dominated, as did that of the late ecologist and composer R. Murray Schaefer.
“I was intrigued by both the incredible response we had from this audience, which (was) by and large scientists, and also wondered why there wasn’t more repertoire,” she says.
Then a graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Hedegaard decided to write her dissertation on Adams’ and Schafer’s music. Today, EcoVoice programs and actively commissions the very repertoire Hedegaard once struggled to find. In summer 2022, EcoVoice hosted its first festival, an ambitious three-day undertaking featuring two world premieres, a “sound walk” around the Loyola campus, a panel and Sarah Kirkland Snider’s 45-minute choral-orchestral opus “Mass for the Endangered.”
Thanks to EcoVoice’s proximity to Loyola, scientists, scholars and policymakers have assumed starring roles in its programming. That first festival featured a keynote by climate scientist Mika Tosca; University of Minnesota anthropologist Mark Pedelty, a leader in the growing field of ecomusicology, participated in the panel. EcoVoice has also hosted UIC environmental engineering professor Karl Rockne, who gave a talk on water reclamation at the 2023 festival. In conjunction with the “Malhaar” performance on Oct. 13, biocultural anthropologist Paula Tallman and environmental engineer Sharon Waller will discuss water scarcity and what climate challenges the region faces along the Chicago River and lakefront.
Someday, Hedegaard wants to augment the “core membership” of the New Earth Ensemble — some 10 to 12 singers — with a community choir of non-professionals. With luck, that choir will be active in time to test-run Hedegaard’s other pet project: an “EcoVoice songbook,” which will compile climate-centric repertoire in one resource. Hedegaard is spending her sabbatical year at Loyola soliciting composers for contributions in hopes of getting the songbook out in time for Earth Day 2027.
“If my plan goes well, thousands of choirs and communities across North America will be participating from this songbook during Earth Month,” Hedegaard says.
But, as EcoVoice’s recent programming demonstrates, climate care is a year-round priority. As of last season, EcoVoice moved away from an annual summer festival model in favor of a four-concert series, tied, appropriately, to each season. A concert presented last year overlapped with the peak of the winter solstice, at half past nine in the evening. Hedegaard plans to reprise the concept this December.
“It’s a community-focused event in that it’s quite participatory, with lots of singing and other solstice activities before and after the actual program,” Hedegaard says.
After that, EcoVoice’s to-be-announced spring concert features the premiere of Loyola faculty composer Dongryul Lee’s “Missa Laudato Si’.” Lee based the mass on Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical, which urged “a new and universal solidarity” around conserving the Earth’s resources. (The Kyrie was excerpted alongside Snider’s “Mass” during the first festival.)
To come full circle, the spring concert doubles as a retirement party for Tuchman, the Loyola dean who first inspired Hedegaard to start EcoVoice. Even John Luther Adams, Hedegaard’s musical hero, has made virtual appearances at EcoVoice events.
“We’re a performing arts organization that offers three concerts a year and a nonprofit doing socially important advocacy. We’re creating a model as we go along,” Hedegaard says.
“Malhaar: A Requiem for Water” will be 3 p.m. Oct. 13 at Loyola University’s Mundelein Center for Fine and Performing Arts, 1020 W. Sheridan Road; free admission with RSVP; more information at ecovoiceproject.org
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.
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