A Razor-Sharp Fragility

Composer and pianist Lola Perrin discusses isolation: to create, we need to be alone (physically or mentally) and this can be an unpleasant process. And yet, we carry on creating because suppressing that creativity is even more unpleasant.

1,150 words: estimated reading time 4.5 minutes

Last September I started touring my latest piano suite; ‘Significantus’, a keyboard conversation about climate change. The idea was that I would perform specially composed solo piano music, a guest speaker would talk and then facilitate a conversation with the audience about positive response to climate change. My aim was to stimulate audience members to carry the conversation into their communities after the concert.

It was during a post-performance debrief, at the request of post-graduate composer Kate Honey who had invited me to perform the ninth date on this tour at Conservatorium van Amsterdam, that I admitted to a lack of satisfaction from performing this work. I wished none of it was necessary, that I wouldn’t have to look into the eyes of twenty-something year old research students studying Significantus and think how they, along with my sons of similar ages, would be facing unimaginable challenges in their later lives. During our debrief I realised how much I craved a return to my old simple ways where ambition lay in the same space as the notes, where satisfaction naturally followed from simply completing the work and the act of sharing my music was the point of my concerts.

For many of us, to create we need to be alone, if not physically, then at least mentally. We have to cut ourselves off and live in our heads. It’s generally an unpleasant process for me and may well be for you too; insecurity, doubt, lack of self-understanding, worry that it’s a repeat of your previous work or a copy of someone else’s, or just that it’s not very good …. the list goes on. Yet we carry on creating because we don’t know any other way of being, and suppressing that creativity is even more unpleasant; without our work processes we’ve lost so much of our identity and meaning.

Whiteread in the Arctic 

I found my real identity with my first piano suite. I’d been up all night at the window, watching a south London road gradually transform and as the dawn arrived, it began to morph into a favourite Hopper painting of an empty street at dawn. I decided to compose a set of pieces about the people behind the windows in that painting; people we can sense but not see. I made up their lives and dreams and found a compositional sound I hadn’t heard before. Inspired, I was soon onto my second suite, this time working from memories of how Ansel Adams photographs had made me feel. Later, after witnessing children set free at the piano, I copied their abandonment to write my third suite.

Then came an idea to follow Rachel Whiteread’s casting of physical spaces (such as in  Untitled (Black Bed) 1991 where she captured the shape of the space beneath a bed). I wanted to see if I could do something similar in music. Whiteread was in the Arctic at the time on a trip with Cape Farewell, so I decided to imagine the changing shapes within icebergs and allow the peaks and troughs of those imagined shapes to dictate the musical lines.

Writing this fourth piano suite was difficult. The three beforehand weren’t easy but I hadn’t become stuck the way I was stuck writing this one. It was 2005 and I was not yet clued up on climate change. That I was composing directly from Whiteread while she was in the Arctic cast a shadow over me. I was uncomfortable and resistant to learning much about the terrible reason for her journey. The feelings of Whiteread visiting ice because the ice was melting had the effect of blocking me. I tried hard, but for six months I couldn’t make the music work and felt disturbed. Finally, I turned to photographic sources also preoccupied with the depiction of spaces; six light drawings by Nazarin Montag revealing a hidden world, and cloud stories travelling the world by Roberto Battista. During a few short days the ideas finally joined up and ‘Music from Fragile Light Spaces’ was rapidly completed.

A different challenge, a razor-sharp fragility

That first experience of engaging in climate change, albeit inadvertently, was like a warning for my subsequent climate-engaged compositions. There’s a different challenge, a razor-sharp fragility when you’re creating work in response to the climate emergency. Each time I’ve become greatly blocked during, and often after, the externalising process of giving artistic expression to the inner world of dealing with climate change.

While touring Significantus, I’m learning about the extent to which we are living the climate change story in our heads. During one performance, a close relative contributed to the audience conversation and this moved me in a way I didn’t recognise. How could it be that we had not ever spoken together about anything to do with climate change? Yet there he was, in the public space of a performance venue, sharing with the strangers around him his carefully thought-through ideas for how to how to make things better. But in our walks around Dovestone Reservoir and on trips to the Moors we had never thought to delve into the climate change story permeating our internal lives, no matter how much each of us might be swallowed up by it.

Two extremes in a story of extremes

For my forthcoming initiative, ClimateKeys, due to take place around COP23 (more about that in the next blog), I’m reaching out to people all over the world and encountering a myriad of responses; from a call centre worker in the Philippines who speaks of how the crops have recently and unseasonably frozen, to a Chinese geologist who speaks of his jaw-dropping invention to clean up toxic water by utilising carbon dioxide. Two extremes in a story of extremes which we cannot afford to see in any other way but as the Number One Global Emergency if we are to rescue our civilisation from the consequences of our dwindling carbon budget. That’s what needs much more talking about and of course, much more acting upon. And soon, I will be returning for another walk around Dovestone Reservoir with my relative and will try to remember to break my own silence and really talk with him about what matters.

Find out more

Listen to Lola Perrin’s Music for Fragile Light Spaces on SoundCloud.

Read more about Significantus and ClimateKeys at Lola’s websites.

Read a Guardian profile of Rachel Whiteread: A Life in Art

Explore Nazarin Montag’s six light drawings at her website.

Explore Roberto Battista’s cloud photography on Flickr.

Lola Perrin 

A composer, pianist and collaborator on keyboard conversations about climate change with economists, lawyers, scientists, artists and other thinkers across the world.

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