How do you feel about climate change? f you're like most of us, you probably feel overwhelmed. It's a huge, complex problem. It feels too big to really understand and too far away to truly worry about in our everyday lives. We look at the graphs and read the headlines. We see numbers rising and warnings repeated. But numbers don’t always help us sit with the reality we actually experience.
This is where music comes in.
Music has always helped people notice the world. We use songs to name a season, describe a terrible storm, or express the ache of loss. Composers have long used sound to turn the environment into a feeling or an argument. This was true in the Baroque era, and it’s true now, with modern composers even turning climate data into sound we can hear.
This storytelling power is crucial. Music doesn't just make you think; it makes you feel. That is exactly why it matters for climate conversations. Music takes a massive, slow-moving problem and makes it feel immediate and real.
On October 22nd, the Emory Climate Hub hosted the Vega Quartet for a unique event that paired live music with climate discussion. The artists explored the wide range of connections between environmental issues and art. Topics included how musical narratives represent weather and place, the effect of climate change on instrument-making, and how composers are translating environmental data into new sonic forms. The session aimed to help listeners hear music with context, allowing a melody to echo a glacier or a shrinking forest.
When the event began, I was already leaning forward, wondering how music could possibly carry the weight of something as heavy as climate change. How could a violin or a cello hold our storms, our disappearing forests, our fears? But the moment the quartet played the first note, something inside me opened.
Vivaldi — The Four Seasons
The first piece was Vivaldi’s Spring from The Four Seasons, written in 1725. It was composed to mirror the rhythms of nature — birds returning, flowers opening, storms rushing in and fading out. Each section paints a scene from the natural world, almost like a musical calendar of how the seasons once moved in steady, predictable cycles.
As they played the first note, I slipped back into my childhood. I saw myself running barefoot through fields, chasing butterflies, breathing in the smell of wet earth after the first rain. I loved playing in the rain as a child, but the rain feels different now. Today it brings worry instead of wonder.
When the storm section arrived, the strings turned dark and fast, and it no longer felt playful. It reminded me of floods, fear, and the way seasons are becoming unstable. In that moment, the music made the loss feel personal and immediate. The steady seasons that shaped my childhood are slipping away.
Haydn’s ‘The Seven Last Words'
The next piece was Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ, originally composed in 1786 to reflect on the final sayings of Christ and capture the calm and chaos surrounding the crucifixion. The slow, music held me in stillness until the “Earthquake” movement arrived. It was a sudden, jarring burst of sound that shook the hall and my heart.
In that moment, I thought of storms flattening cities, floods swallowing homes, and landscapes reshaped by fire and wind. The music made the disaster feel immediate and also highlighted resilience. The quiet returns, the soft strings, and the human capacity to endure were all there. It was a visceral reminder of nature’s power and our urgent responsibility to confront and respond to climate change.
Dvořák — American Quartet
The next piece was Dvořák’s American Quartet, composed in 1893 during his time in the United States. The music is full of dance rhythms, folk influences, and a nostalgic sense of place, capturing the landscapes and culture Dvořák experienced in America.
As I listened, I thought of people displaced by climate change, forced to leave their homes and the cultures they grew up in. The music carried both joy for new beginnings and ache for what is lost. The violins seemed to say, “Even in movement, life continues,” a reminder of the resilience needed to face a changing world.
Osvaldo Golijov — Tenebrae
The next piece was Osvaldo Golijov’s Tenebrae, composed in 2002. The music is full of contrasting emotions, calm and tension, beauty and fear. Golijov wrote it after seeing both suffering of war and beauty of a planetarium. Listening to it, I could feel the quiet moments and the sudden bursts of emotion, as if the music was showing two very different realities at the same time.
The piece made me think about war—not just as human conflict, but as something that reshapes land, air, and water. Wars destroy infrastructure, burn fuel at massive scales, poison soil and rivers, and leave cities unlivable long after the fighting stops. In places already facing climate stress, conflict accelerates environmental collapse, making recovery nearly impossible. Tenebrae felt urgent and unsettled, as if it were holding up a mirror to a world where violence and climate breakdown feed into each other, pushing us closer to irreversible damage.
The quartet shared something fascinating about how the changing climate is quietly reshaping the very wood their instruments are made from, and why this matters. Violins and guitars rely on special woods like spruce, maple and ebony. These trees need to grow slowly in cold, steady climates to develop the tight and even grain that gives instruments their clear, beautiful sound. But rising temperatures, droughts, sudden storms and pest outbreaks are damaging the mountain forests that have provided this wood for centuries. Even in famous places like the Alpine valleys used by Stradivari or the Jura mountains today, more and more trees are drying, weakening or dying. Only a tiny fraction of spruce trees are ever good enough for instruments, so losing even a few has a big impact. At the same time, heat and humidity swings are also hurting the instruments themselves by causing cracks, loose seams and changes in tone. All of this shows how climate change is affecting even the smallest and most delicate parts of our world. It is a reminder that climate change touches everything, and that we all have a role to play in protecting what we love.