In summer 2016, I volunteered for a month in the Fijian rainforest, working with a charity on a sports and youth development programme and living in a rural village, utterly immersed in the culture. Throughout the trip I heard snippets of a song called 'Isa Lei', a traditional Pacific farewell song, that, when I heard it sung by our hosts in the emotional farewell ceremony at the end, became an extremely important musical moment for me. Not because this experience went on to be the basis of a major project at university, but because the context and performance and music itself was so affecting that it will stay with me forever.
In 2023 I volunteered somewhat closer to home, for a week or so at Sidmouth Folk Festival in Devon. A similar experience occurred, where I encountered a piece of music and performance thereof that completely stopped me in my tracks. I'm sure that as a relative outsider in both contexts (being form a different culture entirely in Fiji, and while a big fan of folk music, not by any stretch an expert), my experience of the music was different to those from inside each group, who might even read the way that it affected me or the thoughts/feelings I had about it and not be able to imagine it due to our different perspectives, but as the only perspective I have is the based on my own experiences and associations and knowledge levels, that is from where I must speak.
I was volunteering in the post-late night event lounge/bar, in a marquee in a field at the top of a hill away from the festival venues in the town. This is where, after the evening gig at this venue, and the following late-night ceilidh, musicians and folk fans would spill out, collapse into a chair or perhaps round the fire with a pint of cask ale and inevitably, sessions would start up. If you're unfamiliar with a folk session, it is basically an informal gathering of musicians, playing tunes together, drawing on a vast knowledge of melodies that those embedded in the folk world will all know. An equivalent could be said to be a jam night at a jazz club, where people call tunes of which most people will know the changes, and whoever is there will join in with their instruments, taking solos etc. This particular night, the group of 20+ musicians were playing a tune I later discovered is called Barham Down.
The atmosphere as I've described was ostensibly joyous and the musicians eventually, when they got going, appeared to be in a trance-like state of almost euphoria- but there was something else going on.
While the music played, a major melody, fast moving and lively, outside the tent the wind was biblical. Reports of drought in Hawaii that have since become deadly wildfires were coming through and recent analysis of the Gulf Stream suggests imminent collapse. It put me in mind of the final scene of the 2019 film Midsommar, where a horrific cultish ritual is played out by flower-adorned participants, accompanied by glorious orchestral textures, or the film Greenland, where a group of young people drink and dance and party on a rooftop while the city around them gets pummelled by meteors. Rather than giving an impression of ignorance or futility, I instead saw it as completely obvious, like its almost the only thing to do at this point. The noise and movement of the wind battling against the energy and music of the musicians was an extremely powerful juxtaposition, the violins and accordions and guitars being played louder and faster to cut through, preluding the experience of a group of morris dancers who the next day were hit by waves and sand and rocks being thrown onto the esplanade by the sea breaching the wall. The tune went round and round, repeating and repeating, centuries of both music tradition but also collective experience and learning of the musicians was all on show here, my fellow 20-somethings having already crammed lifetimes of learning into what might be curtailed existences for us, here at what feels like the end of all things. The music was almost frenzied, tumbling away on the edge
of controllability, mixing with the heady atmosphere of slightly damp tent, sweat, trampled grass, stale beer and the wood of the instruments to somehow freeze time even as it appeared to stream through the musicians fingers. The same scene repeated on different scales throughout the festival but this particular tune on this particular night really struck me.
This post has been about climate change, obviously, something that *just about* at the time of writing might be, if not reversible, at least significantly mitigable with the technology and money currently available. What doesn't appear to be available at the moment, at least among those with the power to make meaningful change, is a willingness or ability to work together. This is in such stark contrast to what I saw in that marquee- dozens of people who had never met, different genders and colours and languages, spontaneously collaborating to create and achieve something beautiful and epic and incidentally extremely moving. It is so hard to know whether to take hope from what I saw, as an example of what can be achieved, or a sort of resigned solace in the fact that, while the world burns and melts and society rips itself to pieces, there will be music, even if it becomes but a memory, to see us through.
In The Shawshank Redemption, prisoner Andy Dufresne gets out of solitary confinement and his fellow inmates ask about the terrible time he must have experienced:
ANDY
I had Mr. Mozart to keep me company.
Hardly felt the time at all.
RED
Oh, they let you tote that record
player down there, huh? I could'a
swore they confiscated that stuff.
ANDY
(taps his heart, his head)
The music was here...and here.
That's the one thing they can't
confiscate, not ever. That's the
beauty of it. Haven't you ever felt
that way about music, Red?
RED
Played a mean harmonica as a younger
man. Lost my taste for it. Didn't
make much sense on the inside.
ANDY
Here's where it makes most sense.
We need it so we don't forget.
RED
Forget?
ANDY
That there are things in this world
not carved out of gray stone. That
there's a small place inside of us
they can never lock away, and that
place is called hope.