Reflections on Rockefeller’s Ghosts
written by Erika Oba
This Composing Earth blog is supported by New Music USA and featured on NewMusicBox.
An essential component of the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music's Climate Commitment, Composing Earth is a commissioning program for composers who recognize that climate change — climate disruption — is a bona fide civilizational emergency.
Composing Earth asks for a two-year commitment from Composer Alumni of GLFCAM. In the first year, composers receive a study stipend to participate in a monthly discussion group with peers, Gabriela, and renowned scholar/communicator of climate science (and music lover) Dr. Rob Davies. These meetings provide an opportunity to review articles, books, documentaries, and online resources regarding the climate crisis, allowing the composer time to find their own personal stories which inspire their commissioned work in the second year. Along the way, "weekly musings" are sent out every Wednesday by a member of the cohort to the full group. Some of these musings, whether in the form of personal letters and other times developed into soulful essays, are featured in the series below.
Back when I was an environmental studies student at Oberlin College in Ohio, many of my colleagues and mentors were involved in activism protesting mountaintop removal coal mining. It is a hugely destructive practice with wide ranging ecological and public health impacts, and the Appalachian mountains have been particularly harmed by it.
I took a week-long trip to the Appalachian mountains with a group of student activists, and that trip was a formative experience that forever changed my perception of our energy systems and their human costs. One of our stops was at a large-scale organized protest event at a mountain site that had been blasted. As I stood on top of the barren remains of a mountaintop, I fell into conversation with an activist photographer who had made it his primary work to document the effects of mountaintop removal coal mining. He asked me a bit about who I was and what I did, and I explained to him that I was a college student studying both jazz piano and environmental studies and felt myself being pulled in two opposing directions. He asked me why I couldn't pursue both, bringing up that many, many jazz musicians were artist-activists. He explained that he hadn't always photographed mountaintop removal coal mining, but that he felt compelled to use his skills as an artist in service of this cause, and I have never forgotten that.
Since then, I feel like I've tried to navigate my way as an artist with that in mind, admittedly with varying degrees of success. The year of study and discussion that I spent with my Composing Earth cohort was invaluable in reigniting my commitment to exploring what it means to be an artist-citizen. Specifically regarding the climate crisis, one of the reassuring things that I got from all of our readings was the knowledge that we actually already have a lot (if not quite all) of the technological and design solutions to many of our current problems. The biggest hurdle continues to be cultural and political will, which is why our Composing Earth mentor, Dr. Rob Davies, has made it his mission to engage artists so that we may collectively shift the needle on cultural narratives and attitudes.
As I worked on my Composing Earth piece, I found myself reflecting on how climate change most saliently impacts my day to day life and I kept coming back to our carbon intensive transit systems. As I worked on my piece, I pondered themes of carbon dependence, urban design, and transit futures.
I have never liked driving, and really dislike living in a car dependent culture. I put off buying a car until I was 26, because I had hoped that I could get by without one. My sincerest wish now is that my current car will be my last car, and that by the time it ceases to run we will be in a car-free society or that we will at least have enough alternative options to not need private cars. I know this is highly unlikely, but one can hope.
I read "Crude: The Story of Oil" by Sonia Shah back in my undergraduate days, and remembered it having a big impact on how I thought about energy and society, so I reread it as I worked on my Composing Earth piece. The book was published in 2006 so some of it's a bit out of date now, but Shah writes about the history of oil in a compelling and accessible manner.
Reading it was an important reminder that history is not an inevitable linear trajectory of “progress” but rather a series of decisions, concessions, and happenstance that have created the structures and systems in which we live. One striking historical fact was that most urban centers in the U.S. used to have robust light rail systems that were decimated mid-century to be replaced by infrastructure that favored individual car use.
A society in which the built environment prioritizes individual car ownership is a society built around individual need rather than collective need, and doesn’t serve the needs of the young, elderly, and those who are mobility and vision impaired. The climate impact of a car intensive environment is substantial, not to mention the acute pollution from cars and refineries. Nothing about this current urban reality is inevitable. Historically we have had other models and systems, and many places in the world have robust public transit and urban design that prioritizes walkability and bikeability.
Sonia Shah writes that “Rockefeller’s Ghost” has risen and continues to haunt us through modern day Big Oil. I titled my Composing Earth piece “Rockefeller’s Ghost” (written for solo bassoon and electronics) and as I worked on it, I thought a lot about what it means to meaningfully use my composing to address something as momentous as the climate crisis.
In our Composing Earth meetings we discussed how some of the ways in which this will manifest will be extra-musical; the titles and themes of our pieces, program notes, preconcert talks, and interviews will inevitably be really important ways in which we communicate. It is equally important, though, to make the music itself stand strong or the rest of it won’t amount to much. In one memorable discussion, Gabriela brought up how trite it would be to create a “programmatic” work that was emulating the sounds of fire and say “this piece is about wildfires”!
As I worked on my piece, I found that it was less about making a statement or a narrative about car culture, but more about exploring how petro-culture and the climate crisis make me feel – deep anxiety, despair, and hope for a better path forward. The use of electronics allowed for an exercise in deep listening to be a part of my process. I made field recordings of the incredibly loud, visceral sounds of traffic at three very busy intersections and layered them, stacked them, and highlighted the sounds against a solo bassoon voice. The process of composing became itself a meditation for me, and my wish is for the piece to become a space for reflection and presence for future audiences.
It is my belief that any action starts with being present. My hope is that we may all fully inhabit our environments with open ears, that we refuse to passively accept our current systems as inevitable, and that by being present and aware we may find the agency and courage to change things.
Erika Oba is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and educator based in the SF Bay Area. As a composer she has written works for jazz ensembles, chamber groups, dance and theater. She is active as a performer on both piano and flute, and performs with her own groups the Oba-Bastian-Steinkoler trio, Ends Meat’ Catastrophe Jazz Ensemble, Rice Kings, and The Sl(e)ight Ensemble. She has also performed with the Hitomi Oba Ensemble, Peter Apfelbaum's Sparkler, Jason Levis and Lisa Mezzacappa’s Duo B Experimental Band, and many other jazz and experimental bands in the Bay Area. In addition to her own private teaching studio, she is a private jazz piano instructor for UC Berkeley’s Music Department. As an artist, she is interested in exploring ritual, diasporic identities, and community through performance.