By Marisa Karchin
Invited annually, graduate schools of music present the Presser Graduate Music Award to an outstanding graduate music student whom they select. The program is designed to encourage and support in a special way the advanced education and career of truly exceptional graduate music students who have the potential to make a distinguished contribution to the field of music. The Award is a cash stipend of up to $10,000, which is made available to a graduate student designated by the institution.
Marisa Karchin received the Award in 2022-23 from The Juilliard School. Her project explored the intersections of environmentalism and new music in New York City.
Background
In my time at Juilliard, I have been eager to seek out interdisciplinary collaborations. In 2022, I co-founded a chamber music collective called the Glass Clouds Ensemble with two Juilliard colleagues (Raina Arnett, violinist, and Lauren Conroy, violinist/composer) to engage with environmental issues affecting our local communities through new music. In my academic work, I have similarly been drawn to intersections of music and environmentalism; I’ve enjoyed writing about directions within the growing literature of ecomusicology, as well as researching avenues for analysis of modern canon formation.
The Glass Clouds Ensemble partners with local community organizations to strengthen channels of communication between musicians, citizens, and local environmental initiatives. In 2023, we began a partnership with Earth Matter NY, a farm and compost center on Governors Island that processes food waste, grows and donates produce, and builds incredible community through educational tours, creative public workshops, and apprenticeships. Drawing on Earth Matter’s identity as a “second home” for many New Yorkers seeking an escape into nature, we commissioned four new pieces by local composers that explored the relationship between environment and their personal conceptions of home. We premiered these works in April 2023 at the Tenri Cultural Institute, in a concert titled “Winter was a Hurricane.”
With this concert as a stepping stone, the Presser Graduate Music Award allowed us to deepen and extend our collaboration with Earth Matter during the 2023-24 season through an additional three-part project.
Part One
The first component of my project involved the commissioning and performance of new works for the Glass Clouds Ensemble. The creation of these pieces took direct inspiration from the natural surroundings of Earth Matter’s beautiful site on Governors Island as well as the organization’s mission to advance composting in and around New York City. We commissioned two local composers, Matthew Schultheis and Seare Farhat, whom we selected based on their prior experience writing thoughtfully on environmental themes as well as their past experiences working in community gardens. In preparation for the commissions, the composers and musicians volunteered at Earth Matter’s spring “Work Days,” helping with farming, composting, and educational tasks, all while getting to know the organization’s dedicated community of staff and volunteers. Their pieces took inspiration from their conversations with the community and their hands-on experiences at Earth Matter’s site. We performed Schultheis’ A Fragile Light and Farhat’s Green Fields as the centerpiece of our concert on June 3rd, 2023. Also performed was an arrangement of Vaughan Williams’ Along the Field – meditations on love and loss through the lens of nature – as well as violin duets of Georg Philipp Telemann and Sergei Prokofiev.
The concert was held at Earth Matter’s Lab, a beautiful wood and cork shed located centrally on their farm and primarily used for educational workshops. The space has large windows that we kept open so the performance could be enjoyed by those working and exploring in the vicinity. Marisa DiDominicis, Earth Matter’s founder and director, spoke beautifully at the concert about the importance of local composting and the many ways to get involved.
We attracted a diverse audience, a mix of fellow musicians and summer visitors to Governors Island; most of our audience were introduced to Earth Matter for the first time through this event. In the face of unrelenting effects of climate change, this process created an artistic space for musicians and audiences to learn about and engage with local environmental solutions.
Part Two
The second component of the project involved the professional recording of four pieces we commissioned on environmental themes as part of the ensemble’s partnership with Earth Matter. Through the recordings, we aimed to preserve these unique works in a high-quality format and share our body of “Earth Matter music” with a wider audience. We recorded the pieces over three sessions at Oktaven Audio (Nov 2023 – Jan 2024): three are currently available on our website (A Fragile Light by Matthew Schultheis, abash the little Bird by Raina Arnett, and Water by Filippo Lepre), and we’re looking forward to releasing the full set of commissions as an album in the future. The opportunity to professionally record our commissions has also been incredibly helpful for our emerging ensemble: not only will these high-quality materials help us to promote our work and seek future opportunities, but we have also gained important skills and grown significantly as musicians throughout the recording process. We’ve also shared our recordings with Earth Matter’s social media team, who have continued to share them with their own community and post them online to attract new visitors.
Part Three
I completed the third component of the project, a lecture performance, on March 20th, 2024, at The Juilliard School, which explored our collaboration with Earth Matter in an academic forum.
My goals for the lecture performance were to contextualize our project within the burgeoning field of ecomusicology, to present a diverse yet cohesive set of environment-focused commissions, and to offer theoretical and contextual analysis that examined the philosophy of nature underlying each composer’s work. I analyzed and performed A Fragile Light and Green Fields, in addition to two other commissions, each serving as case studies to explore multiple threads of ecomusicological discourse and illuminate the role that music can play in understanding and facilitating connections between humans and the environment. In preparation for the lecture, I spoke in depth with each composer about their compositional process and their unique means of engaging with Earth Matter’s sense of place through their music. Several featured composers were able to attend the event and converse further with the audience after the performance.
Impact
Support from The Presser Foundation has provided an opportunity to successfully carry out the Glass Clouds Ensemble’s mission: to create artistic spaces for audiences to learn about and engage with local environmental efforts, and to explore new models for how musicians can interact with community organizations. Our 2023 project with Earth Matter has served as an essential steppingstone for our work: after the success of this project, we were grateful to have received additional funding from Chamber Music America and The Juilliard School to continue and expand our collaboration with Earth Matter for another season, involving a series of on-site open rehearsals, site-specific improvisation, and performances.
As cultural creators and analysts, musician-scholars can play an important role in exploring how music as a communicative tool directly contributes to environmentalism. This Award helped my ensemble engage more deeply in local climate conversations, and explored how art can be an important catalyst for community empowerment and grassroots change.
New York-based soprano Marisa Karchin is a compelling performer of art song, opera, and contemporary music. Marisa is pursuing a doctorate in voice at The Juilliard School, where she is the recipient of the 2022-23 Presser Award for her project bridging chamber music and environmental initiatives on Governors Island.
At Juilliard, Marisa has performed diverse chamber music including Unsuk Chin’s Akrostichon-Wortspiel at Alice Tully Hall, Pierrot Lunaire, and John Musto’s The Book of Uncommon Prayer with the composer. As an avid proponent of new music and interdisciplinary collaborations, Marisa has also recently performed with the Da Capo Chamber Players, Brooklyn New Music Collective, and in an immersive theater piece with dance company Jody Oberfelder Projects at Green-Wood Cemetery. A founder of the Glass Clouds Ensemble, a chamber collective that partners with local environmental organizations, she has held artist residencies at Yellow Barn and Avaloch Farm Music Institute and is a current Chamber Music America Ensemble Forward and Artistic Projects grant recipient. Marisa also performs with guitarist Alberta Khoury in a series of community engagement concerts at hospitals and community centers. Marisa holds degrees from Yale University (BA) and Mannes School of Music (MM).
