Post 108.

Today’s news is filled with the heatwave. Fifteen kids needed to be rescued, hiking in Maryland; and two were hospitalized. Here in Pennsylvania, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) is warning residents not to leave their pets out in the sun, and to walk dogs in the shade. Already this year, 28 dog deaths have been reported due to heat. Recent studies warn that, because of climate change, heatwaves will “drastically worse in the Northern Hemisphere.” Between 1998 and 2017, there were 160,000 heat-related deaths globally. The scientists suggest that record-breaking heat events are up to 7 times more likely to occur between 2021 to 2050.

How does this relate to what we do as educators? In 2019 Raffi wrote the song “Young People Marching” inspired by the work of Greta Thunberg:

Decades of lies, decades of denial\ Turned up the heat, engulfed us in fire\ Decades of obstruction, though people knew better\ Caused this climate emergency, now we gotta set ourselves free\ Of this climate emergency—climate emergency

“Engulfed in fire,” we recognize our responsibilities as music educators every bit as much as young people like Greta and professional musicians like Raffi. Unbound, for the most part, from the curricular dictates of distant global corporate interests and governments, we set our classroom’s direction in a way many Reading and Math teachers cannot. We aren't required to teach to a script. We don’t have to prepare children for weekly bubble tests; or to narrow possible futures to multiple-guess.

We teach music, and music is part of everything. Music education in schools is ecological if we allow it to be. If we take off our blinders.

More in this blog:
See Post 27: The American Politics of Climate Change
And also Post 53: An Intersectional Approach to Climate Justice

DS

Image:  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/Funeral_for_our_future_-_Melbourne_-_IMG_3634_%2831186598827%29.jpg/640px-Funeral_for_our_future_-_Melbourne_-_IMG_3634_%2831186598827%29.jpg

Post 107.

Today, I only offer a short post: a poem that I wrote this morning as a hummingbird floated in and out of my front-yard garden. How can we who teach music become and live eco-literacy if indeed, as I think, being ecologically literate is a way of life. Eco-literacy is more than merely a trendy (or more accurately untrendy) approach to teaching in schools. Echoing my thoughts, in a recent study, Dylan Adams and Gary Beauchamp champion children playing outside, which offers students "states of being and knowings that are not as accessible in schools." How does being ecologically literate every day--conscious of soil/of locality in its full ecological reality, and understanding how that soil connects to global issues--guide the ways we live life? How do we become life-sustaining educators and musicians? The peoples of earth we are born to be. It begins with being present in our bioregion, and our local ecosystem. Where else can we be?

Hummingbird, Hummingbird

Hummingbird, hummingbird, where are you going?
I planted this bee balm to welcome you here
If you choose to stay, I’ll sing you a song
I do not eat meat, you need not fear
But hummingbird hovers, and never stays long
Hummingbird, hummingbird, where are you going?

DS

Link to image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/df/Hummingbird_moth%2C_Massachusetts.jpg/640px-Hummingbird_moth%2C_Massachusetts.jpg

Post 106.

Listening: NatGeo Earth Day 202, The Seed, Aurora

“Only when the last tree has died, and the last river has been poisoned, and the last fish has been caught will we realize that we cannot eat money.” ~Quotation regularly attributed to Chief Seattle

Chief Seattle, Si’ahl (1780-1866), often called “The Big One” because of his tall stature, was a member of the Duwamish/Suquamish people who is most famous for a speech he gave being ecologically responsible. He was born on the Black River, and was a Roman Catholic who addressed relations between Native Americans and European settlers. Today a club named in his honor provides “sacred space to nurture, affirm, and renew the spirit of urban Native people.”

Aurora Aksnens is a Norwegian singer-songwriter who has been active since 2012. She released the album, “A Different Kind of Human (Step 2)” in 2019, which featured the songs Animal, The River, the title track, and The Seed. Also in 2019, she sang the film Frozen 2’s theme song, Into the Unknown, which brought her international attention. Aurora said, in an interview, about The Seed: “It’s representing my personal fire inside of me because I’m very passionate about saving the planet. It’s about human history, about how we’ve co-existed in the world and how we’ve forgotten how to live with nature and the power we have. It’s a very sad story, a very sad side of the story of humankind. It was a good way to end the album, to fuel the fire in people and to speak louder, about how we have to learn to exist with everything again. That’s why I figured out it’s a good way to end it all. Or this chapter, at least. The next one is already in the making!”

