London, 22 Dec. 2021 – The certainty of the beautiful notes of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has no longer reason to be as it was composed in 1725, while outside nature is dying at the hands of mankind and sparrows sing their last, desperate, sad melody.
In 2050, when the world’s false commitment to stopping climate change will show its failure, Spring will have lost its joyful sound, Summer sunlight will hit like an acute flat tone, Autumn dance for the harvest turned into a funeral cortege for a floating countryside and Winter intimate reflection will stumble its flow, sobbing between silence and despair.
We can’t delude ourselves that todays’ nature is flourishing like Vivaldi’s three centuries ago. It would be too easy to enter a concert hall and forget the reality of the world we live in for a two hours classical concert.
Music has a mission; it’s not pure entertainment. Music changes with the reality and nature in 2050 will sound like this:
The European Union Youth Orchestra perform the Venice Variation of The [uncertain] Four Seasons as interpreted by Carmen Fizzarotti at the Church of the Santissimo Redentore in Venice. AKQA and Jung von Matt, in partnership with composer Hugh Crosthwaite and Monash University’s Climate Change Communication Research Hub used climate data to recompose Vivaldi’s ‘The Four Seasons.’
European Union Youth Orchestra (EUYO) Secretary General, Marshall Marcus, built a global project to put pressure on Cop26; the UN summit already failed, but the music is still there for us all as an invite to act now for the climate, recalling a concert is not just a place you sit passively, but an experience bringing knowledge, awareness.
EUYO involved 14 orchestras across six continents. Listen to the Four Seasons in Venice, where Vivaldi composed it, and listen in parallel how this sounds now, in this world, from 14 corners of the planet, from Venice to Cape Town, from Inchelon (South Korea) to Caracas, from Saskatoon (Canada) to Amsterdam… just move the globe and listen.
It isn’t just a matter of musical variation on Vivaldi’s themes. Harmonic shifts from major to minor key, the balance violin solo-orchestra derail towards unexpected pauses: silence sounds like the lost of meaning and hope.
The work of re-composition of Vivaldi’s original score has been massive and extraordinary: cultural and geographic decentralisation making time and rhythm relative to unpredictable changes. Nothing is certain. Mood is not the positive one we are all used to and would like to listen to: now symmetry is lost forever and baroque harmonic structure gradually dissolves. Yet nothing is static in this global concert unifying orchestras distant hundreds of thousands kilometers, in one aim: changing our emotions, expectations, determination, giving our conscience’s resolution the name of action.
Talkeurope.org 