Summer Distortion (2022)
(a recomposition of Vivaldi's RV 315)

Summer Distortion
a recomposition of Antonio Vivaldi's Concerto No. 2 in G minor ("L'estate"), RV 315
(2022)

This work transforms its source material through various processes that echo and reference our present age of climate change. My central focus was on the pervasive anxiety with which our minds and bodies apprehend the rapidly deteriorating stability of Earth's climate future. I was fortunate to meet with a number of climate scientists while preparing this composition, who pointed me to studies that document not just the climate science but also the associated affective, cognitive, and behavioral ramifications on the populace. Overwhelmingly these studies attest to the immense psychological burden that climate change anxiety exerts on one specific group: that of children and young people-i.e., the age group both least responsible for and most vulnerable to climate change.¹ Here I must mention a parallel to race, class, and nationhood: the brutally unjust, on-going projects of imperialism and racial capitalism have ensured that those portions of the global population least responsible for will remain the most vulnerable to the devastation and suffering of the unfolding climate disaster.²

As temperatures, wild fires, droughts, food and water scarcity, and-it must be said, the power of fascism across the world-rise, so do the numbers of people who agree with statements like "the future is frightening", "humanity is doomed", and "I am hesitant to have children". The failures of older generations and of the so-called "developed nations" to prevent the catastrophe manifest for them, statistically, as a milder psychological burden of anxiety and, for some, guilt. At our worst we are, of course, deeply selfish beings. That children and "underdeveloped nations" are forced into the role of chastising for their flagrant abuses those whose actions dictate the very world in which we all exist is both a commonplace and one of the chief perversions of our age.

Summer Distortion addresses the subject of psychological distress through distortions-even perversions-of Vivaldi's score. Extension is pushed to the point of distension, like a bodily organ swollen far beyond its natural limits. Sudden shifts of mood, while present in the original work and in the poem that serves as its musical program, are here juxtaposed to the point of absurdity. Above all, Summer Distortion is marked by a persistent tendency to rise.

Temporal discombobulations also appear in multiple forms. Familiar elements repeat in unfamiliar ways-too long, too short. Pauses disrupt and efface the original dramaturgy, at times painfully prolonging what is already obvious. Several passages jarringly collide past, present, and future musical events, severing them from their roots only to thrust them into fallow ground. There is even a moment where the music loses itself completely, reemerging in a roughly contemporaneous Baroque concerto by a different composer (BWV 1048). In the second movement, half of the musicians form an independent tempo layer, which soon unmoors itself from the others, its strange, disembodied, inhuman dirge softly rising.

This music does not take a hopeful position on climate change. No one who's looked seriously at the numbers possibly could. If it takes any position it is this: Our persistence in writing, playing, hearing, and (a very different act) listening to music in the 21st century remains a meaningful, deeply human act. As our world literally burns, perhaps anxiety is a place we must inhabit. Perhaps this inhabiting-our full, unflinching immersion therein-is how we move beyond the disaster. But also, and legitimately: Perhaps there is no moving beyond it.

- MB, Berlin-Neukolln, 4 August 2022

1  Hickman, C. and Marks, E., et al. "Young people's voices on climate anxiety, government betrayal and moral injury: a global phenomenon"

2  Curious readers are invited to explore the writings of Cedric Robinson, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Mary Anna'ise Heglar.