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No one in Australia was left unaffected, directly or indirectly, by the bushfires that raged across the country this last summer. The nation, and the world, watched on in horror as stories of tragic loss – of human life, homes, wilderness and wildlife – emerged alongside tales of selfless heroism from our largely volunteer firefighting forces, and acts of kindness from members of the community.

Cover image © Shutterstock

One story was particularly touching in the music world: a group of young singers from Sydney Children’s Choir gathered to raise funds for a fellow chorister who lost his home in Balmoral just before Christmas. The money will allow him to continue singing with the choir while his family rebuild their home.

The impact of the fires rippled across the arts community, as it did every community in Australia. Dozens of bushfire relief concerts were organised, performances were dedicated to the brave firefighters battling the blazes, donations for firefighters and communities were collected at performances of opera, theatre and blockbuster musicals, as well as orchestral and chamber music concerts.

“There have been people in the National Choirs and in Sydney Children’s Choir directly affected in terms of losing their homes,” Gondwana Choirs Artistic Director Lyn Williams tells Limelight. “And staff as well, losing property of various sorts.”

The smoke from the fires also affected the children singing at the Festival of Summer Voices 2020 held in Sydney in January. “It seems pathetic to say, really, but it did impact on us in terms of singing,” Williams says.

In January, French actor Isabelle Adjani pulled out of the Sydney Festival, citing concerns about the hazardous air quality in the city. A few days later Australian actor Yael Stone announced she was giving up her US Green Card to base her career in Australia, choosing to reduce her emissions rather than divide her time between two continents.

Italian pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi performs his Elegy for the Arctic in front of the Wahlenbergbreen glacier in Svalbard, Norway in 2016. Photo © Pedro Armestre for Greenpeace

While the unprecedented ferocity of Australia’s bushfires – fires which scientists have warned for years will increase in frequency and severity, along with other extreme weather events, as the earth warms – has thrust the issue into the spotlight, the arts were already grappling with the implications of the climate crisis. Italian pianist Ludovico Einaudi made headlines when in 2016 he performed floating in front of a glacier, his tranquil music accompanying the fall of a huge sheet of ice.

“We are already experiencing the consequences of climate change, of temperatures rising in the world, and the weather is behaving strangely everywhere,” he told Limelight ahead of his recent Australian tour. “And I think you cannot just stay silent and watch what’s going on, you have to participate [and do] what you can do to improve the awareness of this around the world.”

International travel itself is responsible for significant emissions, and Einaudi is upfront that this concerns him. “When I can, I [travel by] train,” he says. “Of course, coming to Australia wouldn’t be possible for me.”

Flygskam and Festivals

The Swedes have coined a word, flygskam – literally “flight shame” – to describe the feeling of guilt associated with flying, due to the environmental impact. “We had three writers in Writers’ Week cite that issue as the reason that they didn’t want to come,” Adelaide Festival Artistic Director Rachel Healy tells Limelight. “The perennial problem for Australian festivals is that artists do see a trip to Australia as a very major undertaking. Their lives up to now have been short flights across Europe and a longer flight to America, but there is still the psychological barrier about what it is to travel to Australia.”

“The fear of jet lag is legendary,” she says. “When you add to that a kind of moral question about the carbon footprint of that flight, I think that it is quite a serious question for writers.”

Other artists have also raised the issue. “We’ve had a very high-profile dance company who made it very clear that they would only come to this part of the world if there could be a number of other performance dates guaranteed in the region, because they would not justify the carbon footprint for a trip of that length if they were only coming to Adelaide for four performances.”

“It’s not quite flygskam but it is certainly part of our conversations, and evidence of a much greater awareness of personal responsibility as it relates to the climate emergency,” Healy says.

It’s an issue all organisations that want to bring out international artists will have to confront, just as organisations – artistic and otherwise – are under pressure to minimise their environmental impact.

“I think the era of exclusives should come to an end, because that’s the biggest problem we have,” says Sydney Festival Artistic Director Wesley Enoch. “When we fly – I don’t know how many people – from a European country, they come for three performances and then fly all the way back – we have to stop thinking that’s a sustainable way of operating.”

There are many smaller ways festivals can mitigate their impact, including looking carefully at how materials from water bottles to set-building materials can be reduced, reused or recycled. “I think number one is waste,” Enoch says. “We’ve decreased the amount of brochures we print from about a quarter of a million when I started down to a hundred thousand, and we’re pushing things more online.”

One approach is to go carbon neutral, essentially mitigating the organisation’s carbon footprint as much as possible and then offsetting any remaining emissions by investing in renewable energy. The Sydney Opera House has gone carbon neutral – five years earlier than its initial goal – and the Adelaide Festival has now also committed to do the same. “It would’ve been late 2018, and certainly coming into fruition in late 2019 that we decided to get very serious about being certified carbon neutral, and about the process of properly auditing our footprint and forming a partnership with an appropriate company to help us deal with this in a formal and codified way,” Healy says.

