Music for climate change: USask composer incorporates social science into musical scores

Dr. Roydon Tse (DMA), an assistant professor of music theory and composition in the University of Saskatchewan (USask) School for the Arts, has worked to incorporate themes of climate change and environmental justice into his music over the years.  

As a composer, Tse says music can help give understanding and context to the world.  

“Music is an analogy, a metaphor for how we view the world,” said Tse. “We can’t see global climate change when we look out the window. So with music we can say OK, here’s what is happening, here is a narrative that can make that more real for listeners.” 

Tse discussed how he builds his research into developing a new composition that explores real-world concepts like climate change.  

Q: When you compose a piece of music, does it start with a concept or theme or a tune? 

A: That’s a great question. I think early on in my career it started off as music – taking pieces of music I liked, understanding how it worked, and then figuring out how to take those concepts into my own music.  

Nowadays it’s more of a conceptual start to my process. I want to know exactly what I’m doing before I put any notes down. How does that sound get anchored to a particular narrative that makes sense to the listener, that will maybe have social impact. Nowadays, more than before, it has been a conceptual starting point. 

Q: So what is included in that conceptual starting point, musically? 

A: Theme, instrumentation, form – those are like three big ones. If I don’t know what those are, I need to figure out the answer.  

But as you know, with a piece of music, the notes make up the piece, but then there’s all sorts of ways to qualify those notes. Are they loud? Are they soft? Is it going to be fast or slow? All those qualifications make a piece what it is and give it a sort of identity.  

Q: In preparation to compose, what does the “research” side of your musical journey look like? 

A: I tell my students that you have understand the rules before you break the rules and make new rules. And I do think that going back to the past, there’s so much to learn. The context of how music or how art has developed matters so much. So I go back, I listen to music, I study scores, I try to understand where I stand now because I do stand on the shoulders of many giants.  

But then ultimately I have to go back and ask myself what do I want to do, what do I have to say and what is valuable to put into the world at this moment and with this particular project, and that’s where the creation comes in. 

Q: Can you give me an example of work you’ve done that draws themes from the current social climate and how you incorporate that into your music? 

A: I started thinking about the climate issue very seriously 10 years ago as part of my doctoral research, and as a result over the years I’ve slowly added some music into my repertoire that makes a commentary on the climate crisis. So I wrote a cool piece back in 2017 called “The Stream,” which is about pollution. It’s for choir and incorporates garbage-related words as a source of inspiration.  

A few years later I wrote a piece called “Decoupling,” and that was a bit of a bigger work – I had time during the pandemic and there was a project that came up that fit that theme of climate change, raising profiles of justice. And the idea of decoupling was about how as economies, we need to decouple from the idea of constant growth and sort of reduce consumerism if we want to see a change in climate impact.  

And the largest work I’ve written called “Restless World Anew” is a string quartet concerto. It was a massive work, which was very exciting. It took a long time to write and that incorporated ideas like climate change. 

Q: How do you connect ideas like climate change into a musical work? 

A: Vocal works are much more direct. We hear the lyrics, we hear the text and we can make that connection. With a non-vocal work or purely instrumental work or even electronic work, it’s about setting the context and what the narrative is. How does the composer set the context up so the listener understands that this is the journey they’re going to go on? 

Music is an analogy, a metaphor for how we view the world. The idea that there’s dissonance and there’s consonance, things that rub up against each other and things that align. We can sit down for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and go present a narrative that makes something like climate change more real for listeners.  

Q: How do you think about your compositions in the context of USask’s research, scholarly and artistic work? 

A: I feel like as a composer I have an easier job of answering this simply because I’m responsible, primarily, for creating new work. So that’s really my research and you know, my colleagues in the sciences and in economics and things like that, they’re also putting out new knowledge and new modes of understanding the world. As an artist and as a creator, I’m putting out new ways of seeing and feeling in the world. We’re adding to the idea of how we as humans live in the world.  

I definitely see climate change and other social topics being a key part of the arts. The arts and social agendas are very intertwined because we talk about what it’s like to be a human being living with all the people on the planet.