Climate change is an issue that is especially close to my heart. Following a very happy and productive partnership with the Prague Symphonic Ensemble since early 2015, a string of orchestral commissions built up to the opportunity to write a symphony on a massive scale about a topic of my choice. I’d been discussing environmental issues with friends, colleagues and experts for a number of years and learnt about the importance of ‘positive action’ campaigning, where emphasis on the positive aspects of an issue are thought to motivate and inspire more people to act.
The wonderful charity The Climate Coalition allowed me to use their incredible ‘for the love of’ campaign, in which members of the public are asked to fill in the final word of their choosing, about something they love that is going to be severely impacted by, or even entirely lost to, climate change. I decided I wanted to present this idea in the most comprehensive way I could imagine, so wrote a symphony in which a phrase and photo from someone from every single country in the world would be presented by a large choir and orchestra.
After a huge amount of correspondence, research and composition, the result is One Home: An Environmental Symphony, a half-hour-long piece in 100 languages with 200 accompanying photos. Following a fantastic world premiere in Switzerland last year, and further performances lined up, we’re currently working on a crowd-funding campaign to turn the piece into a 360-degree HD video on YouTube to spread and hopefully add to the impact of the message that it’s not too late to stop catastrophic climate change.
