I was out recording the wind sounds and it was really snowy and icy and I
came back down into the building and I was just covered in like
ice on my beard and snow and, you know, everything was frozen up and
someone said, 'Matthew what are you doing?' and I said I'm composing. Well I'm a
composer and a sound artist and an eco-acoustician. So I work with
environmental sounds and I create music and sound art in dialogue with nature. So
I particularly focus on climate change, so, you know, I'm interested in composing
music that reflects changes in our climate and I try to bring attention to
that and work with the natural world as a musical instrument. So I'm very often
composing with glaciers and with the snow or the wind and any way that
I can discover how we hear climate change.
By thumping it I hear, like, the snow bank as a bass drum. You know some days I'm
out in the mountains, listening and recording sounds. There are days where I
sit at the computer programming. There are days when I sit at a music paper
writing music. No, it's never dull. I made an album called Glacier Music; It's
published, so it kind of fixes in time snapshots of these glaciers. As they melt,
they're singing, and those songs we can hear those songs and we can
understand them. As the glaciers are retreating they go through a rapid kind
of time of retreat and that has a certain sonic signature.
And then the glacier goes through a period of thinning and you can hear that
too because the water that's thinning comes out of the glacier on the
sides and usually makes these rushing rivers on the sides of the glaciers and
that sound to me is a signature sound of a glacier that's in
advanced retreat.
When I was studying music I was impressed by the sounds of the natural
world and in general the power and the presence of the Alaskan wilderness and
so I naturally made music with those things. As I got older, you know, the
environment started changing and I started hearing those changes in the
sounds that I loved. I want people to feel something. If the music is made by a
glacier for example, will we feel more connected to the glaciers and think
about them in a different way? Through composing these pieces we're kind of
documenting the world now and in the future maybe the glacier, like Matanuska,
will sound very different if it sounds at all, right? I mean there's a
chance that if the glacier recedes and disappears, well, then they'll be
listening to a glacier that no longer exists.
You know, it's one of the things that art can do is is open up our emotions in a
way so that we can deal with them; and it's a sad album in a way. I didn't mean
it to be a sad album. It's like a love song to the glaciers and I still hope
that we can change that. That the glaciers won't disappear.
It's stressful to think about, you know, a million species of animals
becoming extinct in the next few years. You know, to think about all the arctic animals
that are among those million. Like what can I do to help with that, you know? Like that's...
that's hard because it's like, is the music really gonna stop the extinctions?
No, it's not. So then how can it be part of the discourse that does mitigate that?
Maybe the music can be used in a kind of joint science, policy, art discourse that
does change that in some way. The science helps the art be more relevant
and the art helps the science be more communicative. Those two things going
together can be a very powerful force for change.