The lyrics to “The Seed” noticeably originate in Chief Seattle’s best-known quotation (above):

Just like the seed
I don't know where to go
Through dirt and shadow I grow
I'm reaching light through the struggle
Just like the seed
I'm chasing the wonder
I unravel myself
All in slow motion
Mmh mmh mmh
You cannot eat money, oh no
You cannot eat money, oh no
When the last tree has fallen
And the rivers are poisoned
You cannot eat money, oh no
You cannot eat money, oh no
You cannot eat money, oh no
When the last tree has fallen
And the rivers are poisoned
You cannot eat money oh, no
Oh no
Suffocate me
So my tears can be rain
I will water the ground where I stand
So the flowers can grow back again
'Cause just like the seed
Everything wants to live
We are burning our fingers
But we learn and forget
Mmh mmh mmh
You cannot eat money, oh no
You cannot eat money, oh no
When the last tree has fallen
And the rivers are poisoned
You cannot eat money, oh no
You cannot eat money, oh no
You cannot eat money, oh no
When the last tree has fallen
And the rivers are poisoned
You cannot eat money, oh no
Oh no
Feed me sunlight, feed me air
Feed me truth and feed me prayer
Feed me sunlight, feed me air
Feed me truth and feed me prayers
Mmh mmh mmh
You cannot eat money, oh no
You cannot eat money, oh no
When the last tree has fallen
And the rivers are poisoned
You cannot eat money, oh no
You cannot eat money, oh no
You cannot eat money, oh no
When the last tree has fallen
And the rivers are poisoned
You cannot eat money, oh no
Oh no

Music educators can use popular songs, like The Seed, to ask questions that matter, to cultivate eco-literacy. What is the role of money in our current ecological crises? Historically, making money has required people to chop down trees, to poison rivers, and has led to fish population collapses; and today these continue, but also server farms poison the soil, and even our daily food is shipped across the globe at great ecological cost, and global billionaires have the greatest ecological footprint (according to Oxfam, the top 10% of people produce half of the consumption-based fossil fuel emissions)—is there a way to make money sustainably? Or was Chief Seattle pointing humanity toward a different way of being; a different relationship with Mother Earth, one that considers money-making second, and sustainability first?

But we too often feel we cannot do much about global billionaires. In fact, though they are the bulk of the problem, we often see the biggest global polluters, like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, getting awards and accolades online and on television for the tiny bit (percentage wise) they do in the form of environmental philanthropy. But, as Aurora’s song can remind us, we the peoples of earth can become a seed. “Through dirt and shadow I grow\ I'm reaching light through the struggle\ Just like the seed\ I'm chasing the wonder.” And here is where musicking flourishes. Not in large-scale philanthropy-as-profit, but in small-scale, grassroots, diverse local actions. Music teachers and students-as-community-members can use their diverse ways of musicking, their teaching and learning, in transformative ways to resist ecological destruction, resist narratives that place us outside-of-nature, and to show humanity diverse and sustainable ways forward. Because none of us are outside-of-nature. We are nature. After all, as Chief Seattle taught us so long ago, we cannot eat money.

DS

Post 105.
 
This month I have worked with students at the University of Freiburg, as they enact eco-literate music pedagogy. I have always called for this to be a pedagogy on soil, following Ivan Illich’s call for a philosophy on soil. By “on soil,” I mean radically place-based. Place-conscious. Place-responsive. Emplaced. As such, many of the most pertinent ecological challenges faced in Freiburg, Germany may differ from those here in Central PA, U.S. The musics, which are central to ecological action, that emerge in the grassroots of Central Europe are likely different than those that emerge in the grassroots of Central PA. Nonetheless, we share global crises too, such as e-waste, climate change, and species collapse, that we face together. A pedagogy on soil is local, fully local, in order to be responsive and transformative to the global. There is no way to enact global change without enacting local change. We live, ONLY, in the local. 

More than 100 people have died in Germany and Belgium from flooding this week. Meanwhile in the U.S., wildfires rage across Oregon, creating fire clouds reaching up to six miles into the atmosphere. And while it rains nearly every day here in the northern part of the Appalachian Mountains, and my garden is celebrating (see photos from my gardens), Minnesota is facing severe droughts. The Earth Organization for Sustainability draws our attention to the ecosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere to better understand the global ecological crises. I wonder too if these will help us draw our attention to local challenges to ecosystems, air, water, and soil. To do so, modifications need to be made. 

