In this original essay for ClimateCultures, composer Lola Perrin describes her climate music residency at Norway’s Grieg Academy of Music, to workshop and perform her new composition ‘Solarpunk Symphony, Music from the Erratocene for 4-pianos and citizen voices’ and debate climate with artists and scientists. The residency reinforced our need for climate conversations and coalitions.
You can read Lola’s introductory post for this essay on our blog, Solarpunk Symphony: Where Are the Music Programmers Who Heed the Science? where she describes how her symphony responds to a frustration with cultural venues’ lack of response to the climate risks we face.
A climate music residency for ‘Solarpunk Symphony’
I recently experienced a highly electrified country where 92% of its energy generation is renewable, mainly from hydropower, and where I learned how a national fuel policy can be going in both the right and wrong directions absolutely simultaneously.
I was in Norway for a climate music residency at Bergen’s Grieg Academy of Music to workshop and perform my new climate composition ‘Solarpunk Symphony, Music from the Erratocene for 4-pianos and citizen voices’. I would also join a public debate with artists and climate scientists for the launch of Amplifying the Alarm, a new start-up created by my host, pianist and climate activist Professor Torleif Torgersen.1 My travel and sustenance had been funded by Culture Moves Europe Mobility Fund, supplemented by a fundraiser to help with accommodation costs during the journey there and back.
I’d arrived the green way. My travel partner, Rob La Frenais, and I took a four-day train trip from south west France, producing 19kg carbon each, as opposed to the 480kg of emissions (around one barrel of oil each) had we flown.
Our low carbon travel seemed an appropriate way to be finally delivered into the heart of Bergen’s clean-green environment with its gentle soundscape of conversation, footsteps and the occasional whirring of electric cars. We’d arrived on an exceptionally warm and sunny late September afternoon. There had been weird weather recently. After summer ended, high temperatures arrived — followed by enough rain to cause flooding, closing access to some areas before the high temperatures returned. Despite fantasies of being wrapped up in a cosy café looking at the misty rain characteristic of Nordic autumns, it was boiling hot and everyone was outdoors in T-shirts.
In case the weather turned to seasonal rain, we went straight to the harbour to catch what might be our only chance to witness the famous sunset. We were not disappointed; an elegant procession unfolded above the jagged line of mountains, immense apricot bands slowly widening into a deep orange, the sun’s giant fingers reaching beyond the blackness of the harbour while a ferry to Denmark silently cruised out of port, disappearing into the night. The utterly majestic natural cinema had a dark underbelly though; that dreamy ferry turned out to be a supply ship making its way to an oil rig in the North Sea.
Nordic contradictions and the Anthropocene
Since the discovery of oil on the continental shelf of Norway in the 1960s, the country has become the world’s fifth-largest exporter of crude oil. It also exports natural gas and is the fourth largest exporter globally. In 1990 Norway established a fund to hold the profits from fossil fuel sales, and invest them outside the country. This sovereign fund is now the largest in the world, currently worth $1.7 trillion (November 2024). The vast bulk of the fund is retained for future generations and 3% is fed back annually into the country, subsidising Norway’s high quality of life from universal health care to free university education. However, there are no sovereign funds on a dead planet.
Even though Norway joins the chorus of countries pushing for the phasing out of fossil fuels during international climate negotiations, its long-term domestic plan is to extend fossil fuel extraction for decades to come. How can the country make such a claim? Torleif Torgersen explains: “What Norway is doing is basically an act, of course, because they’re taking as a starting point that we have the Paris Agreement that each country has pledged to do so and so much. Norway, without any second thoughts, is now even going forward with electrifying the production of oil and gas on the fields in order to keep our part of that bargain, but does not seem to care at all about the 2 million barrels of oil we produce every day and send out of the country. That is an absolute disgrace”.
Norway’s leaders have the opinion that stopping drilling will have catastrophic national consequences, that the loss of hundreds of thousands of oil jobs will crash the economy. But something much more catastrophic is going to happen if they, and other fossil fuel nations, don’t keep it in the ground. And that something seems to be heading straight for Norway.
