Season 2, Episode 10: Composing During the Climate Crisis with Scott Ordway

Climate Change and Happiness

image credit | Scott Ordway

Season 2, Episode 10: Composing During the Climate Crisis with Scott Ordway

In the first episode of the new year, Thomas and Panu spoke with composer and multimedia artist Scott Ordway, whose recent works such as The End of Rain, The Clearing in the Forest and The Outer Edge of Youth explore themes of nature, identity and the effects of global climate change. Scott described the process of creating The End of Rain, an ambitious 2022 orchestral work that wove documentary, music, imagery and landscape investigations to tell the story of the aftermath of a catastrophic wildfire that swept through Scott’s childhood home in the redwood forests of Northern California. Scott also shared a musical selection from his recent choral opera, The Outer Edge of Youth.

“I wanted to understand how fire and drought are changing us emotionally in personal and often hidden ways. Because my questions concerned communal rather than individual consciousness, it was important to me that my work be guided by the experiences of a wide range of people and that the final product reflect the things they told me. I wanted my work to be an act of sustained and careful listening.” — Scott Ordway

Links

• Scott Ordway

• The End of Rain: Review and companion book

• Exploring Drought, Fire, and Our Relationship with Land Through Art and Music

• Erica Hellerstein (2022) “Grieving California” (featuring Scott’s work and a contribution from Panu)

• The Outer Edge of Youth: Listen and obtain the Recording

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

Thomas Doherty: Please support the Climate Change and Happiness Podcast. See the donate page at climatechangeandhappiness.com.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

Thomas Doherty: Well, hello, I'm Thomas Doherty.

Panu Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. Our podcast, a show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change – the personal side of climate change. And, you know, in the show we focus on emotions, what you're feeling in your body, and your feelings, the words that you use [to describe your emotions]. And you can find us at climatechangeandhappiness.com. And see our Patreonreon.com/bePatron?u=71854012. And today we have a special guest.

Scott Ordway: My name is Scott Ordway. I'm a composer and multimedia artist based in Philadelphia and originally from Northern California. I'm so happy to be here.

Doherty: And we're really glad to have Scott. And we're going to be talking a bit. We're assuming this episode is going to be coming out early in the year. And this is a beautiful episode to begin our podcast season. Panu, do you want to get us going in our dialogue?

Pihkala: Definitely. So we are going [to] talk a lot about music today. Also emotions. And as almost every person on the planet knows, [there is a] very strong connection between music and emotions. And some time ago with Thomas we did a couple of music themed episodes for our podcast.

Scott, as mentioned, has been working with music in many ways for a long time. And some of his work very explicitly touches on the emotional side of climate change. And overall the changes in the world around us. But Scott, could you start by telling us a bit about your background? So where do you come from? What's up for you?

Ordway: Sure. So I am, as I mentioned, a composer and multimedia artist. In addition to writing works for orchestra voices [and] chamber ensembles, I also work with photography and video as a way to explore themes that are important to me. I was born and raised in Northern California. In and around the coastal redwood forests. And the landscape of coastal Northern California was a huge part of my upbringing and remains an important source of inspiration for me today. And it's also an area which is seeing tremendous changes in the last decade as a result of climate change. And has been a point of inspiration for a lot of my recent work.

Pihkala: Yeah, thanks for sharing. I had the privilege of listening to one of your recent works, called The End of Rain, which explicitly deals with the impacts of wildfires and droughts to California. Both to people and the more than human world. And would you like to say something about that work? And how did you end up working with that?

Ordway: Sure. So as your listeners may know, in 2020, Northern California suffered some of the most intense wildfires in recent history. And these came on the heels of several previous years that were also among the worst wildfire seasons in living memory. In late summer 2021, one of these wildfires burned quite near to my childhood home in Santa Cruz, California. And I was experiencing this at the time, from the other side of the country, in my home, now in Philadelphia. And as I watched these fire maps, intently. Day and night. Getting closer and closer to the places that I knew and loved so well. And ultimately burning many of them. I knew that I wanted to respond in my own work.

At the same time, I knew that even though this was my home. And a place that I knew and cared about deeply, that my own personal experience was somehow insufficient to capture the intensity of this feeling. Because, as I said, I experienced it from across the country. And so I designed a process through which I gathered first hand testimony from about 225 Californians who had experienced these events directly. All in all, I gathered about 80,000 words of firsthand stories of fire and drought in Northern California. And working from this large data set, I extracted something that I think of instead of a nonfiction poem. Where each line of the poem came directly from one of these responses.