Mother Earth strives to find a balance within her global ecosystem. When disturbances occur, such as a volcanic eruption (atmosphere), increased chemicals added to the topsoil from farming (lithosphere), or plastic waste dumped into the oceans (hydrosphere), she gradually approaches a state called “dynamic equilibrium.” She restores balance, especially in response to minor disturbances. However, when these disturbances are too large in a single place, ecosystems collapse; which includes the possibility for a global collapse in response to multiple global-level anthropogenic disturbances. In the face of such horror, what are we, music teachers, then to do?
 
Are we required to fully understand the challenges we face? No. Nobody knows everything. A bit a humility is always a good thing. However, don't mistake willful ignorance for humility. Ecological conscientization is a responsibility for all people. This conscientization will look different for children than adults. Adults can bear on their shoulders the full weight of the mess we’ve made. Children should be introduced to the challenges and their responsibilities gradually. The resistance to sustainable futures enacted by billionaires and global corporations must be addressed. We, the peoples of earth, ultimately must ask ourselves, what sort of economy do we need to enact to thrive on Mother Earth for centuries to come? I believe the solutions to big damage are small structures. If we return our economy to the community-sized, strengthening farmers markets and local businesses, that is the start (but likely not the end) of the change we need. Big solutions may also pan out, though most posed by billionaires have been, for them, profitable lies. Rather, it is most likely the solutions will arise in diverse places, using diverse musics, in the grassroots in diverse communities around the globe. Folk here in the northern Appalachian Mountains are finding distinctive ways of sustaining this place, and folk in other places modify those solutions to their own places; and come up with their own in the deserts of Utah, the lakes of Minnesota, and the once-forested areas of Germany and Belgium.
 
Listen to: Wisdom Cries, Aurora

DS

Post 104.

Today I read a Pocket Worthy article on incubation calling and climate change. Many birds sing to their babies while they’re still in the egg. This has a number of known and unknown evolutionary advantages. Incubation calling helps many birds imprint who their mother is. For some birds, like fairy wrens, it helps mothers avoid raising parasitic cuckoos. Research also has found that the music that zebra finches sing to their eggs changes growth and behavior. In particular, these songs help baby birds be prepared to adapt to changing environmental conditions caused by climate change. This is a new area for research, and there’s a lot scientists don’t know about these songs.

Zebra finch mothers, who live in the harsh Australian Outback, do most of the incubation. Like many bird species, the males are more brightly colored than females, and sing more complex songs. However, zebra finch mothers sing a particular incubation call when temperature climbs above 78 F. Growth and development differs between eggs who experience that particular incubation call. This incubation call helps the baby birds grow smaller than average, which then leads to the advantage of more efficient thermoregulation in hotter environments. These effects are felt into adulthood, as this next generation of birds chose hotter areas to make their nests.

Are these incubation calls one, of many, of the songs of global climate change? What might this music mean for music education? Do our songs affect development as obviously as the Zebra finch mothers' songs do? Probably not. But it's interesting to consider anyway.

DS

Link to image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1e/Zebra_finch_nest_hollow_Burke_River_floodplain_Boulia_Queensland_P1030205.jpg/640px-Zebra_finch_nest_hollow_Burke_River_floodplain_Boulia_Queensland_P1030205.jpg

Post 103.
   
Today I received a copy of The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning, edited by Janice L. Waldron, Stephanie Horsley, and Kari K. Veblen. At a risk of being obsolete by its release, the authors wrote chapters for this handbook exploring the following questions:
1. How do social media and social networking enable and support learning in diverse contexts.
2. How meaningful is the notion of participatory culture for thinking about social media and music education.
3. How are issues such as communication, mass self-communication, power, democracy, and identity negotiated in a networked society, and what are the implications for music learning and making?
4. How does the business of social media support or exploit the ways in which musicians learn and interact? How does it support musical agency?
5. What roles might social media and social networking play in supporting music learning and making from a social justice perspective? And 6. What are the implications for future music learning in diverse contexts? (pp. 6-7).

To avoid obsolescence embedded in music technological scholarship, my co-author, Vincent Bates, and I chose to challenge the, sadly, perennial negatives of development—economic and ecological devastation. These two devastations, that tech-utopians are most likely to elide, implicate them, and us, in the ongoing oppression of the poor, who are unable to access the newest tech and have their physical homes, waters, and soils poisoned by  chmicals and plastics that make the middle-and upper-class’s prized technologies possible, and dominate nature, who cannot long survive such resulting crises as e-waste and server farms.
           
