Pianist as Protestor
By David Murray
Over the last few weeks, as of this writing, there have been a series of protests about climate change in art museums around the world. Activists, often wearing t-shirts that read “Just Stop Oil,” have been targeting famous artworks in museums throughout Europe, typically attacking them with food before gluing themselves to nearby walls. The underlying sentiment of these protests, as evidenced by statements made by the participants themselves, is that the average person cares more about paintings or museum exhibits than they do about the world and the people around them. Composer Brian Field, however, in a new work for solo piano, espouses the opposite point-of-view: that a meaningful work of art can itself be used to make people care more about their world.
This is, of course, not an unprecedented idea. The history of the arts is full of examples of creative souls taking inspiration from real-life events and tragedies: Voltaire was horrified by an earthquake that devastated Lisbon in 1785, killing between thirty- and fifty-thousand people, and wrote Poem on the Lisbon Disaster; Liszt composed Funérailles as a response to the tragic fates three friends suffered as a result of the Hungarian uprising against the Hapsburgs in 1848; and Beethoven’s well-documented admiration and repudiation of Napoleon resulted in several compositions, most famously the Eroica symphony. It comes, therefore, as no surprise that composers in the 21st century should be similarly affected by contemporary concerns, especially when those concerns impact everyone on a global scale. Brian Field, inspired by the climate change crisis (which he describes as greater than that of “world wars, political unrest or the coronavirus pandemic”), recently completed “Three Passions for Our Tortured Planet,” a thirteen-minute suite in three movements for solo piano.
New York based composer Brian Field has lived his life in music, starting piano studies at the age of 8 and completing his first composition at 16. He is a former student of, among others, Milton Babbitt at Juilliard and both George Edwards and Mario Davidovsky at Columbia University. His works have received several awards, including first prizes in the Briar Cliff Choral Music Competition, the Victor Herbert ASCAP Young Composers’ Contest, and the Vivaldi International Competition. He states that he was inspired to begin composing “Three Passions for Our Tortured Planet” in 2020 as “a collaborative effort with South Korean pianist and Sony artist Kay Kyung Eun Kim,” and that the work began to receive attention from performers “in early 2022 and has been generating significant traction among pianists from around the world who are programming it for recital performance, recording the full work or movements of it, and social sharing it as well.”