Breaking ranks: Composer tells orchestras to stop flying

Fabien Lévy, a French composer based in Berlin, has greatly enjoyed the carousel of world orchestras playing in the city.

But he has suddenly realised the cost to the planet. The flying has to stop.

Fabien writes in VAN magazine:

… I’m finding it less and less enjoyable to go and listen to Beethoven, Bruckner or Prokoviev interpreted by these internationally-touring orchestras when I realize that at least 80 people took a plane for a single concert; particularly when I know that I can listen to a similar interpretation of the same piece by a more local orchestra. I then measure the egoism of this pleasure–though I love to hear these pieces live!–against the future of my children, my students, and an entire generation that will face dramatic shifts and difficulties. I consider the tribulations of all those people around the world, from Bangladesh to Kenya to Florida, where people are already suffering acutely from climate change. Going to concerts by touring orchestras becomes a self-serving and irresponsible pleasure, like driving a SUV in the city, flying to Barcelona for the weekend (or rocketing into orbit on SpaceX), making money in non-sustainable industries, or buying non-fair-trade clothes and meat from carbon-intensive livestock farms: since I can pay, I can blindly enjoy.

Could there have been other possibilities to limit the extensive air travel of entire orchestras? Take the example of Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra. What if he had asked the original performer, the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, to play Adámek’s piece again in Germany and Switzerland, instead of the LSO? What if the European tours of the LSO could be grouped together, eliminating the need for separate trips from London and back?…

Read on here.