yes!!

Composers who write opera:

When is the last time you performed from memory?

Yay! Thank you!

It's so frustrating, because I think many of us would like to attend to get all the info and be able to support our students to our very best abilities- but it isn't right to expect us to do so without compensation.

Thank you for sharing!

Love in a Time of Climate Change sets poetry by Craig Santos Perez. It will be premiered by soprano Lindsey Rae Johnson and pianist Dianne Davies at the OMTA State Conference in Florence, Oregon, on June 28.

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.

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?

It’s a kick in the pants to level up our efforts as individuals and, most importantly, as communities.

#climatechange

Inspired by their words, the piece holds space for mourning, for fear, for anger, for all of the emotions we experience in the face of this global catastrophe. It affirms that we are not alone in our grief, but neither are we off the hook for taking action.

Climate change, a phrase that has been with me as long as I can remember, is now something we experience on a daily basis.

Craig Santos Perez and Felicia Zamora ’s powerful, heartbreaking, gorgeous poetry speaks to this reality with unflinching clarity and directness.

As I wrote No One Saves the Earth from Us But Us, a record-breaking heatwave brought temperatures as high as 116 degrees to my city of Portland, Oregon. Just 9 months earlier, we fled our home as wildfires, less than 10 miles away, produced off the charts air pollution for weeks.