Composers and Players Are Reimagining Music in an Age of Climate Crisis

By Thomas May | From the May/June 2026 issue of Strings

While traveling across the Pacific en route to Australia, composer John Luther Adams found himself scanning the horizon—the shifting line where sea meets sky. The moment helped shape Horizon, his recent commission for the Australian Chamber Orchestra, written for 17 solo strings and conceived as a meditation on distance, perception, and humanity’s uncertain horizon in a rapidly changing natural world. Slowly expanding textures give the music a sense of breadth, while dark, hypnotic undercurrents in the lower strings hint at the unsettled horizon the piece contemplates. The ACO featured Horizon on its recent 50th anniversary tour, performing it at Carnegie Hall in April.

Such moments, for Adams, offer an invitation to listen more closely to the surroundings of human life. As artists and composers increasingly turn their artistic attention toward nature, alarmed by the existential ramifications of climate change, it seems prescient that Adams’ focus has always been there. For much of his career, Adams has explored how music can evoke the experience of vast landscapes—the slow breathing of oceans, the shimmer of Arctic light, the meeting point where earth and sky dissolve into distance. 

Now 73, Adams looks back on decades of music shaped by such landscapes. But the meaning of that work, he says, has shifted as the climate crisis has intensified, altering how he hears pieces written earlier in his career and how audiences respond to them today. “The composer has changed. The world has changed. The music now has different shades of meaning than it did in years past. What once seemed a celebration of what we call ‘nature’ may now feel more like an expression of longing or mourning. Giving voice to grief over what we have lost, and searching for redemption, for a new way forward, seems more urgent than ever.”

Across the classical world, as the climate crisis increasingly shapes how composers and performers think about their art, Adams is far from alone in confronting these realities. Composer Liza Lim explores the ethics of listening within what she describes as a broader “web of life,” while cellist Gautier Capuçon has commissioned a cycle of new works about the earth under the title Gaïa. Annea Lockwood has long treated rivers, winds, and other environments as musical collaborators in her compositions, and younger figures such as Gabriella Smith are bringing ecological awareness into a new generation’s sense of what a composer should do.

What unites these approaches is a growing sense that music can offer something uniquely valuable in an age of climate anxiety: a form of listening that reconnects audiences to the natural world and to one another. Beyond efforts to make the music industry itself more sustainable, that impulse is reshaping commissions, performance projects, and even the places where new music is experienced.

Listening Beyond the Human

Lim views the climate crisis as part of a broader transformation in how humans understand their place within the living planet. She often speaks of the present moment as a “polycrisis,” a term used by many thinkers to describe the simultaneous convergence of ecological, political, and social pressures across the globe. Rather than treating those pressures simply as a subject for artistic commentary, Lim sees them as reshaping how creative work itself is conceived.

Ecological loss has surfaced repeatedly in Lim’s music. One of her most widely performed works, Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus (2017), reflects on the cascading traces of disappearance in the Anthropocene—from plastic debris circulating through the world’s oceans to the final recorded mating call of the now-extinct Kaua’i ‘ō‘ō bird. Lim describes the piece as a collage of fragile historical and ecological remnants: “heterogeneous relics of the past” whose echoes rub against one another in cycles of decay and memory.

That perspective carries into her 2024 cello concerto A Sutured World, written for Nicolas Altstaedt and awarded the 2026 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. The title refers to the act of stitching together a wound—an image Lim extends to bodies, creatures, and landscapes that have been torn or damaged, suggesting the possibility of healing even as the scars remain visible. Lim’s engagement with climate concerns has also taken institutional form: In 2025, she became the first musician to receive an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship, leading a five-year research program exploring how music can address urgent climate and social challenges.

More broadly, Lim increasingly thinks of composing as participation in a network of relationships that extends beyond the individual artist. Composition, in this view, becomes less the projection of a solitary will than a process shaped by performers, traditions, histories, and environments interacting with one another. “Things don’t start with the self,” she says. “There are prior threads that are coming through you.” In that sense, artistic work unfolds within a wider field of collaborators—human and otherwise. “The relational nature of creating means that you’re binding with many others in a whole community and allowing them to speak through you.”