In October 2024 a letter was sent to The Nordic Council of Ministers from forty-one climate scientists in fourteen countries. It begins: “We, the undersigned, are scientists working in the field of climate research and feel it is urgent to draw the attention of The Nordic Council of Ministers to the serious risk of a major ocean circulation change in the Atlantic. A string of scientific studies in the past few years suggests that this risk has so far been greatly underestimated. Such an ocean circulation change would have devastating and irreversible impacts especially for Nordic countries, but also for other parts of the world”.
The Atlantic Meridian Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that brings warmth to the north and cold to the south, has slowed down. Now this oceanic current is a really beautiful thing in which one part of water takes one thousand years to complete a full cycle.
The already slowing AMOC may collapse this century or next, triggering unprecedented changes including ‘cooling’, aka a mini ice age.
“Given the increasing evidence for a higher risk of an AMOC collapse, we believe it is of critical importance that Arctic tipping point risks, in particular the AMOC risk, are taken seriously in governance and policy. Even with a medium likelihood of occurrence, given that the outcome would be catastrophic and impacting the entire world for centuries to come, we believe more needs to be done to minimise this risk. The impacts particularly on Nordic Countries would likely be catastrophic, including major cooling in the region while surrounding regions warm …. potentially threaten the viability of agriculture in northwestern Europe”.2
The letter ends with calls to action including asking the ministers “to increase pressure for greater urgency and priority in the global effort to reduce emissions as quickly as possible, in order to stay close to the 1.5 °C target set by the Paris Agreement”.
Lead IPCC scientist and AMOC expert Stefan Rahmstorf explains more in a conversation with Nate Hagens for The Great Simplification podcast.3
This is all getting too much for my brain. I want to understand how Norway can have such a contradiction, on one hand to ‘drill baby, drill’ and on the other, the determination to be as clean as possible in its own territory. Rob and I sit down to interview Torleif to find out more. We’re asking someone who might have something to say, if his participation targeting Norway’s crude oil exports is anything to go by. In this jaw-dropping action, first they painted a small sailboat in that famous pink shade used across Extinction Rebellion, adding the symbol to its sail.
He tells us “the boat was sailed in a triangular pattern, breaching the 200-metre security zone of the oil plant and the tanker. Despite there never being any real danger, the safety rules do not allow for the filling of oil during such a breach of security and the filling / loading of oil into the tanker was suspended. Even though the action lasted only a day, it took several days for the operations at the plant to resume”.
While sailors maintained the boat’s position, others blocked the road to the terminal.
The story hit the world’s newswires, for example this by Reuters: Equinor halts oil exports from Norway terminal due to demonstration.4
How does Torleif now see Norway’s future unfolding? “Somehow these are questions that I don’t even ask myself for fear of answering myself because we do what we do. But at the same time, I do feel that I’m on a sinking ship and I won’t be able to make any difference, but I just wanted to fight it while it goes to hell somehow. I am not very optimistic about the way things are. I think just now I was reading this morning that the current forest fires around the planet are burning up the remaining carbon budget that we have, at speeds which we have no idea about. I do find it extraordinarily problematic that we are running out of time and nobody is doing anything. It’s a mad dash, a desperate last mad dash to save everything. And whether we get there in time is entirely something that I try not to think about because we’re not giving up”.
