Going Green

Happy Earth Day!

When this article was first written, the Juilliard Green Club was planning an Earth Day concert at school, but events unfolded much differently than anyone could have foreseen. Instead, the Green Club will be hosting a Zoom Earth Day event for the Juilliard student community. “Gathering ideas and materials from friends and mentors and seeing everyone’s determination to celebrate the earth and call attention to our environment despite this uniquely challenging time has been truly inspiring,” third-year violinist Sophia Steger, the club’s president, said. “At least for me personally, keeping things going with the Green Club has brought a strong sense of purpose and community during this time of self-isolation. We have received a great amount of support and encouragement from faculty, administrators, and alumni throughout the year—our first as a student organization—and it fills me with joy to know that sustainability is so important to the Juilliard community!"

By Ben Sellick

A riddle, from Benjamin Britten, Michelangelo, Beethoven, and Jacques Cousteau:

“It is cruel, you know, that I should be so beautiful. I have the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. I have cruel beauty, and the everlasting beauty of monotony.”

“A soul can find no staircase to heaven unless it be through my loveliness.”

“I am a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.”

“Once I cast my spell, I hold you in my net of wonder forever.”

Who am I?

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If you answered nature or music: yes! The specific attributions are in the footnote below,[1] but perhaps more interesting is the fact that both music and nature ring true as the subject of each of these quotes.

Maybe this isn’t such a surprise. This close affinity between music and nature been recognized for a long time. The ancient Greeks recognized that the fundamental math of music is the same as that of the natural world. Some 250 years ago, Beethoven and his contemporaries enjoyed the duality, writing Pastoral symphonies and music featuring programmatic natural phenomena, from storms to seasons. And this year at Juilliard the Green Club worked to rejuvenate the link in a time in which both classical music (and the arts generally) and the natural world are undergoing rapid change.

“We want to show people the ways in which music can humanize the conversation about the monumental changes that we’re experiencing,” says Ben Doane, a first-year cellist and the Green Club’s sustainability research coordinator. “The club’s goal is to make Juilliard a beacon in the artistic community and beyond, as a place which is sustainable, and which emphasizes music’s connection to the environment. Juilliard is already a world leader in music, dance, and drama, but it can also be a world leader in sustainability.”

Doane recognizes Juilliard’s unique position as a conservatory, an institution with roots linking the conservation of music and of nonmusical charges (initially, orphans) all the way back to Renaissance Italy. “An interesting link between music and the environment is the conservation element: both have the need for a combination of preservation and rejuvenating communities,” he says. “Both bring communities together, and both can’t survive without the support of communities. We have to take collective responsibility and look at the ways in which we are polluting or rehabilitating these environments. The preservation part is the same in music and in the environment: we’re acknowledging them as things of value that need to be passed from generation to generation.”

Earlier this year, I was one of a group of master’s students who attended a New York Philharmonic panel discussion with hen renowned conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen that was moderated by Ara Guzelimian, provost and dean. Salonen noted that we can have a certain confidence in the lasting power of music: “People equate the bad physical health of a few monolith, mammoth institutions with the health of the art form: they are not the same thing. The fact is that music is not going to go away, because it’s a biological thing. It’s hard-wired in our DNA. The forms are going to morph into something else: just as they’ve always done.”  

So too we can have a certain confidence that the natural world will continue to morph into new forms as it’s always done. Our challenge is to see to it that these new forms in music and in nature do not exclude an unbearable quantity of the things we love: our cherished institutions, our musical and ecological diversity, rare things of beauty like the blue whale or Mahler’s Second Symphony, and, ultimately, ourselves.

“Co-existence is what we should strive for,” Doane says, “considering our impact and our role as custodians. We discover nature in terms of both how we survive by it and how it elevates us. It both affects our survival and our quality of life, and we can take responsibility for that.”

Music and nature are not such fundamentally different things: In the natural world birds make songs, flowers make blossoms, and we make music. The environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy has said, “We often forget that we are nature. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.” We are not only nature defending itself, we are nature healing its connection with itself. At Juilliard, the Green Club aims to be nature making itself heard.

First-year composition master’s student Ben Sellick, who received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Manitoba and holds a Juilliard Scholarship, is a Green Club member

Sustainable Juilliard by the Numbers

Earlier this year we reported on a number of green initiatives that have been taken partly in response to faculty, staff, and student requests. Here’s an update.

Replacing the halogen lamps with LED equivalents in Room 543, the orchestra studio, will save 42,240 kilowatt/hours. That’s the equivalent of 30 metric tons of carbon emissions—the amount expended on driving more than 74,000 miles, or almost one-third of the way to the moon).

A student-led initiative with the support of the Green Club has led to 35 reusable containers being used in the cafeteria with an average of 73 uses per week 

Since starting to place water bottle filling stations throughout the school last year, we’ve saved the equivalent of 102,021 water bottles, or just under 12,000 per month. 

We’ve substituted recyclable materials for plastic in the dining hall and Starbucks cafe, specifically fiber plates (about 18,000/week), paper boats (about 10,000/week), soup cups (about 13,000/week), and straws (about 500 a week)

Last summer, we cooperated with Con Ed on four high-peak demand reduction events, which saved a total of 4,818 kWh of electricity, or the equivalent of 3.4 metric tons of carbon emissions. That’s the same as driving a car 8,330 miles or charging 434,441 smartphones from empty or the amount of carbon that four acres of forest would sequester in a year.

[1] “It is cruel...” —Britten, referring to music;
“A soul can find...” —Michelangelo, referring to nature;
“I am a higher...” —Beethoven, referring to music;
“Once I cast...” —Cousteau, referring to nature, and the sea in particular