Performing the Planet

If composers such as Adams and Lim have been rethinking how music can connect us to the wider living world in an era of climate crisis, performers are also finding ways to bring that awareness directly into musical life. French cellist Capuçon has channeled that impulse into Gaïa, an ambitious commissioning project launched just before the pandemic set in. He invited 16 composers from around the world to write short reflections on humanity’s relationship with the earth, releasing the results last fall on an album of the same name (Erato), its title drawn from the ancient Greek goddess of the earth and mother of all living things. The project brings together composers as varied as Ludovico Einaudi, Missy Mazzoli, Joe Hisaishi, and Bryce Dessner.

Capuçon notes that nature has long inspired composers. “If you look at composers in the past—almost everybody was inspired by the earth,” he says. “For Gaïa, I asked each to speak in their own language, in their own way. Some speak about the beauty of what the earth gives us. Others speak about the anxiety of climate change. But they all respond to the same subject.” The result, adds Capuçon, is “a song of warning, a hymn to threatened beauty, a prayer for future generations.” Gaïa has also become a regular part of Capuçon’s concert life. “I play those pieces very regularly—at almost every concert the project is present”—whether as part of a recital program or an encore.

For Capuçon, “composers need musicians, just as musicians need composers. When a piece is written for you, you witness the birth of the music—the first ideas in the composer’s mind, then the notes on paper, then the premiere. And the goal is that the piece continues to live and be played by others.” He believes that the cello’s expressive character sits at the center of that conversation: “The instrument allows you to express all those emotions. It’s the voice of hope and life—of sunshine; sometimes it’s the voice of the wind, or of the storm, or of the fear we feel about climate change.”

The urgency of that message became especially vivid during a video performance Capuçon filmed on the slopes of Mont Blanc. “We hear many scientists talking about climate change and the frightening numbers,” he says. “But when you go to Mont Blanc and you witness the glaciers melting with your own eyes, it’s terrifying. That’s why I wanted to bring my cello outside of concert halls to play there—to speak about these changes through beauty and emotion.” Capuçon sees the project as a reminder that the climate crisis is a shared human challenge. “The message is also about humanity,” he says. “Climate change concerns all of us, and we cannot solve it alone. If we were more united as humans, we could move mountains together.”

Connection and Consequences

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma is another musician who has been exploring the idea of direct engagement with nature and how different cultures relate to their environment. His recent project Our Common Nature is a podcast and recording series that brings his instrument into natural settings across the United States—from national parks to coastal waters. The series follows Ma as he collaborates with local musicians and communities whose lives are closely tied to land and water. “I worry we’ve forgotten that we’re part of nature, how endlessly we are connected to one another and to the planet,” Ma says. “Culture keeps these connections alive and can reinvigorate our love for the earth.”

Across the field, other performers are increasingly using their platforms to commission new works, stage performances in natural settings, and bring climate awareness into the public life of music. The Bronx-based piano trio di.vi.sion commissioned five composers for Five for the Planet (Albany Records), a set of chamber works reflecting on climate change. Meanwhile, the Magic Tuber Stringband from Durham, North Carolina, recently explored the ecological legacy of a Cold War nuclear weapons plant in South Carolina with Heavy Water (Thrill Jockey), combining fiddle, banjo, guitar, and field recordings drawn from the surrounding landscape.

Another pioneer of environmental listening is the New Zealand–born composer Annea Lockwood, who for decades has created works that immerse audiences in the sonic life of rivers. A fellow maverick and close associate of composer Pauline Oliveros, Lockwood has developed a body of work that treats natural soundscapes as musical ecosystems in their own right. Her “sound maps” include works such as A Sound Map of the Housatonic River, which traces the waterway’s course through extended field recordings presented with minimal alteration.

Lockwood continues to explore these ideas in the recent project Elwha!, created with flutist Claire Chase as part of Chase’s long-running Density 2036 commissioning series. “When you listen closely, in a way that allows you to feel yourself in the river,” Lockwood has remarked about her Housatonic sound map, “you cease to perceive the river as an it that you’re listening to. You listen to something from which you are not separate.”

A New Generation Listens

While composers like Lockwood helped pioneer forms of environmental listening in contemporary music, a younger generation has been placing climate awareness at the center of its artistic identity. Among the most prominent of these voices is the currently Seattle-based composer Gabriella Smith, who approaches the climate crisis not only as a subject for composition but as a catalyst for artistic action.

