Echoes of Climate
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, Campus West, University of York (Map)
Event details
We often feel anthropogenic environmental change with our senses: we feel the extra-ordinary dry and hot summers in the UK, we smell the haze coming from burnt biomass and feel the tickle in our throats, we can see that our seasons are out of sync - but what does environmental change sound like?
Across the world, changing environmental rhythms are slowly - and alarmingly - becoming part of everyday lives. For example, we come to expect that there’ll be a ‘fire’ season in the UK in the summer, we learn to prepare for ‘haze’ pollution in equatorial Southeast Asia.
This concert is the output of a YESI International Fellowship Project "Echoes of Climate", which explores how music and artistic practice can communicate and make felt the environmental, emotional, and cultural dimensions of environmental change in ways that words alone cannot. Bringing together Gamelan Sekar Petak, Rhythm in Bronze, researchers from the University of York and the London School of Economics, we combine contemporary gamelan performance, improvisational composition, and environmental humanities research.
Through an international exchange of researchers and musicians comprising two multi-day residency workshops, we reflect on our encounters with the changing world around us. Through experimentation of sounds and musical structure, we translate these experiences, emotions, and visions into the intricate melodies, experimental textures, and innovative rhythms that you hear in this concert.
About the performers
Dr Jillian Ooi
Dr Jillian Ooi is a marine geographer and Associate Professor at Universiti Malaya whose life's work revolves around seagrass - the overlooked underwater meadows that shelter fish, feed dugongs, and store carbon. She has spent two decades researching, mapping, and championing these ecosystems across Malaysia's coastlines and island archipelagos. But Jillian doesn't stop at science. As the Artistic Director of Rhythm in Bronze, KL's award-winning gamelan ensemble, she believes the arts (and especially the Malay gamelan!) can move people where data cannot and keeps finding new ways to bring the two together.
Dr Nuradilla Mohamad Fauzi
Dr. Nuradilla Mohamad Fauzi is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Biological Sciences (ISB), Faculty of Science and the director of the Glami Lemi Biotechnology Research Institute, Universiti Malaya. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology and a Ph.D. degree in Genetics, both from University of California, Davis, USA. She seeks to understand how organisms respond to stress and adapt to the environment by using techniques in molecular biology and biotechnology, towards the goal of conservation of ecosystems and agricultural sustainability. Her ongoing research are clustered in two areas: 1) genetics, stress and reproduction in small ruminant livestock, and 2) coral reef restoration and ecology of marine organisms. When she is not in the classroom teaching or holding a micropipette in the laboratory, she plays music with Rhythm in Bronze, a contemporary gamelan ensemble in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Partners
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