Richard Morrison How environmental can classical music be?

Musicians need to examine their own contribution to climate change

Slowly but surely the issue of climate change is intruding even into musical life. Sometimes that intrusion can be jolting, as happened this summer when eco-activists from Extinction Rebellion protested outside the Royal Opera House. Why? Because the ROH gets sponsorship from BP. In the protesters’ eyes, that’s tantamount to endorsing the fossil-fuel industry, which they consider a major contributor to global warming and pollution.

And sometimes there are gentler musical warnings, such as the recent decision by the RSPB to release a beautifully mixed recording of birdsong from 25 familiar species of birds that are now endangered – largely because of climate change and modern intensive farming. The statistics are shocking. Britain’s population of sparrows has declined by 95 per cent in 30 years, willow tits by 74 per cent, thrushes by 56 per cent, cuckoos by 33 per cent. These days, Vaughan Williams would be hard pushed to find a lark ascending, descending or going in any direction.

The ‘impending ecological disaster’ message was also apparent in Stuart Macrae’s recent opera Anthropocene. Melting ice-caps play a crucial part in its plot. And now I see that a choir called Nature’s Voice is being launched to ‘spread the message of environmentalism through music’. Not only will its concerts showcase links between music and nature (the first, on 3 Oct in Temple Church, London, seems to contain every song ever written about trees). They will also include instructional speeches by environmentalists. What joy!

Full marks for idealism, and for finding a marketing niche that distinguishes this bunch of singers from

other choirs in London. But if musicians want to take climate change seriously they need to start thinking more radically about their own activities.

For a start, major businesses are under pressure to shrink their carbon footprints by minimising the flights their employees make. Where does that leave orchestral tours? What environmental justification can there be for an ensemble to fly across an ocean, usually to play music that local orchestras perform perfectly well? When the band U2 played 44 venues round the world in a single year, flying 390 tons of equipment with them, environmentalists estimated that Bono (an outspoken eco-campaigner) and colleagues had created the same carbon footprint as if they had flown to Mars and back. By that reckoning, Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra must have done the carbon-footprint equivalent of twice round the solar system in the past 20 years.

At least when orchestras tour, the audiences are local. Not so for vast festivals such as Glastonbury, Salzburg or Edinburgh, where almost everybody – performers and punters – creates a sizeable carbon footprint to attend. This summer’s Edinburgh Fringe, for instance, attracted 35,000 performers, including 280 ensembles from America and 136 from Australia. Many in the audience, too, had flown thousands of miles. Back in the 20th century we would have celebrated Edinburgh’s global reach. But now the debate around climate change has shifted so far that such vast cultural gatherings are starting to look environmentally indefensible.

So what could musicians do to keep their carbon footprints acceptably trim and their consciences clear? How about just recording music and distributing it via streaming services so that punters can enjoy it at home? No significant carbon footprint involved in that, surely?

You must be joking! A startling study by researchers at Glasgow and Oslo universities, The Cost of Music, found that the carbon footprint of recorded music has soared, not fallen, since we all started downloading tracks and podcasts rather than buying LPS or

CDS. It’s counterintuitive, I know, but it turns out that generating the electricity required for billions of people to download and store trillions of digital music files produces at least 350 million kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions each year. For comparison, at the height of the LP era the manufacturing of all those vinyl records and cardboard covers produced only about 140 million kilograms, rising to 157 million in 2000, when CD sales were at their peak.

So it seems that nothing that musicians do is without an ecological cost, and quite a lot is damaging to the environment. What’s the way forward, then? I have no magic bullet. I just know that if we don’t start responding to such concerns now, the music industry may soon be under as much attack from ecocampaigners as the oil companies are.

Performers and punters at vast festivals create a sizeable carbon footprint to attend