And so, working almost like a journalist speaking to one person after the next. Asking for introductions. Traveling all around the state. I gradually assembled this long poem which I could set to music. I was fortunate enough to have a commission for the work from the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz, California. Which is one of the oldest and most celebrated festivals of contemporary orchestral music in the United States. And through that festival, I was able to work with the Grammy winning vocal ensemble, Room Full of Teeth, who would sing this text as soloists.

So with this incredible commission in place, I set out around California to speak with people who had experienced this directly. And also to make video and photography to do documentary video and photography that would illustrate the themes that I heard in the texts. So the final work involves projected documentary video, crowdsource texts sung by Room Full of Teeth, and a large orchestra. At the same time, I published a volume of landscape photography, so the audience could experience the poetry as well as the photography in that way as well.

Doherty: It's really beautiful. You can see some images of the book at Scott's website, Scottordway.com. And I've been just checking them out. And so this was happening. This is a creation in time. This performance must have been quite powerful. Scott, did you hear back from people? I imagine that some of the people who attended the performance were also touched by the fire. What was it like for you? For your family? For people to have this? Because you create a ceremony. You created something that doesn't happen, really, in the world, regarding these disasters. A kind of a ritual and a ceremony to kind of bring them together and extract some meaning and purpose from them, I think. But how did people react?

Ordway: Well, this was something that I was really nervous about. Anytime you create a work that purports to speak on behalf of anyone other than yourself, you're taking quite a risk that you will somehow misrepresent someone. Or that you will have gotten the tone wrong or gotten the spirit wrong. And I thought very deeply as I was gathering these texts. And also, as I was making the selections of which lines to include in the final work. I thought very deeply about what I heard from people. And really did my best to make this piece a conduit for other people's point of view, rather than simply a platform to share my own.

The premiere, which took place in July of this year, or July 2022, I should say, in Santa Cruz, California was for me one of the highlights of my life as an artist. Not only because it was a major event in my home region, but also because I had the opportunity to speak with so many people who had either experienced these events directly, or who had themselves contributed to the text. And what I heard from people was that there was something quite unusual and striking about hearing their words filtered through this process. And included in a symphonic composition. And then sung by these world renowned singers.

And the feedback that I heard was quite positive. The people that I spoke with felt that the work adequately summed up their experience of these events. Or crystallized their feelings in a way which perhaps hadn't before. I'm sure there will have been others that felt that was less the case. And maybe didn't stop by to tell me afterwards. But in either case, the dialogue with the audience was unlike anything I've ever experienced after a premiere.

Doherty: How did your family fare? This is a CZU fire, right? So a big fire complex. How did your family fare yourselves?

Ordway: My family, while they were evacuated. And my hometown was largely evacuated. My family was fortunately spared. For them, the traumatic part, I think, came in losing portions of natural parks which we've known and loved for so many years. Buildings and structures which we considered part of the permanent landscape of the region.

And also losing the peace of mind. And thinking that they were somehow immune from this. Because this fire burned in regions that really have not experienced fire like this in generations. We're not talking about remote wilderness here. This is very, very close to some very densely populated urban areas. So it was quite unsettling for a lot of people that didn't previously envision themselves as living in a fire zone.

Pihkala: Yeah, thanks for sharing all [that].

Doherty: There's a ton of directions to go. Yeah. But Panu, take this away here. I've got some things to bring up here in a moment.

Pihkala: Yeah, there's several things that I really appreciate about the method. And in the end product of The End of Rain. One being that you were willing to really listen to people's experiences. The second being that you were interested in the wide variety of people's reactions and experiences. And trying to produce a sort of collage or mosaic or whatever word one could use here. And I think that's very valuable. And sort of appreciating and recognizing that people will react differently.

As a scholar of ecological emotions, there's, of course, a very wide variety of things that have come up in other studies, which are now manifested in the lines of The End of Rain. Or in the imagery in a slightly different format. So I think it's very fruitful, also, for researchers to take a look at many kinds of impacts that these kinds of events have. And you explicitly described in the text, also the impact on people's beliefs and assumptions. And that's something I think that would need even more discussed.