Because our critique was 2/3 negative (The Bad and The Ugly), many tech-utopians will feel personally challenged. Some are, wanting to hide their unconscious crimes, likely will bury our critique, or charge us with luddism (as if the original rural, English Luddites wouldn’t have benefitted from stopping the 18-hour workday at the factories poisoning their communities). But, truly, we outline The Good, explicating many good things that come from social media development, as well as The Bad and The Ugly. Sadly, most education tech-discourse is 100%, so this small critique can seem radical. There is, after all, money to be made selling the products billionaires develop, like Facebook, to schools and students, who become lifelong customers (or do they call it "consumers of music" still?). Luckily, the editors of the handbook permitted our critique to be voiced. Our critique has meaningful implications for the field of music education, if the field opens its mind, as well as educational and other musical fields. It is part of the long-standing critique of development in many fields, going back to the work of such thinkers as Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger, Ivan Illich, Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, Jerry Mander, Neil Postman, Jaron Lanier, Patrick Murphy, and, perhaps the most powerful voice in educational technology today, Audrey Watters.
           
In our chapter, we clarify what community is, and why social media is alternatively good or bad for the cultivation and sustaining of communities. While communities developed solely through social media seldom sustain the depth of feeling and experience as communities developed in actual physical places, communities and other relationships can be sustained through social media, and social media even provide ways for people to sustain a sense of communities after being uprooted, often by our economic system (e.g., urbanization and work-related transience). We also clarify what the commons are, and while I can recall when the internet (then called the Web) was considered a new commons, perhaps too idealistically, social media serves as part of industrial capitalism’s multi-century endeavor to steal the commons from common folk. Poverty and ecological destruction follows in development's wake. Finally, we identify the structure of convivial tools (and idea developed by Ivan Illich and expanded by Audrey Watters) to identify what sort of social media interactions may meet requirements for The Good. How can social media and related technologies be used that support community and avoid ecological destruction through e-waste and server farms? How can social media and related technologies support the commons and intergenerational wellbeing?
           
Finally, we discuss our experiences with specific social media—Facebook, YouTube, Online Scholarship, Pinterest, and Other Social Media (including Wikipedia and Google Docs)—to begin identifying the types of social media and interactions that might be convivial in our field.

DS

Reference

Bates, Vincent C., & Daniel J. Shevock. “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Social Media in Music Education.” In The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning, edited by Janice L. Waldron, Stephanie Horsley and Kari K. Veblen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 619-644. [Chapter 31]

Post 102.

This morning want to chew over important words from Esteva & Prakash’s discussion of comida/eating. My educational philosophy teacher, Madhu’s class utilized their book Escaping Education rather than Grassroots Postmodernism, but I have a read much of that book as well. Here I’m going to transform their words comida/eating and “culture” into “music/musics/musicking/musickers” to draw our attention to the depth of Esteva & Prakash’s challenge to my field, music education. Other than that, this is a direct quote:

"Our journey starts with the culture of [music]. [Music] belongs to an ethnos, but it can never be reduced to ethnic [musicking]. By crossing over the chasm that separates the first from the second, peoples are transmogrified into modern industrial [musickers]. [Music] disappears where people buy, prepare and cook [music] to nourish the myth of the “individual self.” Regenerating ourselves means, among other things, escaping the prison of industrial [musicking] and ethnic [musics]." (Esteva & Prakash 1998, 55)

This sentence, “By crossing over the chasm that separates the first from the second, peoples are transmogrified into modern industrial [musickers],” has been central to my published work, and is also to be found in Madhu’s mentor (my scholarly grandpa), Ivan Illich’s work. This quote, from Ivan Illich’s (1990) Declaration on Soil: 

"We were torn from the bonds to soil - the connections that limited action, making practical virtue possible - when modernization insulated us from plain dirt, from toil, flesh, soil and grave. The economy into which we have been absorbed - some, willy-nilly, some at great cost - transforms people into interchangeable morsels of population, ruled by the laws of scarcity." (http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1990_declaraion_soil.PDF) 

And so, here I stand, torn from my bonds of soil by an industrial system that has done just that to countless folk for centuries. When I walk in Patton, I see a shell of its former self. A town that has suffered the loss of its children for many generations, that has water and soil poisoned by long-gone industry, and, for the people who stayed, lack of job opportunity and a plethora of addictive drugs. This is the town where I was raised, where my brothers and sisters, my mom, and her dad were raised; and within six miles of where my mother’s mother, my father, and his parents were raised, and where many of my ancestors are buried—going back to the 19th Century when Eastern European people’s soil was transmogrified into Private Property, and the peoples of the soil, often called peasants, were torn from the soil. From communal property. As Marx wrote as early as 1867 of peoples elsewhere in Europe, “landlords grant[ed] themselves the peoples lands as private property” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm).