That company is Trellis Technologies, who have provided a preliminary audit of the Festival’s carbon footprint, estimated at just over 9000 tonnes – after mitigating strategies this will be offset by a wind powered project in Gujarat in India. As a result, the Adelaide Festival is now accredited as being carbon neutral by the Department of Environment and Energy.

It’s a thorough process, Healy explains. “We count not just the obvious things like international artists flying into Adelaide, but also our local audience driving their cars from wherever they live into the city. The paper consumption in programs and day bills. All of the elements that you don’t always have to think about that go into putting on a festival.”

The Festival is not about to give up programming large-scale set-piece opera productions like Brett Dean’s Hamlet or Romeo Castellucci’s Requiem. “We don’t decide that we’re not going to bring out a company with 80 performers because that will have a bigger footprint than bringing out a company of three performers, for example,” she says. “If we think small, then the Festival loses its reason to exist. But our way of dealing with the impact of that is through commitment to carbon neutrality.”

Orchestrating Change

Ten years ago, the Association of British Orchestras and UK not-for-profit Julie’s Bicycle released a Green Orchestras Guide. “Audience members – particularly younger ones – are showing an increasing tendency to make choices influenced by an organisation’s approach to the environment,” the Guide’s introduction states. “There is a new generation of staff, musicians and young people for whom this is a very compelling and serious issue. These people are making choices about their lifestyles, values, tastes and professions – choices in which our activities may be invoked. As the issue of climate change permeates inexorably the public consciousness it becomes incumbent on us to account for our own operations.”

While the global financial crisis and the struggle for financial survival pushed the Green Orchestras Guide off many orchestras’ radars, 10 years on the issue was one of the key topics discussed at the Association of British Orchestras’ 2020 Conference this year.

The biggest challenge for orchestras is touring, the Association’s Director Mark Pemberton tells Limelight. “Moving upwards of 100 musicians plus staff has an inevitable consequence in terms of carbon emissions.”

Is flygskam affecting the willingness of soloists, or the orchestral musicians themselves, to travel by plane? “It’s looking increasingly so. Questions are definitely being asked by musicians about whether it is ethical to travel so much,” he says. “But cultural exchange is core to our business. How we balance that against climate change is a big challenge.”

Australia’s geographical isolation exacerbates the issue. “It’s a huge problem,” says Musica Viva Australia’s Artistic Director Paul Kildea. In a former role, Kildea gave Swedish mezzo-soprano Malena Ernman her Wigmore Hall debut. Since then Ernman has become even more famous as the mother of 17-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg. “Malena now doesn’t fly to performances,” Kildea says. “She’ll catch the train, which of course is much easier in Europe – and I just say this as a way of illustrating that our thinking is changing – has to change.”

“We need to be on the front foot and not on the back foot,” Kildea adds. “[We have to ask] why is it that people don’t want to fly to Australia?”

It’s a delicate situation, Kildea says, as the organisation grows. “We have to recognise that these musicians grow through exposure to fantastic visiting musicians, and we are part of an international cultural ecology – for us to play our part in it, we need to be able to travel and musicians from over there need to be able to travel.”

As an organisation, he says, Musica Viva runs meetings electronically wherever possible. “We really do question every trip, and will continue to do so,” he says. “But the reality is that this art form we love, and that I’m now responsible for nurturing and growing further, requires engagement with Europe and America.”

The Role of the Arts

Beyond balancing the responsibility to reduce their environmental impact against financial and artistic imperatives, there is another issue facing artists and arts organisations in the face of climate change. “What can we actually do to make a real difference, rather than just singing or performing about it?” asks Williams. “What’s our role actually? I think we’ve reached a stage where it’s quite a dilemma.”

The arts, of course, have never been divorced from the culture and politics of their time – Beethoven, Verdi, Shostakovich and Sibelius are merely some of the more extreme examples of these forces interacting – and the last few months have shown that the arts can play a significant role in the response to disasters such as the bushfires. “In these harrowing times, the arts has quickly responded as a platform for sharing and support,” Mary Jo Capps, Chair of the Australian Major Performing Arts Group said in January, citing the fundraising initiatives.

The response occurred on a massive scale – the Music for Our Country concert at Sydney’s City Recital Hall raised over $80,000, and that was just one of many events. Support on a more personal level included the choristers from Sydney Children’s Choir visiting fire-ravaged Balmoral and singing to raise money for their friend. “I’m so proud of that group,” Williams says. “Without any prompting from anybody, they went ahead and created this group to raise money for their friend Gabe, which is great and is exactly what we’re encouraging from our choristers – it’s a practical outcome that music can have.”

