David Longstreth: Earth Music

Composer/performer David Longstreth, lead vocalist and guitarist with the band Dirty Projectors, has here gathered works inspired by the natural world to raise awareness of humankind’s escalating damage to life on Earth. The earliest composition, one of Vivaldi’s evergreen Four Seasons, predates the start of the Industrial Revolution by several decades, while the most recent, John Luther Adams’ The Wind in High Places, released in 2015, belongs to a world metaphorically (and often literally) on fire. In between sits Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, the inspiration for Longstreth’s Song of the Earth album. In contrast to Adams’ work, Mahler offers a more harmonious expression of humanity’s relationship with nature and respect for life’s transience. Longstreth’s playlist probes what he sees as the affinity between music, the most abstract of all art forms, and nature. “Music frees the mind in the same way a walk in the forest can,” he tells Apple Music Classical. “Long-form orchestral music seems an apt medium for addressing issues around the climate crisis—this is observation and intuition more than a hypothesis, but there seems to be an emerging body of such works.” The trend is mirrored in Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Aeriality. It’s present, too, in Olivier Messiaen’s Des Canyons aux étoiles (From the Canyons to the Stars). “Des Canyons is a great piece partly inspired by a camping trip in [the National Parks of] Utah that Messiaen took with his wife in the early 1970s,” says Longstreth. On a similarly large canvas is Koyaanisqatsi, the first in Philip Glass’ trilogy of soundtracks to Godfrey Reggio’s pioneering Quatsi documentaries. Koyaanisqatsi, he notes, “feels like the mathematical Anthropocene grid superimposed on the free contours of Earth.” Longstreth, however, first offers up the idylls of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony No. 6, a glimpse of an altogether more innocent age when climate and man co-existed on more equal terms…