Eight years ago, when the existential threat of climate change was already critical, Australian National University science communicator Joe Duggan asked eminent scientists a curious but ultimately revealing question: "How does climate change make you feel?" They had to respond in handwriting.
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Anna McMichael
Lecturer, Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance
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Louise Devenish
Senior Research Fellow, Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance
Among the list of scientists asked was the late Emeritus Professor Tony McMichael, AO, an epidemiologist and champion of environmental health, also of ANU (although he completed his PhD at Monash University).
"It's sad when a society like ours can't see further than its bank balance," he wrote, not long before he died in September 2014, "and stumbles blindly into a future when children won't be able to enjoy the flowing rivers, mountain snow, coloured birds and bush animals."
Professor McMichael's daughter, Dr Anna McMichael, has now taken up the project and propelled it in an intriguing new direction - as a multimedia and musical installation/performance called Climate Notes in Melbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens, as part of Victoria Nature Festival.
She's an acclaimed violinist and joined Monash University's Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance as head of strings, honours coordinator, and researcher in 2019. Her main collaborator on Climate Notes is percussionist Dr Louise Devenish, the music school's head of percussion, and a senior research fellow.
Real-time audience input
Climate Notes was scheduled for last year, but COVID-19 put a stop to that. Drs McMichael and Devinish commissioned six classical compositions in response to the suite of scientists' letters, which have all been updated five years on. They sit on Duggan's Is This How You Feel? online site. People who attend the free event will be able to write their own letters, too, using the same question as a prompt: "How do you feel?"
The compositions commissioned by the Monash musicians are the "musical equivalent" to the handwritten scientists' letters, says Dr Devenish. Their works include violin, vibraphone, electronics, percussion, aluminium bell plates, custom instruments, and field recordings from water, grasslands, forest, deserts and tundra. There are video and live performances during the events.
A spectrum of emotions
Dr McMichael says the emotions expressed by the scientists were across the spectrum - "angry, frustrated, hopeful, concerned, terrified, sad, motivated" - in contrast to their perhaps more emotionless research papers.
"How do they live with climate change day to day," she asks. "How do you deal with that? What is the emotional response?"
She wrote a letter too, in place of her late father, when they were updated: "... he privately said it may take a catastrophe to make Australian politicians take action on climate change. Are the bushfires of this past summer [2019] a sufficient catastrophe?"
The act of writing the letter on behalf of her father - as a musician - convinced her to start asking the same question of people in the arts.
"So that's how the project took off," says Dr McMichael. "Then I thought, 'Let's take it one step further and ask the public also to write letters when they come.' So they can read all the climate scientists' letters, they can hear the musical responses, and they can also write their own letters.
"It becomes quite an inclusive activity - a rolling video of all the climate scientists' letters, a wall where all the public can write letters, and then video of the musical letters, the composers' works."
The commissioned musicians were given access to the State Botanical Collection and Royal Botanic Gardens in Cranbourne. Damian Barbeler used images from the collection's plant archives, as well as violin, vibraphone and electronics, in his video Pressed, while Cathy Milliken, for Red Garden (violin, percussion), filmed at the Red Sand Garden at the Cranbourne Gardens.
"I know there's a lot of eco-anxiety around, and we hope to allow people a space to voice that," says Dr McMichael. "But we also want to show hope as well. It's quite complicated, in that way. A lot of mixed emotions.
"I think what we've done is approachable for people from many different angles, from a literary point of view or a musical point of view, or if you're into art installations, or if you just love the gardens and nature, and are wondering about climate change. It gives a lot of entry points for a lot of different people."
Climate Notes is Mueller Hall, National Herbarium of Victoria, Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne, until 18 September.
