Among the most personal music I’ve ever composed, Vespers of the Blessed Earth is both a lamentation and a celebration — an expression of my personal grief over the loss of someone I loved dearly, and over the violence that we humans inflict on one another and on other forms of life. At the same time, Vespers is an expression of my faith in the enduring beauty and the cycles of renewal on this earth.
Following the first performances of Vespers (in 2023) I wrote this essay:
Biology, Politics, and Prayers
“Biology is politics.”
— Michael McClure
I began my adult life as a full-time political activist. But in my early 30s I withdrew from activism and dedicated myself entirely to a life in art. Although it’s impossible for me to separate my art from my feelings about the state of human affairs, I’ve always aspired to put the art first. For me, music is a way to transcend myself, to be in touch with something larger, older, deeper, and more mysterious than I can fathom. My music has rarely been overtly political, or even personally expressive.
Several years ago, a critic contrasted my work with that of another composer, arguing that the music of the other composer was directly engaged with the great issues of our times, while in my music I had “retreated into nature”. Around the same time a different critic took me to task as “an ideological composer”, arguing that my “environmentalist ideology” had limited the artistic range of my work. What struck me about these two critiques was not the polar contrast between them, but rather their similarity. Neither writer discussed the music as music, while both seemed to regard music primarily as a political phenomenon.
My lifelong “retreat into nature” has come from a deep spiritual hunger. Where some composers look to their religious practice as the source for their work, I’ve turned to the larger-than-human world that we call “nature”. My music and my faith are grounded in the earth. And if Olivier Messiaen, Arvo Pärt, and so many others in the European tradition whose music is grounded in their Christian faith are recognized as “ideological composers”, then I stand guilty as charged. No less than theirs, my music is an expression of my faith.
When I was young, I lived by an 18th- and 19th-century brand of romantic idealism. In my travels in the wildlands of Alaska I had numerous experiences — close encounters with grizzly bears, roaring wildfires, calving glaciers, and howling storms — walking that razor’s edge between beauty and terror that Edmund Burke called “the sublime”. From those experiences I could imagine how the world once was, how it still is deep beneath the terrestrial purgatories that we humans have built for ourselves, and how we might create new societies living in harmony with the earth.
Throughout the last decades of the 20th century, I held to these visions. But by the turn of the 21st century, the increasingly dire state of human affairs began to make this untenable. Everywhere I looked I saw human violence — violence against one another, violence against other species of life, violence against the earth itself. Again and again, I felt confronted with a stark choice: I could surrender my romantic ideals, or cling to them and eventually succumb to what Thomas Merton called “the rotten luxury of despair”. I had to face the reality that, as my friend the writer Barry Lopez put it: “...the throttled Earth — the scalped, the mined, the industrially farmed, the drilled, polluted, and suctioned land, endlessly manipulated for further development and profit — is now our home.”
But what on this new earth could take the place of that heady idealism that had sustained me all those years?
I remember vividly the first time that Barry said something to me about the imperative for us to give voice to our grief. Although I was experiencing daily the dramatic acceleration of climate change in Alaska — historically long, widespread, and destructive wildfire seasons, rainfall and lightning in winter, the rapid appearance of new plant and animal species, and record high temperatures being set on a regular basis — I hadn’t yet allowed myself to admit that what I was feeling was grief. But once Barry had spoken the word, there was no turning back.
Barry went on to voice his aspiration that in addition to expressing our grief, our work might also be able to offer some measure of solace. It seemed telling that he did not use the word “hope”, which by then had come to seem as glib and shallow as a presidential campaign slogan. We hadn’t earned hope. But Barry and I both recognized that we had to discover a different kind of faith. This began by acknowledging the depth of our grief — not just the essential human grief that comes with the recognition of our own individual mortality, but also what Barry called “natural grief”, our grief over the rising tsunami of species extinctions, including the possibility of our own extinction. Only in this humbler and more chastened frame of mind, could we begin to find some measure of solace, and to search for the possibility of salvation.
Most adults of any age (and far too many children) have experienced some or all the stages of grief as described by popular psychology: Shock. Denial. Anger. Bargaining.
Depression. Acceptance. As climate change began to roll like a tsunami over Alaska, I was shocked that my refuge, the place that I’d always viewed as a world apart was being irreversibly changed by the actions of people in faraway places. At first, I tried to deny this by retreating into my long-cherished visions of the sublime North, but when the new realities became undeniable, I grew heartsick and outraged. I tried to escape my grief by leaving Alaska in search of a new refuge — in the deserts of Mexico and Chile, and in the vibrant cultural forest of New York City. Yet although each of those places offered their own unique magic, I couldn’t recover anything approaching the sense of refuge that I’d felt for all those years in Alaska.
Bargaining my way out of my grief — whether through religion, politics, or faith in technological solutions to climate change — just wasn’t possible for me. With continued rise of gun violence and extreme right-wing politics in the United States, and then the arrival of a deadly pandemic, I succumbed to depression. And then, in the middle of it all, Barry passed away — just a few months after a wildfire had roared through the temperate rainforest that had been his home for fifty years. Barry died as a climate refugee.
The only thing I knew to do was to try and voice my grief through music. I composed Crossing Open Ground, an outdoor work titled after one of Barry’s books, and dedicated it to him. I composed An Atlas of Deep Time, a sprawling orchestral work in which I looked for solace in the 4.57 billion years of history in the rocks beneath our feet. But it was in Vespers of the Blessed Earth that I finally gave full voice to the depth of my grief.
Vespers is the most unabashedly personal music I’ve ever composed — an expression of my personal grief over the loss of someone I loved dearly, and over the violence that we humans inflict on one another and on other forms of life. At the same time, this is an expression of my faith in the enduring beauty and the cycles of renewal on this earth. The heart of Vespers is “Litanies of the Sixth Extinction”, in which the chorus sings the Latin binomials, the scientific names of 192 extinct, threatened, and endangered species of plants and animals, ending with Homo sapiens. Some people seem to regard this as an overtly political statement. But the current mass extinction that we humans have set in motion is far more than a political issue. It is a worldwide biological emergency that threatens the survival of thousands of species, including our own. As Barry put it in the title of one of his last essays: “An era of emergencies is upon us, and we cannot look away.”
The urgent challenge facing artists, and all thinking people today is this: How do we respond to this unprecedented moment in human history? How can we give voice to our grief? How can we move beyond grief, to solace? And beyond solace, how can we find our way forward, toward the possibility of redemption?
Barry always said that he just wanted his work to help. I feel the same way. I want my music to be of use to people I will never know, those in the next generations who may imagine and bring into being a new culture that I will not live to inhabit.
Vespers, of course, are evening prayers, prayers offered in a time of darkness descending. Barry often spoke of the practice our work as artists as our form of prayer. If I’d offered my prayers within the doctrine of Christianity or another established religious tradition, Vespers of the Blessed Earth would likely be considered a “sacred” work. But because my faith has no name, some have taken it as a political statement. Yet perhaps Vespers isn’t too political. Perhaps it’s too personal.
I’ve long maintained that unless a piece of music moves a listener as music, then anything the composer may say about it is irrelevant. And in this instance, because the work is so personal, the composer may have said too much about it. My words about Vespers may have made it difficult for some to hear this music simply as music. It’s ironic that a work I regard as my most personal would be heard by some as my most political statement. Yet ultimately the composer’s intentions don’t matter. No matter what a composer may have in mind, and no matter how a critic may receive it, a piece of music must make its own way in the world. And often history proves both the composer and the critic wrong.
Still, in our present-day hyper-politicized culture, the words of the poet Charles Péguy ring as true as ever: “Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.”