I look at my garden, where to cultivate the land means, in common gardening praxis, to take a tiller to the living ecosystem beneath the soil. To tear years-dead roots from the grasp of living roots. To gain temporary productivity through destruction, as this plot of soil is transmogrified into production for the sake of produce. But tilling is unnecessary as permaculture gardeners and farms have known for decades. Every old-growth forest has loose soil. The same is true for music education, which is why we must, to reuse of Prakash & Esteva (2008), escape education. 

I escape the tiller, just as I must escape music education. Music education tears children from the bonds of intergenerational community just as effectively as the tiller tears roots. Children begin to produce, but at what cost? Decimated rural towns and villages around the globe for the sake of urbanization (this story is repeated in the Global South, and in China, just as it is repeated in the U.S.); to draw all of the intellectuals to one place, all of the engineers to another, all of the businesspeople to a third, all of the carpenters to fourth, all of the farmers to a fifth, never to meet again? Hidden behind the walls of industrial suburban “communities”? Behind the walls separating fictitious nations on Turtle Island; walls that also destroy the lives of migrating non-human animals who know nothing of nations? Onto the superhighway of what goes for success in 21st Century capitalism, while most people find only suffering, unable to win that lottery?

Even the ivory-white tower of universities, maybe especially so, this is so. Most faculty are “part-time” adjuncts, teaching most of the coursework and seldom receiving either the middle-class salaries that capitalism falsely promises nor basic healthcare or retirement programs. Just as farmers can’t quite tell you why soil is always compacted when it’s tilled over and over, since tilling is meant to loosen the soil, music teachers can’t seem to tell you why so many people are self-identified non-musicians after they have been cultivated by the music curriculum (see https://deepgreenpermaculture.com/diy-instructions/no-dig-gardening/). Some farmers think more tilling will loosen the soil, and some music teachers think more music education will fix the problem of non-musicians. It may be that the only way to re-member (again, Esteva & Prakash 1998) music, to put our musicking bodies back together, is to escape music education. To return to grassroots, intergenerational, emplaced musicking. But this requires also re-membering quite a bit more than just musics. We must re-member one another, community, intergenerational and living.

DS
 
References
Esteva, Gustavo and Madhu Suri Prakash. 1998. Grassroots post-modernism: Remaking the soil of cultures. New York: Zed Books.
Prakash, Madhu Suri and Gustavo Esteva. 2008. Escaping education: Living as learning within grassroots cultures. New York: Peter Lang.
Link to image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5e/Tree_Roots.JPG/640px-Tree_Roots.JPG
 

Post 101.

The Covid pandemic, a powerful expression of our global ecological crises, provides distinctive challenges for teachers and students seeking uplifting, nature-infused, ecological experience. The move from not-nearly-living-enough classrooms to oft-worse digital screens has led many, myself included, to gloom and despair. So much disconnection. Detachment. Isolation. And yet, the pandemic has also provided opportunities for thinking differently. Opportunities for us to step outside, and learn in parks and front lawns; to cultivate gardens and our-selves as we learn music.

Stephen Nachmanovitch (1990) concluded his groundbreaking book Free Play discussing the power of limits and specific events, of “conflicting states of mind” (196) that happen when we surrender, in order to transcend hopelessness. He draws our attention to Oliver Messiaen, who composed one of the 20th Centuries most acclaimed works, Quartet for the End of Time, during the harsh winter of 1941, in the Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, Stalag VII. (Listen here, link: https://youtu.be/e2hbwINj7dE)

Like Messiaen, we and our students have been obliged to become distant (social distancing) and even to fear each others touch. This separateness has been harder one some teachers than others; on some students than others, but we have all experienced it, just as Messiaen and others in Stalag VII experienced separateness and despair. And like Messiaen, perhaps we can transform our despair into feelingful art.  

It is important we feel. We don’t aim to transcend gloom by ignoring it, pushing it into the deep recesses of our psyche, and pretending all is well. All is not well. Not societally or ecologically. “If life is full of joy, joy feeds the creative process. If life is full of grief, grief feeds the creative process” (Nachmanovitch 1990, 196). When we create music, we are able to create because we feel. And so, I recommend we help our students express their feelings through poetry and music, beat-making, lyric-writing, experimenting, playing, songwriting, and composing. In short, I call music educators to music educate.

