PROGRAM NOTE

On September 9, 2020, ash and smoke streaming from hundreds of thousands of acres of burning wildfire in the Pacific Northwest converged over San Francisco, blotting out the sun and turning the sky a dark, rich orange. Waking up at midday to the night-dark sky and looking out over an orange-tinted ocean, it felt in every sense like the beginning of the apocalypse, the premonition of a future without blue skies. This is the scene onto which Those Who Favor Fire opens. Taking inspiration from literature of the end of the world—including Robert Frost’s Fire and Ice, Andri Snær Magnasson’s On Time and Water, and the ancient Icelandic poem Völuspá—and drawing upon my memory of this rising tide of fires, the first movement attempts to convey the mythological scale of our environmental collapse. At the end of the movement, the choir lists the name of every wildfire that burned in California in 2020, as well as places around the world whose fires defined my memory of this stretch of relentless burning: Australia (2019) and Hawaii (2023) among them. The voices rise into chaos, an incomprehensible tower of names that collapses with the impact of a massive wave.

In the second movement, we are transported to an utterly different environment. The electronics introduce sounds recorded on the glaciers of Iceland’s southern coast, immersing the audience in a soundscape of trickling water and calving icebergs. The orchestra reacts to the sounds without comment, becoming a part of the landscape itself and creating a sense of geologic time. Bit by bit, the human world encroaches on the incredible slowness of glacial timescales—Milankovitch cycles overtaken by the rate of human industry—and water begins to flow with increasing fervor. A low throbbing of seismic data from the Ross Ice Shelf in the electronics adds the language of science to the movement. Like the piece itself, this data sonification, created by geophysicists Richard Aster and Julien Chaput, attempts to translate the timescale of glaciers into a timescale perceptible by the human ear. But it is not fast enough to span the history of the glaciers’ collapse. Metric modulations in the viola and piano compress our sense of time further as swelling strings and winds—representing seasonal carbon flux—show the passage of each quickening year. Over this rushing sense of time, the strings begin a steady rising, and the pulse intensifies into an overwhelming, club-like beat. In the end, the rising, pulsing strings are overpowered by the sounds of water pouring down moulins and into massive subglacial rivers. The deafening torrent is cut short, leaving us to picture a world without ice: a world where moraines and eskers are our only reminder of a once unconquerable landscape.

Those Who Favor Fire is about the shifting of timescales through human greed. In Iceland, a few centuries of oil and coal-burning has just begun to erase a ten-thousand-year dynasty of glaciers. Fossil-fuel-induced climate change is at play in the wildfires of California as well, but the full truth of wildfires is more complicated—a convergence of climate factors, water extraction, and the abandonment of proper forest management practices. As the rate of our consumption surpasses the rate of natural systems, we disrupt non-human timescales and draw the Earth’s resources away from nature—from million-year-old coal seams to power plants, from wetlands to beach resorts. With Those Who Favor Fire, I hope to create a space to feel the changing time of our environment and our society.

Watch the performance preview →