Climate music responses — conversations and composition
I share that wanting-to-continue-to-fight feeling. Contrary to the fake news put around by the fossil fuel industry that even if we stopped all burning today there’s much heating already locked in for decades and we may as well just throw our hands up, the truth is that the rate of planetary warming decreases as the rate of additional emissions decreases. So there’s absolutely every reason to continue the fight. This was once again brought home to me during remote interviews I conducted while composing Solarpunk Symphony – extracts:
“It’s just shocking here how, two years ago, there were no buildings around me and in the last two years, about 20 huge masseria have been built all with their own artisan wells drawing from an already low water table”. (Italy)
“The government says to the school kids not to have outdoor activities during the day. And they were told to wear whatever they feel comfortable in … And also someone told me about cats as well. We’re big on pet cats, you know? They were dying in the heat”. (Malaysia)
“Now, we have winters, it hardly freezes. And that changes everything, of course. A big problem also with the bees. In fact, the bees, in the winter, naturally, they go into the hive. they stay in the hive, they do nothing else. And as it is relatively hot in the winter, they get out of the hive, they get tired, they die”.(France)
“When it does rain, and it usually rains hard, it does not soak into the ground. Therefore, you have flooding, here’s a lot of tunnels, and we have homeless people who live in those tunnels. So there’ll be reports on going down to see if they need any help”. (Las Vegas)
“Now we get milder winters, we have longer drought season in summer, less rain, and the fires just get out of control”. (Canada)
“People are putting in their own personal wells and that is taking water out of the aquifer, which traditionally supplies everyone … I have no idea what my orange production will be like this year … I mean, we all talk about it all the time, but we all just say it’s climate change and that’s it. This is the future. We’re all looking into capturing water off roof”. (Southern Spain)
Such conversations impacted on the shape of the music and I began to see the composition as part of a continuing story and that it couldn’t have a beginning or an ending. In fact, the performers begin their performance before the audience has even fully arrived. Let me explain.
The audience is getting seated, the sound of chatter in the room. The lighting changes, attention shifts to the dramatic presence of four pianos. The audience is now hushed but there is a conversation somewhere. Four people are intimately discussing climate news they’ve been looking up on their phones.
They’re the performers who now make their way to the pianos, continuing to exchange stories. When seated they put their heads in their hands, the room is entirely silent for the first time, it’s a moment to consider the reality of the news. They make their way to the pianos where they sit motionless for a time, the hall is now silent for the first time, a moment for considering the climate news.
Playing commences, the first movement is ‘Degree Celsius’. I’m like a broken record about climate, repeating how Bach and everything else is at risk of ending up underwater, without a trace. So I start this work with Bach, playing with him Grieg-like because Bergen was the symphony’s first destination, but then it breaks.
The second movement is slow, processional, disconnected – ‘In the far east of India the yak hunts for paisang leaves, meanwhile in Manhattan the banker protests the climate protestor’. I wrote it in August 2024 after having the remote conversations mentioned above, and also when two news stories hit. In a very hot New York City there was an incident when bankers ended up punching some peaceful climate activists. Meanwhile ecological collapse dramatically whispered along, triggering social collapse; women farmers in East India were struggling to remain independent because of a decline in the yak population, the leaves they feed on were becoming inedible.
In the third movement ‘Where What What What When: Citizen Carbon addresses the Sleeping Czar of Collapse’ the musicians read from the interviews with farmers and others about ecological changes they’re seeing. Two of the pianists play a gentle piece and the other two roam the audience distributing handouts, enticing responses to provocations; “Where are we going? What do we really want? What do we need to let go of? What can we bring back to help us? When people are listening what will you say?”.
The work ends with the upbeat ‘Be Roger’, named after my brother Roger who, throughout a serious illness in his final year, never lost his talent for happiness. My sister and I developed a mantra, “Be Roger” – this movement is my way of saying to remain positive, without optimism it’s too devastating to stare the reality of ecological collapse in the face.