Like you say that it may change people's view about the world and their image about sense of safety, for example. Which, of course, are very basic psychological needs, also, as Thomas very well knows, as a therapist, also. But could you tell us a bit more about the sort of emotional journey that you had to go through in making this? So how was that process or journey for yourself?

Ordway: Well, one of the fundamental questions that motivated this work was a hypothesis that we are looking at the forests in a different way than we have in recent generations. And that specifically forests are bringing up a different set of emotions than they have in recent times. And my understanding is that for much of the history of humanity, when people looked out from the cultivated parts of the world, toward the wild parts of the world, they did so with fear and trembling and with trepidation. And that when people looked toward the forest, they saw a place of danger and uncertainty and darkness. As opposed to the parts which were cultivated and understood. And only in the last several 100 years did the forest become a place where we thought of peace and safety and tranquility, and restoration and rejuvenation. Only in recent years, or recent generations have we begun to think of the wild parts of the world as a place of peace and safety.

And my hypothesis is that as we're entering this age of perpetual fire, we're returning to a much older way of looking at the forest where we see it as a potential source of danger as much as a potential source of peace and tranquility. And my own journey has been similar. Particularly when I'm in California and other parts of the Western US. When I see a dry forest, I'm not just thinking of how peaceful it would be or how rejuvenating or inspiring it would be to spend time in a forest. But I'm also thinking of the threat that it poses. And thinking about the relationship between the built environments and the wilderness. So my own way of looking at the forest has become a lot more complicated than it was even a few years ago. And I found in speaking with people for this project that that feeling was widely shared. The forest is not as simple as it was a generation ago.

Doherty: Yeah. And the listeners can take this in. There's people listening, obviously, that have personally experienced worry about forest fires or impacts. Certainly in the Pacific Northwest, everyone can identify with this new sort of trepidation about dry forest and dry underbrush and crinkling leaves and baking sun and all this kind of thing. So yeah, it's good to zoom out. Just remind us that, you know, Scott's work is illustrating climate psychology, right? We have the idea that there's different impacts from climate change. Disaster impacts and societal impacts and the emotional weight. And for a lot of people, you know, they've only just dealt with the emotional weight [of] watching climate as a distant thing. Something that's happening to other people far away.

But of course, these impacts are all coming together. And in a singularity at different places in different times. And if you're in that place, then suddenly you're feeling the emotional weight, and actually the disaster and the social upheaval and the rebuilding. So it is a loss of innocence for those regions. Certainly in the Northwest, it's a loss of innocence. And then it's a loss of — its deep anxiety. Eco-anxiety. So that worry about the potential fire. And the no-longer-trusting-the-heat, and the sun. That's a great example of the subtle kind of pervasive, you know, eco-anxiety. It's lingering in the back of our minds. Which I think is why your piece is so helpful.

Because, you know, there's three ways we have meaning in our life. You know, we feel like our life is significant, we have a purpose, you know, things make sense. And I think after that disaster, people's meaning … they feel insignificant. They don't know what's going on. They don't have a sense of purpose. And so I think your work, at least for yourself, restored some of that meaning, I think. Obviously, why you probably did it. But I think it was, you know, a community meaning making ritual. What do you think about that?

Ordway: You know, as I started out the work, I was imagining that I was going to be writing something considerably more somber than I did. And I was surprised and inspired as I traveled around, speaking with people. I was surprised at the extent to which these events had a galvanizing effect on people and on communities. I spoke with many people who told me that their communities were stronger after the fire than they had been before the fire. In the process of confronting these catastrophic events, they forged connections with their neighbors that hadn't been there before. That they found strength in their community that they hadn't been aware of previously. And that they came out of these events with a determination to be stronger as a community. As a group. As a collection of people.

And there were some people that I spoke with, in particular in one community that had suffered some of the most catastrophic fire damage in the history of the United States. And these individuals told me with great determination, that I was under no circumstances to write a sad piece for them. That I was under no circumstances to make this work about defeat or tragedy. But instead, they wanted me to know that they were rebuilding. That the forest was coming alive again. That their community was coming alive again. And that spirit really surprised me. I wasn't expecting to find that in quite the way that I did. But I tried to honor that in the work.

