Unsung: If the Earth Could Sing

Conductor Notes:

SSAA div. with cello and percussion. Includes body percussion and suggestions for movement/staging.

1. Hurricane
2. Grand Lac
3. Grassland
4. Mountain
5. Glacier

Composer / Arranger Notes:

Unsung: If the Earth Could Sing is a compelling five-movement environmentally inspired choral work and collaboration between composer Katerina Gimon, poet Lauren Peat, and conductor Elise Naccarato. It centers around the question “if the earth could sing, what would it tell us”? The environmental crisis has been called the “biggest threat modern humans have ever faced” (United Nations, 2021) and Unsung aims to shed light on its impact on Canadian landscapes in particular, using choral music as a form of advocacy and a voice for change. Each movement of Unsung focuses on a different geographic region of Canada, moving loosely from East to West, and is sung from the perspective of the landscape or weather event (in the case of the first movement).

The first movement, Hurricane, speaks to the worsening hurricane impacts on the Canadian East Coast and their ever-increasing destruction. Mirroring the progression of a storm, the music spirals and grows into a powerful, rhythmic, fury, as the storm reaches land.

Grand Lac (Great Lake) moves away from destruction to highlight the beauty of the Great Lakes and river systems that branch through Ontario and Québec. In this peaceful and meditative French-language movement, the listener is drawn in by the haunting calm and serenity that the Great Lakes offer but reminded that these landscapes too and the biodiversity they support, are changing.

Grassland focuses on the disappearing native grassland in the Canadian Prairies (only about 25% remain) and the species that rely on them to survive. The tone of this movement is quite mournful and intimate, aiming to bring to life the subdued and intricate beauty of this region.

Mountain Range gives voice to the iconic Canadian Rockies, highlighting how even landscapes as grandiose and seemingly unchanging as mountains, are not untouched by climate change. The music aims to depict at once the grandeur and vulnerability of the Rockies through contrasting sections that show mountains on both a macro level (the grandiose, unchanging, and majestic mountains we see) and on a micro level (the intricate layers of rock, erosion, and changes happening at a scale that we can’t see). In this movement you’ll hear echoing mountain calls, powerful folk-like choral textures, and intricate aleatory.

In the final movement, Glacier, we move to the Canadian North to look at perhaps the country’s most startling testament to the ravages of climate change — melting glaciers. The music and poetry are striking and persistent, urging us toward a place of understanding and seeking to inspire action by leaving its listeners with one final thought: “The door is open and it’s up to us to decide what our future will be”.

For more about Unsung visit: katerinagimon.com/unsung.

Text:

From the poet:

Unsung: If the Earth Could Sing was born out of a conversation between composer Katerina Gimon, conductor Elise Naccarato, and myself. Marrying word, music, and the human voice, we hoped to pay homage to the awe-inspiring power of the Canadian landscape, whose careful equilibrium is increasingly under siege.

The Canadian landscape being vast and varied, I was faced with a series of difficult decisions. After much deliberation, I narrowed the writing down to a cycle of five poems, each of which adopts the perspective of a regional landscape feature or weather movement: Hurricane, Grand Lac, Grassland, Mountain Range, and Glacier.

Adopting the perspective of the natural world will always be an imperfect imaginative experiment. (As Marie Howe writes in her extraordinary poem “Singularity”: “[t]rashed oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French.”) This being said, conservation and climate justice are possible only through an earnest reappraisal of our relationship to the natural world—and language is one of the most profound relational tools at our disposal.

This was my original intention, and yet the work acquired new meanings as it evolved alongside current events. I began writing the text sometime before the word coronavirus graced the world’s lips, and completed it just as protests honouring the lives of Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities occupied streets across Canada.

Unsung ultimately became a lens through which to think more critically about my role as an artist and settler living on Indigenous land. Rereading the Hurricane movement, for example, I was struck by how its call to examine our own relationships to “destruction” mirrored the call for a nation-wide reckoning with police brutality and systemic discrimination.

While the scope of this work is environmental collapse, any attempt to bear witness to the custody of Canadian landscapes must acknowledge the injustices inflicted on its First Peoples. I humbly acknowledge the limitations of my own perspective, as well as my commitment to supporting and amplifying Indigenous voices in the fight against climate change.

— Lauren Peat

Text Source

Lauren Peat