Climate Changing: Playlist for a changing planet

This is what I’m thinking about as I try to pull together music that seems to resonate in some way  with Climate Changing. A few words about the playlist itself: first of all, it might feel a bit difficult. My hope is that if that’s the case, it is difficult in the same way that Climate Changing is, which is to say, in the way that is rich, engaging, and ultimately rewarding. Secondly, the playlist tries to feature a variety of moods, because difficulty isn’t valuable in and of itself; we also need to have fun and to be joyful. Third, the playlist both does and does not have anything directly to do with the exhibition. It does in some broad ways touch on certain themes present in the exhibition, and which I’ll leave listeners to think through on their own. 

But more often than not, these connections are oblique. Literal, lyrical references to certain topics are only one way of “relating” to a given topic, and the most limited way that music does so. Rather than relating directly, music can sometimes relate to disparate topics simply by virtue of our own listening, as if by the hinge of our attention. Music can set a mood in the background, can make us feel pumped up or contemplative, can attune our attention in a different way, can affect our bodies in certain infinitesimal or otherwise unmeasurable capacities. That doesn’t mean that music has nothing to do with art, but only that this relationship might exceed our ability to describe in words. I make no effort to do so here, and hope that resonances emerge through people’s individual experiences of listening. It’s less about relating directly and more about placing two things in proximity, to see how they vibrate each other.

In putting together a playlist to accompany this exhibition, I began in the same place where I began thinking about the show for the first time: namely, with Torkwase Dyson’s statements about improvisation. In a 2018 conversation with scholar Christina Sharpe, Dyson speaks about her work in relation to Sharpe’s, and in doing so often invokes improvisational language to describe what she’s after. 

For instance, in reference to the discussions of trans-Atlantic slavery in Sharpe’s In the Wake, Dyson says:

Improvisation can carry many meanings, purposes, and effects—consider here the way in which it is invoked as a method of sensing, of touching-feeling and otherwise coming into contact. 

Or again later, speaking about Sharpe’s notion of “the weather,” Dyson asks:

Contrary to its most colloquial meaning, improvisation can involve features often assumed to not belong to it, such as intentionality, repetition, deliberation, or what Dyson refers to above as “tuning” and “composition.” Dyson helps me to think improvisation outside of its stereotypes, insofar as she uses improvisation in her process of “Black compositional thought.” Such a process, which involves deep research, and the emergence of specific reference points (the square, the curved line) helps us think improvisation as a slow kind of movement, so slow that it becomes polemical to call it an improvisation. 

Improvisation as I read it here is not necessarily the space of “free play” but the encounter that occurs between Dyson (with her histories, with her embodied knowledges), the research she conducts, and her artistic materials, and the processes of self-reflection and editing that emerge through these encounters. This kind of improvisation might require revision, or slowing down, or critique, deep processes of reflection that are not made “in real time.” That does not mean that such processes are not improvisational; they still come about through a collision between artist, context, history, and medium. 

Improvisation is both a starting point and a kind of throughline in this playlist, though one that is not always obvious and is never consistent. For instance, improvisation is most obvious here as an aspect of the Great Black Musical tradition, that energy of the changing same that Amiri Baraka pointed to (1967), and which is audible in different forms from Wadada Leo Smith through J Dilla. Less obvious is improvisation considered as a relational force, as something that solicits entanglement and connection, which responds to contingent circumstances through contingent responses, and is therefore present in all music no matter what. 

The idea of improvisation as relationality returns us to the exhibition itself: Climate Changing, it seems to me, is more than anything concerned with the ongoing navigation of contingency, of our circumstances, where navigation is not a means to arrive at any end-point but simply the mode of how we live. Active or passive, toward or away from social justice, equity, and an inhabitable planet, we are all implicated in this shifting moment, invited to consider how we want to move from here, confronted with only possibilities, uncertain outcomes, and music.

Listen to the Climate Changing playlist on Spotify.