Hearing and Seeing Climate Change, Through Music and AR
May 05, 2023
Performance at The Clarice and its virtual reality element bring listeners to Chesapeake Bay.
By Sala Levin ’10 | Maryland Today
On a precariously narrow two-lane roadway, bordered on both sides by water lapping nearly at the asphalt surface, a string ensemble performs, seemingly oblivious to its surroundings.
That’s because the four musicians of the Tesla Quartet aren’t really performing on this causeway, which leads to Hoopers Island—three watermen’s villages perched in the Chesapeake Bay off the coast of Dorchester County. They’re there thanks to augmented reality (AR) which blends the virtual world with the physical one, to tell a musical story about how climate change is ravaging this part of Maryland.
On Sunday, The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center will present “Rising Tides,” a new musical performance comprising a series of commissioned pieces reflecting how the state of Maryland, especially the water-centric Eastern Shore, is seeing communities, farmland and public infrastructure increasingly succumb to rising sea levels and other consequences of climate change. Concertgoers can watch and listen to the pieces in AR through the app ImmerSphere, which places the musicians in the spots that influenced the composers.
Richard Scerbo, artistic planning program director at The Clarice, said he has long been considering “how the music that we’re programming here at The Clarice can have an impact on our communities and speak to social issues of our time,” he said. “Climate change has been on my list.”
So he, along with the Tesla Quartet (who are being presented as part of The Clarice’s Visiting Artist Program), approached Maryland-based composers Alexandra Gardner and Adrian B. Sims ’22 to see if they might be interested in writing pieces that spoke to the impact of climate change on the Chesapeake Bay and the people who live on its shores. “The project sounded right up my alley,” said Gardner. “A lot of my work is inspired by the natural world and natural sciences, and of course I’m concerned about climate change.”
Read the full story in Maryland Today.