‘Mass for the Endangered’ channels grief
Keeping up with the news can be overwhelming. All too often, front pages report school shootings, wartime invasions, economic woes, misconduct by those in power or the steadily worsening condition of our planet. Sometimes, it’s all of those things at once.
People tuned in to the climate news cycle in particular have reported increasing levels of what psychologists now call “climate anxiety,” or the mental stress caused by worrying about the wide-ranging consequences of global warming. Concerns about Earth’s future habitability complicate major life decisions, such as whether young people feel it’s wise to start a family or save for a house, changing the fabric of our societies.
Climate change is stressful for those who stand to inherit the beleaguered Earth.
Sarah Kirkland Snider is a New Jersey-based composer who counts herself among climate anxiety sufferers. She has always felt most comfortable communicating with other people through music. So when she received a commission from Trinity Church Wall Street in New York City to “reimagine the Catholic Mass,” she teamed up with friend, fellow nature lover and poet Nathaniel Bellows, to write a score that channels humanity’s distress about the planet into a religious ritual of asking for forgiveness — not from God, but from nature.
“Music is a place where you can have cathartic experiences emotionally and deal with certain feelings that are under the surface or that you don’t know how to deal with otherwise,” Snider said.
Snider and Bellows’ six-part “Mass for the Endangered” will attempt to bring climate absolution to Arizonans on March 24 and 25, when it will be performed by the Phoenix Chorale at the Phoenix Art Museum. Tickets are $45 for adults, $23 for youth, $39 for seniors and military and can be purchased at https://phoenixchorale.org/concert/
dominion/. The experience will include chamber orchestra accompaniment and animated visual projections by artist Deborah Johnson, also known as @candystations.
Rebooting the profound
Snider originally released “Mass for the Endangered” in 2020, but the pandemic prevented the performance tour from taking place. She used the travel funding to commission the video animations. With the visuals, which Johnson describes as “drawing from architectural elements of cathedrals and growing in dimension and complexity with each video,” Snider hopes the experience may be transcendent.
She mentioned growing up, going on long drives with her family when the windshield would end up covered in bugs. Now, she said, that rarely happens. Though she’s not particularly fond of insects, she recognizes their absence as a major ecological problem.
“It’s just terrifying to think of these species dying out because of human activity on the planet,” Snider said. “Whether it’s over-exploitation or habitat intrusion or poaching or climate change, the fact that we’re culpable for all these other species dying out is just horrifying to me and really scary for so many reasons.”
Snider is not traveling to all nationwide performances of her work but will be at the events in Phoenix. For her, endangering nature’s biodiversity is both a personal and a professional affront. Since she was a child, she has gained inspiration for her musical compositions by taking long walks in nature. She sometimes feels she relates better to animals and the environment than to humans.
“It’s music and nature and walking and the three of those together were kind of my cathedral,” she said.
From loss to love
The Rev. Doug Bland of Arizona Interfaith Power and Light, an organization that offers a spiritual response to the climate crisis, will attend Friday’s performance and is looking forward to experiencing the cathartic release of grief for Earth’s struggling nonhuman life while surrounded by fellow humans.
“I’m always thinking about who will be drawn to an event like this,” he said. “Will they be kindred spirits who are concerned about the environment? Will this just be an aesthetic experience that titillates us and we find interesting for a while? Or will it be something that has the potential of being transformative? I think art has the capacity for doing that. But sometimes it just entertains. So how do we move from loss to love?”
Snider also hopes that those who attend the Phoenix performance will leave with more than a sense of cathartic release. She hopes they might be inspired to stay engaged and push for solutions despite the mental toll it sometimes takes. She thinks this could come in the form of caring about climate change and species loss while voting, donating to organizations that are trying to make a difference, supporting scientific research and making the effort to think about these issues as a whole, even when it’s hard.