After the performance I interview the two undergraduate pianists for their impressions. Sofie tells me “as a person who cares very much about climate and has had a lot of difficult conversations with people, I really wanted to feel that I could also find a way to engage myself and others in this. The climate crisis is a danger but people don’t see it right in front of them and the changes are slow. They don’t feel. It was really interesting to do music I wasn’t familiar with before. I just had a score, and I was wondering how it would be when we were all four playing together. And I didn’t even know which part I was going to play. So I just listened to the piece a couple of times and tried to understand. It was strange to play with three other pianists at the same time. Since this was so open and free, a lot of it was talking also, figuring out stuff together. And that way of working and thinking was a bit new. I almost felt like I was a part of the audience as well. It was very unpredictable what was going to happen. At least the third piece, it caught me really off guard. And the whole, how we decide how long we play or how long we talk. It felt so free in a way, it felt very real. When I was playing there and didn’t really know, Oh, when will I stop? Or how long will we do? It was almost like being trapped in a way. But it was also really cool. And when people ask me how the concert went, I can’t really explain it because it was just so different from what I’m used to. So I can’t really explain it. You had to be there”.
With some difficulty I manage to track down the other undergraduate pianist, Kristian, in the labyrinth of the Academy minutes before leaving my residency. I was glad because, despite our hours of rehearsing, only then did I find out that he’d been a school striker in Oslo. “Well, I think it’s hard not to be involved in climate things – for example, in middle school, on Fridays, we would often protest in front of the government. For me I think the timing of this project was really nice because I was really looking for some music that wasn’t just me, it was with people. I’m very often alone playing. It was my first time doing something that needed a bit of acting, but I really liked it. But I feel like it wasn’t really acting, it was just being myself. I really liked when the audience would write things. And when we read to the audience, it felt so natural. People told me they liked the writing part. So I liked giving people a voice and, feeling you’re part of it all”.
Bringing hyper-vigilance of the Anthropocene into concert spaces
The weeks of my journey and residency crossed September and October 2024, weeks in which alarming weather events happened across all continents: Africa – Algeria & Morocco, “catastrophic” floods; North America – Asheville, Carolina was hit by two hurricanes; Asia – a super cyclone with winds over 200km caused a humanitarian crisis in several countries from Viet Nam, Myanmar, Laos and Thailand to China; Europe – weather events in Italy, Austria, Poland and Slovakia caused loss of life and extensive infrastructure damage; Oceana – in Dunedin, New Zealand, the town was cut off by hit by extreme rainfall 2024 and declared a state of emergency, and there were landslips, water shortage and damaged houses no longer safe to occupy; South America – multiple countries continue to have extensive areas on fire; Antarctica – ongoing heatwaves are melting the glaciers and disrupting hibernation cycles, the impacts on wider earth systems are currently not fully known.
Solarpunk Symphony aims to bring a hyper-vigilance of The Anthropocene into concert spaces. Scoring the work for four pianos means performances can only really take place with the support of larger institutions. It’s those influential spaces I am appealing to, asking that they move away from Holocene-thinking, that they connect with a greater urgency. Just as those climate scientists have asked the Nordic Minister to show “priority in the global effort to reduce emissions”, that priority surely applies everywhere, including our cultural centres. I write more about this call to our music venues in the companion post, Solarpunk Symphony: Where are the music programmers who heed the science?
The World Scientists Warning to Humanity in 1992 states “A new ethic is required – a new attitude towards discharging our responsibility for caring for ourselves and for the Earth”. Examples of a new ethic in programming that are continuing projects rather than one-off events or festivals are hard to find, but so far I’ve discovered some gems: Orchestra for Change, Germany, which “strives to confront the climate crisis in creative ways through music”5; Pontiac Enchanté, an environmentally sustainable, community-minded chamber music series in the Gatineau Hills, Canada6; and Orchestra for the Earth in the UK, which “inspires action for our planet through virtuosic musical performances”7. My no-fly initiative ClimateKeys, has seen scores of musicians performing locally, concerts using a format that facilitates climate-engaged audience conversation as part of the performance.8
Torleif Torgersen opened our concert in Bergen with Matthew Butner’s electroacoustic ‘Iceprints’, in which “change in the Arctic ice is simultaneously mapped on several scales from seconds to decades revealing an ice melt trend using a sonification strategy that takes advantage of music’s ability to articulate multiply directed sound”. Concluding the evening was the public debate with Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, launching Torleif’s startup. We reflected on issues raised in both compositions and on bringing forth a broad initiative in which climate scientists, local groups and citizens can co-create more understanding, ideas and action.
