Shaping an Ear for Climate Change

• Published in: Environmental Humanities
• Main Author: Chisholm, Dianne
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Duke University Press 2016
• Subjects: Pulitzer; Sila; inuit
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3664211; https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/8/2/172/409070/172Chisholm.pdf

Abstract How does contemporary music cultivate ecological thinking and climate-change awareness in our era of global warming? This essay investigates how the music of Pulitzer Prize–winning Alaskan composer John Luther Adams incites ecological listening and shapes an ear for climate change. It examines Adams’s evolving signature style of composing and/or performing with climatic elements and natural forces, and it further examines how this style effectively attunes audiences to ongoing environmental events that weather the world outside the concert hall. In other words, it investigates the idea and play of “Sila” in Adams’s work, Sila being a concept that Adams derives from the Inuit to signify in the largest possible sense the weather, its cosmic and chaotic modalities, and the wisdom that attends to them.