Meanwhile the Music Trust’s Resound program, run by Rachel Hocking, is taking donations of instruments to help musicians who have lost their own in the bushfires.

“The arts, with their deep engagement in the human experience, can play a role in rebuilding communities, raising hope and joy, and enabling reflection,” said Capps. “They also have the potential to stimulate visitation and other economic recovery efforts.”

The arts can also play a role in advocating for change. “For me, the project from the Arctic, doing a video with Greenpeace to promote the desecration of the Arctic was very important, and I think was a different point of view,” Einaudi said. “To say something that’s already in the air, and was a story that was already told with words – I just told it with my language, with the artistic language.”

For Williams, the Gondwana Choirs should be a voice for the young people in the choirs. “Their opinions about things really matter; what we sing about matters to them,” she says. “It means that we’re also commissioning new music and asking them what they want to say.”

Gondwana Collective performs We Are Watching You at the Festival of Summer Voices 2020. Photo courtesy of Gondwana Choirs

Which is how Williams came to commission a new work from Dan Walker for the Gondwana Collective to perform at the World Choral Symposium in Auckland this year. “It’s called We Are Watching You,” she says, “[and the concept is based on] Greta Thunberg’s ideas and words taken from various speeches that she’s given – so directly of the age of our choristers.”

The work, which the choir prepared and performed at the Festival of Summer Voices in January, includes a section for which the choristers sing songs they have written with dioramas, based on environmental themes that they have chosen themselves.

Chorister Valdas Cameron lives north of Canberra, near Lake George. “There hasn’t been any water in it for years and years,” he told Limelight. His song is about the sheep that graze on the lakebed, “how they just barely survive, and how all the wildlife is gone and how it’s all dry.”

Performing the piece was a moving experience. “It felt good expressing the story and the meaning and how it’s all affecting us – it felt quite powerful,” he says. Gabrielle Cotteroll, who lives in Armidale, wrote about the drought that has affected her community. Her fellow students, particularly the boarders at her school, are feeling the impact. “A lot of those boarders are really struggling,” she says. “At home, they don’t have any water and they have to hand-feed their cattle.”

“The lyrics in my song reflect what we could have had versus what we have now,” she says. “That birds could be flying, and new things could be born – but instead a lot of things are dying, and the land is broken and dry.”

“I think the fact that it’s all so personal moves people incredibly,” Williams says. “I’m always astounded by the depth of thought and feeling that comes from young people.”

It’s a reminder “that we need to listen to young people,” she says. “I feel that with Gondwana, and through their singing, it’s a way of giving them a chance to be heard in a way that they might not be otherwise.”

“I think that as artists we are often at the forefront of conversations,” Enoch says. “It’s interesting because I think in the climate change discussion and debate – which is a very vital and important one – we need to find deeper storytelling that affects us on an emotional and psychological level. Because I think we can understand the science, but we need to understand how it fits in our hearts and minds in a greater way.”

“As a festival too we need to consider working with our community, to tell the stories that are important to that community – for me that’s always been about First Nations conversations,” Enoch says. “The whole conversation around cultural burns at the moment is really pertinent, because it’s actually saying that Indigenous knowledges can lead you to a different understanding of the landscape and can also give you a way forward.”

He gives an example: “If you don’t already have a familial connection to an animal, or a place, maybe, as an Australian, choose one. Choose what is your totem, so that you say, ‘I, for the rest of my life, will look after this particular animal and where it lives.’ We have to have that very personal relationship to our landscape.”

The Future

So where do the arts go from here? “In the last 12 months alone HarrisonParrott has organised 38 international tours to more than 200 countries,” wrote the classical music agency’s co-founder Jasper Parrott in The Guardian last year. “But now, faced with undeniable scientific evidence of manmade climate change, music and arts professionals must take a stand rather than blindly continuing with business as usual. We have a responsibility to galvanise our industry and question the established way of working in order to mitigate its ecological impact.”

“It is quite possible that orchestras will become more local,” Pemberton says. “When we have great orchestras on our doorstep, do festivals and venues need to fly in orchestras from other parts of the world? It’s controversial, but in an emergency, maybe we have to change our ways of thinking.”

It’s not just the arts, of course. “I don’t think that the arts should play a special role,” Healy says. “I think every company and community organisation has to play a role. I think sporting teams need to play a role, I think businesses need to play a role, I think government instrumentalities need to play a role. I mean, this is not some kind of artsy, lefty campaign. This is a global climate emergency, and everyone has to play a part.”

It isn’t just for the arts workers to make these kinds of commitments,” she says. “I think Greta Thunberg has kind of nailed it: Our house is on fire.”