Senior Aislin Carpenter is a musician on a mission. Carpenter’s grant-winning project, Conserve Bloomington, aims to raise awareness for environmental action in Bloomington through music. In Carpenter’s eyes, this project has three main goals:
- …to inspire audiences to create actionable goals for local environmental improvement. The project aims to reframe the swaths of overwhelming scientific data depicted in the news, transforming broad issues into local issues that are solvable through collective action.
- …to expose public audiences to new music and encourage them to think critically about both natural and musical soundscapes.
- …to promote future interdisciplinary collaboration between scientific and musical fields. By demonstrating the educational and artistic benefits of this dual program, more composers and environmental scientists will combine forces to fight climate degradation.
These goals will be achieved through a massive effort working towards a guided, interactive summative public performance.
In order to execute this project, Carpenter is connecting with resources from all over IU and Bloomington including the IU Student Composition Association, Classical Connections, and Michael Chitwood, the Property Manager of the IU Teaching Preserve. On February 18, 2023 Carpenter, Chitwood, and the composers hiked the IU Teaching Preserve to collect field recordings of local natural sounds. These recordings will be used by the composers when putting their works together. Additionally, Carpenter aims to create an accompanying ecology curriculum that will be presented at the culminating concert.
The Conserve Bloomington Concert will take place on May 13, 2023 at the Bloomington Arts Alliance Flex Space. This concert will feature the worksof the composers and the integration of the field recordings. Carpenter also hopes to engage the audience in meaningful dialogue about music, local ecology, and the preservation of natural surroundings as a means to inspire action and dispel feelings of hopelessness surrounding conversations of climate change and preservation.
In an initial interview, Carpenter stated, “I hope that Conserve Bloomington will inspire community members to think more deeply about their natural and musical surroundings. While I am graduating this semester, I hope for it to become an annual or semi-annual undertaking that features different natural locations throughout Bloomington. The real beauty of this process, however, is that it is extraordinarily adaptable to different locations. I would love for Conserve Bloomington to expand into a chapter-based organization that partners with conservatories, musical collectives, and nature preserves throughout the world. “
Leave a Reply