Arts for activism: Passions for our tortured planet

Juan Patricio Saenz
Thursday, January 12, 2023

Composer Brian Field's ‘musical movement’ shares his climate-focused composition with artists for free to raise awareness of the impact of climate change

The past century has seen a dramatic increase in climate-related events across the world, from destructive super typhoons in the Philippines to raging forest fires in the American West, from severe droughts in Australia to thousands of cubic meters of ice being sheared from the Antarctic glaciers. All these events have taken costly tolls – both direct and indirect – on human lives, along with the destruction of wildlife and changes in our global ecosystem.

Recently, feelings of frustration and alienation around leaders’ inactivity in response to this crisis have driven some individuals to more radical expressions, such as throwing food or paint at works of art in museums in Europe. While certainly attention-grabbing, these more destructive efforts have led to further public polarization around the issue. As a more unifying counterpoint, award-winning American composer Brian Field has opted for a constructive approach to raising awareness and stimulating dialogue around the rapidly accelerating climate crisis through his global artistic project Passions for our Tortured Planet.

Field has composed a three-movement solo piano work titled Three Passions for our Tortured Planet. Each of the individual movements is titled after a climatic phenomenon and vividly depicts some of the challenges of climate change throughout the unfolding of the work.

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