Afterwards a scientist on her way out mentioned we have to change our economic system to tackle the emergency and she believes that Doughnut Economics gives us the tools — guiding human activity into a safe place away from breaching planetary boundaries and away from deprivation. The threat of deprivation is never far away in our modern system. In fact, that threat actually hit hundreds of professional artists in Bergen last summer when they suddenly had their livelihoods endangered. The city’s arts grants that enable festivals, studios, exhibitions and education, including a famous children’s ballet school, grants that have made Bergen into a world-renowned cultural centre, were going to be vastly reduced. The crisis came about partly because, in pandering to the far right, city leaders had slightly reduced property taxes, with the accumulative effect of the loss of millions of Norwegian crowns bringing forth a cascade of cuts. The arts community was targeted and was set to be decimated. A protest at the town hall was followed by more actions, petitions and evening torch-lit marches – with one artist commenting “at this rate the torch makers will be the only ones still in business”.
It’s hard to understand how people can be threatened with such extreme cuts in a country that has the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. In her book Doughnut Economics, Seven ways to thing like a 21st Century Economist, Raworth writes “So many transformative ideas are originating in other fields of thought such as psychology, ecology, physics, history, Earth-system science, geography, architecture, sociology and complexity science. Economic theory would be wise to embrace what these other perspectives have to offer. In the dance of the intellects, it is time for economics to step back from soloing in the limelight and join the troupe instead”.9
How do we get there? Philosopher Roman Krznaric says he “can’t think of an ecological civilisation unless it’s a civilisation of conversation between strangers”.10 We seem to be in a time of reimagining how to have these conversations. Kryznaric speaks of “a table for strangers to talk to each other in every Starbucks”. Torgersen is evolving “ways in which music and art can work together with climate scientists to make this alarm heard”. I am advocating for a cultural ‘International Climate Service’. Roger Hallam is initiating mini assemblies.11 The Climate Majority Project is aiming to “transform the conversation about climate adaptation and resilience from a fringe concern to an issue at the heart of serious climate action”12. Gail Bradbrook’s new project speaks to the readiness “to make change together when sufficient power is built from neighbourhood level upwards”.13 The Humanity Project (UK) is bringing together local groups and citizens in scores of assemblies to produce environmental, economic and justice-based change for their local community.14 And perhaps it is The Humanity Project that best sums up what’s behind this commonality of approach; “There’s no-one left to turn to but each other, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for”.
From one hill to another
Back in France and I’m on a hill looking towards another – on an island near Bergen 3,000km away, questioning if my carbon emissions travelling hill to hill were justified. And can I justify a return trip? For moral reasons I am compelled to because it may be there, in Norway, directly in the path of that coming own goal of an ice-age, where so many dominos begin to fall, and I want to be part of pushing over enough of the bad stuff.
Afterword
Some better news is coming from Bergen’s artists. Congratulations have been exchanged following the publication of the budget. In the end, the council had a re-think on cutting arts funding so drastically. Digital arts festival creator Piksel updated their petition page:
‘We’re excited to share some positive news: thanks to your support, we’ve secured funding from the city—about one-third of what we used to receive before the cuts—which has allowed us to regain our operational footing. This is an important milestone, and we’re truly grateful for your solidarity. That said, our journey is far from over. We’re determined not only to restore but also to surpass our previous funding levels. With your continued support, we’re confident we can achieve this goal together. In the coming months, we’ll be preparing new applications for the Arts Council, aiming to regain our full initial budget. As the Red Queen tells Alice: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”’15
I phoned artist Marianne Morild, who was on the panel after my concert, to ask what was going on.16 She explained; “In the summer artists began to get signals that the culture budget in Bergen would be cut. We worried that institutions where artists worked would have their funding cut, it was not on our horizon that all the art grants would go! These grants enable project growth, they may not be big working grants but these smaller grants help get productions off the ground. There are seven comprehensive grants that give up to 40% of salaries, but most of the artist funding is smaller project funding given to individual artists. These grants are vital for creating new projects. The institutions would be cut a little bit here and would gain a little bit there, but were largely going to be okay. So we formed a group of artist organisations, unions, and individuals, Vi vil skape i Bergen (We Want To Create In Bergen). We reached out to wider institutions, anybody who could be affected. It was the first time we had all sat down together. We agreed on a solidarity brief to send a message to the politicians, that these cuts would be damaging to the city as a whole. We spoke to them in ways that they understand; there’s a circumstantial economy created by artists working in the town, if there’s fewer of us here Bergen will suffer. And that artists as a whole add value to the city; a brain drain of artists would also impact on the health of the city.