DS
 
Reference
Nachmanovitch, Stephen. 1990. Free play: Improvisation in life and art. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam.
 
Link to image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/76/Novel_Coronavirus_SARS-CoV-2.jpg/640px-Novel_Coronavirus_SARS-CoV-2.jpg

Post 100.

Yay! I have written 100 posts on this blog, expanding our understanding of eco-literate music pedagogy. In this post, I situate humans as a sound mimic species, and provide a pedagogical practice that can be used throughout the school year to improve musical thinking, and challenge ecological destruction in a way musicians are, perhaps, best situated to do.

Some of the best mimic species in the animal kingdom are birds, including (here North America) mockingbirds, thrashers, catbirds, starlings, and blue jays. Humans, as a species, are also mimics. We mimic the natural world in order to acquire culture—what Bernie Krause (2015) calls a “continuously evolving fusion … [with] experienced soundscapes” (44). We, and other animals contributing to the soundscape, are co-evolving through a sharing of sounds.

The soundscape also provides humanity with our sense of the divine. The ever-evolving soundscape, including the musics of birds, contributes to personal wellbeing and increases our sense of rootedness. This isn’t meaningless beauty. Finally, becoming conscious of the more-than-human soundscape, we become increasingly aware of technological intrusion on our soundscape. This listening, deeply and purposefully, can be the start of ecological action. Here is a link to the soundscape in my backyard this April morning. And here is a photo I took this morning of the cherry tree the borough planted in front of my house. We experience the seasons through our senses, which are scientific and spiritual tools.

For students, we can also take them outside and have them record the soundscape. We can increase their wellbeing, while also tuning in their critical ears. Monet, famously painted a series of oil paintings of the Palace of Westminster from his window at St. Thomas’ Hospital between 1899 and 1901. The series provides the viewer with different views of the same place, on different times of day, and under different weather conditions. Researchers suggest that climate change is transforming the global soundscape, including its biophony (animal created sounds) and geophony (non-biological sounds). Drawing these together, we can, with our students, record the same soundscape throughout the school year, and note how it changes through the year, in different seasons and under different weather conditions. This will not only tune our students into the sounds of the natural world, increasing their abilities to understand music, but also provide them with the tools to contribute to and challenge ecological destruction wherever we hear it.
 
 DS

Reference
Krause, Bernie. 2015. Voices of the wild: Animal songs, human din, and the call to save natural soundscapes. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Post 99.

A graduate of a Baptist theological seminary as well as a music academy, Ēriks Ešenvalds’s music often draws on spirituality and the natural world. His choral pieces highlight spirit and ecology-oriented poets such as Rabindranath Tagore (Where is Heaven?), Khalil Gibran (Song of the Flower), Paulann Peterson (Translation), and Sara Teasdale (Stars). Analyzing these poems (below I am including all, or for longer ones, part of the poems), deeply, with choir students provides an opportunity to teach for ecological literacy.

Where is Heaven? By Rabindranath Tagore
Where is heaven? you ask me, my child,-the sages tell us it is
beyond the limits of birth and death, unswayed by the rhythm of day
and night; it is not of the earth.

But your poet knows that its eternal hunger is for time and
space, and it strives evermore to be born in the fruitful dust.
Heaven is fulfilled in your sweet body, my child, in your palpitating heart.

The sea is beating its drums in joy, the flowers are a-tiptoe
to kiss you. For heaven is born in you, in the arms of the mother-
dust.
 
Song of the Flower, by Khalil Gibran
I am a kind word uttered and repeated
By the voice of Nature;
I am a star fallen from the
Blue tent upon the green carpet.
I am the daughter of the elements
With whom Winter conceived;
To whom Spring gave birth; I was
Reared in the lap of Summer and I
Slept in the bed of Autumn.
 
Translation, by Paulann Peterson
Empty of words, not empty
of light, the moon’s face
awaits the touch of a pen.
 
Stars, by Sara Teasdale 
Alone in the night
On a dark hill
With pines around me
Spicy and still,
And a heaven full of stars
Over my head,
White and topaz
And misty red;
Myriads with beating
Hearts of fire
The aeons
Cannot vex or tire;
The dome of heaven
Like a great hill,
I know I
Am honored to be
Witness
Of so much majesty

DS
 
Link to image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9e/Milky_Way_IR_Spitzer.jpg/640px-Milky_Way_IR_Spitzer.jpg