Smith grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and traces her ecological awareness to early time spent in the field. As a teenager, she volunteered at a bird-banding research station at Point Reyes, California, working alongside field biologists and observing firsthand the delicate dynamics of coastal ecosystems and wildlife. Those formative experiences continue to shape her musical imagination, which often draws on lived contact with landscapes as much as on experimental approaches to sound. Trained as a violinist, Smith frequently explores ideas at the instrument while composing, recording layers of unusual string sounds to sketch out a rough sonic landscape before encoding those discoveries into notation.

Her cello concerto Lost Coast, written for longtime collaborator Gabriel Cabezas, draws on the experience of hiking along the remote, rugged Northern California coastline from which the piece takes its title. Rather than “translating” scientific or ecological data directly into music—including the evidence of wildfire devastation—Smith describes her process as transforming her emotional and sensory experiences of place into sound. Her 2023 quartet Keep Going, written for Kronos, extends that outlook by incorporating recordings of people working on climate solutions in fields ranging from ecosystem restoration to renewable energy and climate justice.

Smith is candid about the scale of the crisis in the Anthropocene era, but she resists the tendency for climate-themed art to dwell solely on loss. Much work about climate change, she argues, focuses on images of a dying world; her own perspective treats the crisis as an invitation to engage constructively with the challenges ahead. At the same time, she acknowledges the emotional complexity of the moment, balancing realism about what she calls our “potentially apocalyptic” predicament with a conviction that creative work can still foster joy and engagement.

Acknowledging “grief and a sense of loss” are important “for it to feel real,” Smith says, yet adds that grief alone cannot sustain action. “If you only focus on that, you’ll never be motivated to act.” The climate crisis is for her not only an artistic inspiration but also a broader cultural responsibility. Smith increasingly speaks about the role musicians can play in shaping broader public awareness of climate and ecological issues. “We need to change our culture,” she says, “and I think music is a part of that.”

Smith’s rising profile has brought a steady wave of commissions and performances, reflecting how strongly her climate-focused perspective resonates with performers and institutions. Last summer, the BBC Proms presented her organ concerto Breathing Forests, while Esa-Pekka Salonen premiered her orchestral work Rewilding as part of his penultimate program as San Francisco Symphony’s music director. Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, critic Lisa Hirsch hailed the result as “a paean to birds, insects, and the process of returning the earth to its natural state by undoing human damage and disruption.” Salonen will also conduct the world premiere of Smith’s new violin concerto, How to Be a Bird, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in January 2027. For Smith, projects like these are another way of translating close attention to the natural world into musical form—a way of listening that reflects how a new generation of composers understands its place within a changing planet.

Listening in the Open Air

For Adams, listening to the natural world can also mean bringing music directly into the environments where people live and gather. Such acclaimed outdoor works as Sila: The Breath of the World and Inuksuit place musicians and audiences within the surrounding space, encouraging listeners to experience sound not as something contained inside a concert hall but as part of the larger physical world. “My outdoor music invites us to turn our attention inside-out—to bring the quality of attention that we seek in a concert hall out into the big world,” he says.

That idea finds vivid expression in Crossing Open Ground, an outdoor work that has been appearing in a range of settings this season, from Elysian Park in Los Angeles to Tanglewood. The title pays homage to Adams’ late friend, the writer Barry Lopez, whose reflections on wilderness and community helped shape the composer’s thinking about the relationship between people and place. Musicians are dispersed across a landscape or public space, while listeners are free to move through the sonic field, discovering their own paths as the music unfolds around them. Drawing on the simple act of walking, the work evokes both ritual and freedom—echoing everything from religious pilgrimage to the marches of social movements. Out of that collective act of listening and movement, Adams suggests, a renewed sense of community and place can emerge.

That expansive idea of listening also shapes how Adams now thinks about the future of his work. “At this stage in life, I’m beginning to think about legacy—about what I will leave behind,” he remarks. “Perhaps my most lasting contribution to cultural renewal may be the outdoor works.” 

In the end, Adams returns to the idea that has guided much of his work: listening itself. In an age of climate uncertainty, the music emerging across the field suggests that listening—deeply, attentively, and collectively—may be one of the most necessary artistic acts of our time.