Creating a School Anthem for the Environment: Reflections on the Process

Creating an Anthem for the Environment: Reflections on the Process

Written by: Jonathan Raisin

As part of the Get up and Goals project our selected schools have been working with artists to develop creative action campaigns. One exciting project has been taking place at St Bede’s Catholic High School where there has been a collaboration between Jonathan Raisin, a local composer and writer, Ann Marie McMurray, the Head of the Music Department and pupils in Year 8 and Year 10. 

The aim of the collaboration has been to inspire the young people to get together to create lyrics and music for a piece of inspirational music that could be performed in the community. This was motivated by Laudato Si written by Pope Francis in 2015. This letter discusses the damage being inflicted on the Earth by humans and calls on ‘every person living on this planet’ to make urgent changes to our lifestyles and how we consume energy in order to protect the planet.

It deals with many environmental issues including pollution, climate change, water, loss of biodiversity and decline in the quality of human life. In his letter Pope Francis implores  all of us  to work together to create a better world for future generations and asks us to make the necessary changes in our lives in order to take care of, respect and value our ‘common home’.

 The pupils at St Bede’s High School worked hard to develop  this over the Spring of 2020 but unfortunately the impact of the school closures caused by Covid 19 has put a temporary halt to this piece of work. It is now hoped that some of the musicians at the school can start to practice this again and make a video of their performance.

Below is an article written by Jonathan Raisin about the creative action campaign. 

Background

Towards the end of 2019 I was approached by Liverpool World Centre to work with St. Bede’s school in Ormskirk near Liverpool to create a piece of music, an ‘anthem’ to be performed by the school choir, the work to be an expression of students’ thoughts and feelings about climate change and wider environmental issues, and also (coming from the school’s Catholic faith ethos), making reference to the 2015 papal encyclical Laudato Si’ – ‘on the care of our common home’.

Let us sing as we go. May our struggles and our concern for this planet never take away the joy of our hope. –From Laudato Si’. Pope Francis

Essential to the overall project was that it should give prominence to the voices of the young people involved and, following discussions with LWC and the school, a process was agreed involving an initial session with a geography study group to discuss themes, to be followed by more extended work with a GCSE music exam group devising text and music, this leading to my finishing the composition for rehearsal with the choir. 

Working in the school

The first engagement was an afternoon session with fifteen year 8 students who had recently worked on a climate change module.  We talked about the anthem project and how we might articulate issues within a piece of music and, from this, working in smaller groups, the focus of the session was on identifying common awareness and concerns , and encouraging thinking and discussion about hopes for the future.

Very quickly it became clear that these young people had a strong awareness of issues of climate change but I was also struck by how bleak the situation appeared to them. There were genuine, visceral fears; of ocean rise, of destruction of habitat, the extinction of animals, and, whilst they had good awareness of policies such as reducing emissions and replacing/recycling plastics, several of the students expressed a sense of powerlessness to effect significant change. To the question, ‘what can we do about the situation?’, one student replied with a despairing, ‘I don’t know, what can we do?’

Having the aim of producing a piece of artistic work as an outcome allows us to focus these sorts of feelings in a positive way. Young people understand clearly that a song can express loss and hurt, and that through articulating feelings one gains a degree of power and control. In this case, we were able to focus discussion and writing on articulating more precisely what, and why, we would miss about certain things (‘why do we care about deforestation? Why do we care about animals becoming extinct?), and how we might also express something positive about the future.

Working in smaller teams the students engaged beautifully with the process, expressing wonderful sense of concern for natural environment and, if not solutions, then a strong sense that there is a need for change.

At the end of the session I have 20 sheets of paper crammed with lists of hopes and fears…

Student responses from workshop:

I fear the loss of our planet’s beauty and nature, for it is what makes our planet different from any other bare piece of land.

The future I hope for has blue skies and clean air.

The future I hope for… I hope that we can fix this mess.

A few weeks later I began work with the music group, fourteen GCSE students who are now tasked with helping me make a piece of music from the ideas from the first session and to contribute their own thoughts and emotions into the construction of the anthem.

I shared the responses from the previous session and we discussed ways of approaching the project; how to write a lyric about a theme, finding an appropriate tone and musical style to express something serious. Inevitably much of the discussion was about purely musical matters; chords and melody,  fast or slow, major or minor- it often the case that musicians (even 14-year old musicians) are uncomfortable dealing directly with ideas and words – that is why they do music! But we did have interesting discussions about the idea of negative and positive. Everyone understood that it is possible to write a song that is mostly bleak, that is sad and about loss or fear, but there was a clearer sense from the group that, for this piece, there should be something positive as well. Again, the strong consensus within the group was that we did not need to talk about specific solutions (no-one wants to write a song about recycling!) but that it was important to express hope, and the sense that young people were demanding that something be done. Lyrics from the project:

We are the children of the earth

We have a song in our hearts

Things are not right with the world,

We think it’s time for a change.

Reflecting now on this work, I am struck by two things – 

In asking young people to engage with global issues that raise the possibility of catastrophic change to their own worlds, we need to be sensitive to the fact that these issues can be disturbing and lead to a damaging fear for the future. 

And I am reminded how music, and artistic work more generally, offers a positive space, somewhere that can deal with fear and loss, and offers ways of expressing hope.

Postscript

Between the last of the music workshops and what was to have been the first session with the choir, schools closed. 

By the time I finished the writing in May we were in Covid lockdown and I was working at home, not knowing if or when the work would be fully realised.  As I write, we are still waiting to see how it will be possible for the choir to work together again. 

And for several weeks the streets were empty of traffic, the sky was clear  blue and the air felt clean.  

How this might effect the final work, or maybe even the world, I cannot say.

Jonathan Raisin – short biography

Jonathan Raisin is a composer and writer based in Liverpool. He works regularly with educational, arts and cultural organisations to create projects that give a voice to individuals and communities. His own artistic practice has involved work in music, theatre, art installation and site-specific performance and has been commissioned by major national venues and for broadcast.