“We organised the protest at the town hall really quickly, it only took about one day, everyone was mobilised. We got attention locally and nationally, it became embarrassing to the politicians. In the big picture of the budget, these arts grants are only a small portion. So then we saw that we’d made noise, we would now try to lobby and talk to politicians. We went to talk to the culture committee in the city; all the institutions funded by the council came and also talked about the grants. It was emotional, people cried, a very heart-felt situation. People from this group also lobbied politicians.
“What happened in the end was that the council coalition parties launched an alternative budget which was published where they suggested to reinstate the artist funding and they then negotiated with the ruling party to get the funding back into the budget. We thanked them of course, but there’s a bitter taste. In this new budget, culture has to pay a little, but others have been cut much more, for example refugees and healthcare and education are losing out in the budget. We thanked them of course, but there’s a bitter taste. We fought for our budget, but these other areas don’t have anyone to fight for them. Our mandate this time was just to fight for the arts but next time we can fight for others. In the end it came down to conversation, you can make a noise politically but what’s needed is conversation, and to have a coalition behind you”.
Notes
- Torleif Torgersen is a Norwegian pianist and professor at the Grieg Academy, Faculty of Arts, Music and Design, University of Bergen. He has developed a special interest in classical performance practice and playing historical instruments, but he is also active as a chamber musician and advocate for new music. Although made aware of the looming problem of our CO2 emissions as a student, he was, as many were, disturbed when the IPCC report in 2018 stated that we had very few years left to combat the situation. He joined the local branch of XR when it was founded in Bergen in 2019 and has since been involved in many different types of actions, both with and without pink pianos and music. In an attempt to explore how music can be used as an activist, he has started the Amplifying the Alarm artistic research project in collaboration with the Centre for Climate Research at the University of Bergen; scientists, musicians and artists seek ways to combine scientific facts with artistic expression, in the hope they may reach out to more people and raise awareness and action in new and powerful ways.
- Open Letter by Climate Scientists to the Nordic Council of Ministers (Reykjavik, October 2024)
- Rapid-Fire Answers to the Biggest Climate Questions with Stefan Rahmstorf, on The Great Simplification podcast from Nate Hagens. The Great Simplification explores the systems science underpinning the human predicament.
- Equinor halts oil exports from Norway terminal due to demonstration. (Reuters, 19th August 2021)
- Orchestra for Change, Germany.
- Pontiac Enchanté, Canada.
- Orchestra for the Earth, UK.
- ClimateKeys
- Doughnut Economics, Seven ways to think like a 21st Century Economist
- Roman Krznaric in conversation with Jeremy Lent for a Deep Transformation Network online event, 13/9/24. You can watch the recording here: How History Can Be a Source of Radical Hope.
- The Love Paradigm: How Mini-Assemblies Can Save Us, Roger Hallam newsletter 20/11/24.
- The Climate Majority Project.
- So Now What? movement ecology, collapse and rising fascism, Gail Bradbrook 28/1/25.
- The Humanity Project.
- Petition for Continued Support of Piksel Festival by the Bergen City Council.
- Artist Marianne Morild