And I ended up ending the piece with two lines which are sung one after the other in an alternating fashion, which, to me, were both equally true. The first of those lines being we must change now. And the second being, things will grow back. And as I was trying to determine the ultimate emotional point of this piece. Or which of the conflicting emotions I wanted to focus on and highlight, I just couldn't decide between those two things. The need for change is undeniable. And it's also undeniable that things will grow back. The forest regenerates. Communities regenerate. Things do move forward. And this tension and this ambiguity is what I've tried to explore in this piece.

Pihkala: That's very striking both in the piece and how you describe it now. And some folks apply dialectical thinking into climate psychology and the times where we are living. But the idea is that sort of two opposites may be true at the same time, you know. In relation to action, individuals have to do stuff, but also there's a strong need for structural change. So these both exist. It's not either or. There's very good reasons for this pair. And there's grounds for hope also.

So there's the dialectical coexistence of many things, which are sometimes considered binaries. And I think that your work speaks to the true ambiguity and the dialectical character of the times in which we are living.

Doherty: Yeah, and one of the things that I've heard with the therapist that I've worked with and people is that people do lose their ability to relax in nature, in the natural world. Or when they go to do some restorative activity then they feel overcome with grief. And this knowledge, you know, the penalties of an ecological education. Living in a world of wounds kind of thing. And so my standard answer to that is that's true. But it's not a barrier, it's a doorway. It's a doorway into a higher way of being. It's a more mature understanding of the world. We don't have that innocence. We lose that childhood innocence.

Ordway: In the course of particularly the photographic ends and video components of the work, I spent many, many dozens of hours walking and hiking in quite remote regions of California. And I began this process in December 2020. Which was just a couple of months after these fires. And I continued this process through June of 2022. Just before the premiere. So it was about an 18 month series of trips. And what was so moving to me, was at the beginning of creating this piece, I was absolutely shocked and horrified and just devastated by the sight of seeing these forests in the condition that they were in.

After these first trips, as I began speaking with more ecologists and people that work with the Park Service and scientists, I learned in much greater detail about the fact that fire is a natural part of the lifecycle of forests. And particularly these coastal redwood forests. It is a healthy and necessary part of the forest ecosystem. And other than its impact on human communities, fire was a neutral phenomenon from an ecological standpoint. It was not necessarily sad from the point of view of the trees. And as I started spending more and more time in these forests, not only did I become accustomed to the sight of burned out trees, you know, it became a little bit less shocking to me after a while. But also in the course of those 18 months, I started to see new growth. By the end of that period of time, groves that had been completely devastated were sending up new shoots. There was just green exploding everywhere by that spring of 2022.

And so for me, this sustained contact with these ecosystems made it impossible for me not to see the truth that things will grow back. They are growing back. They've already started. In the time it took me to write this piece the forest has begun that process of rejuvenation. And what we need to do is reconsider the relationship between where and how people live and the wilderness.

Doherty: That's very well said. That's very well said. I think we need sustained contact and a sense of time.

Pihkala: Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

Doherty: Maybe we can steer the conversation toward the other pieces that we want to talk about today as well. The Outer Edge and The Clearing. [Do] you want to get us in that direction, Panu?

Pihkala: Yeah. There's this framework of post traumatic growth. That's actually the title of one of the last texts I did in Finnish for this national eco anxiety project, from which we had guests visiting our podcast. Post traumatic growth refers to the fact that often after a major crisis, there's both damage and growth. So, in my mind, that very strongly resonates with the vivid imagery that you are talking about here, Scott.

And music is, of course, something which can help in many ways in producing all kinds of growth. And many works of yours also, other than The End of Rain, deal, in one way or another, with this relationship between humans and the more than human world. So, would you like to say a bit about some of your other works, which come close to the topic at hand?

Ordway: Yeah, I'd be happy to. So whereas The End of Rain is very much a documentary work and is kind of a piece of musical nonfiction, if you will. Most of my other work is concerned with imagined worlds or more fictional representations of these ideas. My most recent recording, which is available on Spotify and Apple Music and everywhere else that music has found is an opera called The Outer Edge of Youth. And in this piece, I imagine a relationship between two young boys who are uncommonly quiet and sensitive. And find a friendship with one another that's rooted in their shared love for the beauty of the natural world. And the landscape around them. This piece is set in an imagined forest that, for me, is very similar to the coastal redwoods of Northern California. And these boys find, one day in the forest, that they're able to understand the words of the birds singing in the trees. And in the course of the piece, the boys have an extended dialogue with the birds on the subjects which are the most urgent to them, at the end of their youth and the beginning of their adolescence. And so they speak with the birds about the nature of love and human relationships. About the nature of compassion. The relationship between humans and animals. About the nature of beauty. And the possibility of the divine. And also the difficulty of having a spiritual life in a broad, secular world that we live in. And all of these questions are left unresolved.

