Love in a Time of Climate Change (High Key)
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PDF Score of Love in a Time of Climate Change for high voice & piano
music by Lisa Neher
poetry by Craig Santos Perez
commissioned by Oregon Music Teachers Association for their 2025 Composer of the Year Award
Length: circa 20 minutes
Vocal Range: A3-A5
For additional keys, contact the composer: [email protected]
SKU:
Program Note
This song cycle drops listeners into the discordant experiences that regularly occur as we navigate our modern world, striving to maintain hope and take meaningful action while witnessing an unprecedented global emergency of our own making. Craig Santos Perez’s poetry conveys an outpouring of love for our natural world alongside unwavering honesty about the severity of this crisis and our culpability in it. A few years ago, I debated the purpose of writing music about the climate crisis. Surely anyone who performs such a piece or listens to it already believes that climate change is real, so what impact can such a piece of music have? A friend said, facts speak to our minds, but art speaks to our hearts. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the facts of climate change, to dissociate, and to freeze. When we feel something, it can propel action. Let’s keep feeling and acting together.
Love in a Time of Climate Change was commissioned by Oregon Music Teachers Association (OMTA) for their 2025 Composer of the Year Award. It was premiered by Lindsey Rae Johnson, Soprano, and Dianne Davies, Piano, in June 2025 at the OMTA Annual Conference.
Love in a Time of Climate Change was commissioned by Oregon Music Teachers Association (OMTA) for their 2025 Composer of the Year Award. It was premiered by Lindsey Rae Johnson, Soprano, and Dianne Davies, Piano, in June 2025 at the OMTA Annual Conference.
PoetryPoetry by Craig Santos Perez, used by permission of the poet
I. Blood Ivory
Honolulu Zoo, for World Elephants Day When we reach the elephant enclosure, I lift our daughter up so she can see them playing in shallow ponds. “Look,” I say. “They love the water, just like you.” Today, 96 elephants are being massacred across Africa’s scarred savannah. Armed poachers surround the herds, who stomp, trumpet, and encircle their calves. Bullets, those small human tusks, bite through thick, wrinkled skin. Do the men still feel awe or majesty, or do they only feel their own awful poverty as they sever the incisors, once used to split bark and forage? Warlords will sell this “white gold” to be carved into jewelry, relics, and art, then smuggled across the planet, our man-made elephant graveyard. This year, 35,000 will be slain. Our daughter waves goodbye to them as we walk towards the exit. Do we build zoos to save what we’ve sacrificed, to display what we dominate, or to cage our own wild urge to kill every breathing being? Our daughter plays with a stuffed elephant doll in the gift shop. “Look,” I say. “It has ears, eyes, and a mouth, just like you.” She touches its tusks, smiles, then touches her own teeth. II. One fish, Two fish, Plastics, Dead fish recycling Dr. Seuss Some fish are sold for sashimi, some are sold to canneries, and some are caught by hungry slaves to feed what wealthy tourists crave! Farmed fish, Fish sticks, Frankenfish, Collapse From the Pacific to the Atlantic, from the Indian to the Arctic, from here to there, dead zones are everywhere! Overfishing, Purse seine, Ghost fishing, Bycatch This one has a little radiation. This one has a little mercury. O me! O my! What schools of bloated fish float by! Here are fish that used to spawn, but now the water is too warm Some are predators and some are prey, Who will survive? I can’t say. Say! Look at its tumors! One, two, three... How many tumors do you see? Two fish, One fish, Filet-o-Fish, No fish III. Echolocation for “J35, Tahlequah” My wife plays with our daughter while I cook dinner. On the news, we watch you struggle to balance dead calf on your rostrum. Days pass. We drive our daughter to preschool and to the hospital for vaccinations. You carry your child’s decom- posing body a thousand nautical miles until every wave is an elegy, until our planet is an open casket. How do you say, “sorry,” in your dialect of sonar, calls, and whistles? What is mourning but our shared echolocation? Today, you let go so her body could fall and feed others. Somehow, you keep swimming. We walk to the beach so our daughter can build sandcastles. May she grow in the wake of your resilience. May we always remember: love is our wildest oceanic instinct. |
Poet Craig Santos Perez
IV. Good Fossil Fuels
recycling Maggie Smith Earth is ruined, though I deny this to my children. Earth is ruined, and I’ve ruined it in a thousand carbon-intensive ways, a thousand carbon-intensive ways I’ll share with my children. The planet is at least fifty percent polluted, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I deny this to my children. For every sea there is waste thrown into the sea. For every sacred place, a place fracked, logged, bombed into dust. Earth is ruined and the planet is at least half polluted, and for every green garden, there’s a toxin that would poison you, though I deny this to my children. I am trying to sell them doubt. Any decent capitalist, profiting from a climate disaster, squeals on about good fossil fuels: This growth could be sustainable, right? We could make this growth sustainable. V. Love in a Time of Climate Change recycling Pablo Neruda’s “Sonnet XVII” I don’t love you as if you were rare earth metals, conflict diamonds, or reserves of crude oil that cause war. I love you as one loves the most vulnerable species: urgently, between the habitat and its loss. I love you as one loves the last seed saved within a vault, gestating the heritage of our roots, and thanks to your body, the taste that ripens from its fruit still lives sweetly on my tongue. I love you without knowing how or when this world will end. I love you organically, without pesticides. I love you like this because we’ll only survive in the nitrogen rich compost of our embrace, so close that your emissions of carbon are mine, so close that your sea rises with my heat. |