Photo: Bryony Jackson

The Bach Project

If not now, then when? An intergenerational Conversation on Culture and Climate Action in collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach Project featuring a musical interlude by Yo-Yo Ma.

Yo-Yo Ma joined with Indigenous leaders, students, artists, scientists and creatives to discuss two important questions: What must we do in the next 11 years to act decisively to mitigate against the worst impacts of climate change; and how can culture move people from awareness to action?

Speakers:
Romy Nolan, Northcote High School, Student Activist
Dr David Karoly, Leader Earth Systems and Climate Change hub, CSIRO
Harriet O’Shea Carre, Schools Strike 4 Climate, Castlemaine Secondary College
Allara Briggs Pattison, SEED Indigenous Youth Climate Network
Gabrielle de Vietri, Artist
Daisy Batten Environment Captain, Melbourne Girls’ College, Richmond
Bronwyn Johnson, CLIMARTE Executive Director
Prof. Peter Doherty AO Nobel Laureate, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity and CLIMARTE Ambassador

Welcome to Country by Gheran Steel, Elder and CEO, Boon Wurrung Foundation

 

Produced by Bronwyn Johnson, Executive Director, CLIMARTE with Program Co-ordination by Catriona Black-Dinham on Saturday 9 November 2019 at the Kenneth Myer Auditorium, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne

In August 2018, Yo-Yo Ma began a two-year journey to perform Johann Sebastian Bach’s six suites for solo cello in 36 locations around the world. The project is motivated not only by his six- decade relationship with the music, but also by Bach’s ability to speak to our shared humanity at a time when our civic conversation is so often focused on division.

For Yo-Yo Ma, Bach’s 300-hundred-year-old music is one extraordinary example of how culture connects us and can help us to imagine and build a better future, but he believes there are many, many more. And for Yo-Yo, culture includes not just the arts, but everything that helps us to understand our environment, each other, and ourselves, from music and literature to science and food. The Bach Project explores and celebrates all the ways that culture makes us stronger as individuals, as communities, as a society, and as a planet.

 

Program PDF