But it's a slow and contemplative work that really just dramatizes the world that's gone on in my head for so much of my life. Which is how to reconcile the intensity of human emotion with an appreciation of landscape with inspiration in the natural world. And with a society which quite often makes it very difficult to live and be in touch with these things. Which doesn't privilege this kind of slow appreciation of beauty. So that work is streaming everywhere and maybe we can listen to a short excerpt from it now.

Pihkala: That will be excellent. So here's an example.

[audio excerpt from The Outer Edge of Youth]

Doherty: Yes. Now this is beautiful. I love our podcast because it always kind of works out. I've been struggling with helping people make sense of their connection / disconnection with nature. This is both-and kind of situation. The fear that's now coming into people. And then, for me, it's coming back to this idea that it's the end of innocence. When we're children we have a blessed unknowing. We have a beautiful natural innocence of nature. But as adults, we let that go. We can go back to it as an adult, though. And think about it. And learn from it still.

But it's not the same. And, you know, we are adults, and we do have this knowledge. So I feel like our conversation has described that a little bit. Because I think, Scott, you've been able to kind of as an adult go back to that. That fraught, you know, fruitful time. And then the idea of having the birds, you know, be the advisors is really beautiful. And captures some of that magic of childhood that we can evoke in art.

Pihkala: Yeah, the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who lived in the States for quite some time, had this idea of “second naivete.” So, you know, the first naivism, in a good sense, is when you are a small kid. But then for some issues, the human task would be to cultivate an ability for a sort of second naivete. So he was thinking of this with several issues.

But that's something that comes to my mind when listening to this. And perhaps that could be applied for connections with a more than human world, also. There's definitely good reasons for that, as I hear you, both Thomas and Scott saying. It's been a very fascinating conversation. I've greatly enjoyed it. And warm thanks, Scott, that you could join us. We have to wrap up relatively soon. But what's on your minds, Thomas and Scott, as we start wrapping things [up]?

Doherty: Well, the idea of naivete. We recently spoke to poet Kim Stafford and he spoke quite forthrightly about claiming that naivete in his poetry. And now he gives a voice to the raindrops and various things like that. So there is almost kind of a. If it's done well, it's a very radical and very mature act. A very fruitful kind of generative act if it's done well. And so just looking back to the episode. I refer listeners back to the episode with Kim as well, in this regard.

But, Scott yeah, where does your creative life lead you these days? And how does it feel? We don't need to open up a long chapter here. But like, I know you're in Philadelphia now, which is a very different place than Santa Cruz or the California redwoods. So what's your creative life leading you even today, in this week?

Ordway: This project has really opened a lot of creative possibilities for me. And going forward, I'm looking for new projects that similarly use this process of journalistic and documentary text gathering to tell stories that are grounded in the experiences of people in the contemporary world.

And I'm also designing projects that continue to use photography and video as ways to enrich. and kind of augment the texts and the music that I'm creating. So I'm really interested in this idea of multimedia work. And creating works that are able to speak directly to the public about issues that people care about. And to do so using music which connects with those deepest and hardest to access places of who we are as people

Doherty: It's so nice that we're having arts in our podcast here. I'm really gaining from it in our show notes we'll have links to Scott's works. And some neat interviews with Scott. And also some other examples of music that are out there. For people in the know, they know there are composers that have been doing climate related work for some time.

But for some others, you know, we're not clued in. So there's some links to follow this or ourselves. And I think we'll be. Scott, I'm going to be delving into your work a little more. Now that I have the personal story it makes it so much more special to think about.

Ordway: Pleasure speaking with you both.

Doherty: Panu take care of yourself, have a good evening. And you all take care. Listeners, you can find us at climatechangeandhappiness.com and see our past episodes. You can also find us on Patreon. And you all be well. Take care.
Pihkala: Take care.

Ordway: Thank you.

Doherty: The Climate Change and Happiness Podcast is a self-funded, volunteer effort. Please support us so we can keep bringing you messages of coping and thriving. See the donate page at climatechangeandhappiness.com.