Award-winning American composer Brian Field studied at Juilliard with Milton Babbitt and has gone on to enjoy an eclectic career. His lyrical three-movement environmental suite Three Passions for Our Tortured Planet has been recorded by pianist Kay Kyung Eun Kim and was released on the Steinway & Sons label earlier this year.
MEET THE COMPOSER
When I was 16, apart from playing the piano I also sang in the church choir. One of the choral instructors was a real polymath, a graduate student studying music, performance, composition and philosophy. I indicated that I was interested in learning to write music and he immediatelty wanted to help. So that was my first formal training in composition. His energy and passion were so infectious; that was really the push into my becoming a composer.
I found the ability to imagine something from nothing awesome – then to try to get it down on paper and have other people interpret it and make it real over and over again. The shades of difference in each performance, each one reimagining what the composer might have been thinking, have always fascinated me.
The Three Passions for Our Tortured Planet project has been going on for a couple of years. I had the topic of climate change awareness bouncing around my head for a while. It’s very close to home for me because most of my family lives in California and there have been, and continue to be, all sorts of forest fires raging around the state. So ‘Fire’ was the first of the three movements that I wrote.
In all three movements the message isn’t hopeless. They could all end in disaster – the fire could burn everything down; all the glacial ice could melt; hurricanes could destroy everything. But I made a point of concluding each movement in a vein of hopefulness.
Climate change as a theme isn’t unique, but the point of this work was to help support the policy programmes of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The performance and recording royalties are being donated in full to the union, and the score is free to anyone who wants to participate. There are dozens of participating artists and I think we’ve performed it on every continent except Antarctica, but we’ll see how that plays out!
Sometimes I start a piece at the piano, but sometimes it’s about imagination. The ‘Glaciers’ movement is a great example, because I could envision the shearing of the glacial ice and how I might represent that musically.
I’ve grav
