Editor’s note: The Fire and Music Project is an immersive, yearlong experience for artists to learn more about and take part in California’s past, present, and future fire story. The project was funded in part by the California Arts Council through the Upstate California Creative Corps as well as the Regional Forest and Fire Capacity (RFFC) Program. Early funding for the Fire and Music project was provided through the California Klamath-Siskiyou Fire Learning Network and the Watershed Center. In this blog, Ellen McGehee, Fire Operations Specialist with the Watershed Center, shares reflections after completing the yearlong immersion with a concert series and videos that give a window into artists’ work.

In the fall of 2023, we sent a group of artists as “The Fire and Music Project” on a one-year journey to shift our relationship with fire.  Over the next six months during five intensive “artist learning immersions,” we traveled throughout Northern California listening to fire’s story, from the legacy of Indigenous stewardship, their loss of fire, and the rise of fire suppression, to fire ecology, modern cultural burning, the grassroots community-led burning movement, and the social fabric of the present moment. Through awareness, participation, and the practice of reciprocity, we began transforming into fire practitioners ourselves.

 To learn more about the project and its background, check out our Fire Networks blog from March of 2024.

Throughout our journey, the more we learned, the more it became clear how much there was to learn. Self-tasked with creating a tour of interactive performances, we realized there was nothing we wanted to try and “teach” any Northern California community about fire, and that our job would be to listen, synthesize, and reflect. We wanted to create a performance space that was inviting, safe, and responsive to everyone in the room’s lived experiences. We wanted the art to be the right kind of cultural disturbance – like beneficial fire on the landscape, opening space and opportunity for renewal and regrowth.  

As we began to weave our learning experiences into an artistic process, we faced many challenges. We were five chamber musicians, a composer, a videographer, and a poet trying to invent a common language about a complex world that was new to most of us. Too many cooks in an artistic kitchen can make an art soup with so many seasonings it becomes overwhelmed with disparate ideas. None of us had a blueprint for how to combine our various media into a performance, or how to efficiently run such a “rehearsal.” Little by little, stretching our capacity for awareness, we learned to not be so overwhelmed by the infinite complexity of the ecosystem around us and our own ripples of effect within it. Little by little, we learned to navigate our cultural WUI – a many-faceted and delicate interface between urban artist, fire practitioner, small-town concert-goer, cultural burner, fire-impacted community member, mentor, student, land steward, first responder, policy worker, would-be ally, and participant. Little by little, we found the gifts embedded in our “outsider within” perspective. 

Qwalen Berntsen was our awareness mentor, creating workbooks that guided us in skills such as bird language, tracking, sensory perception, and memory cultivation. Inspired by these workbooks, composer Julie Zhu created workbook entries for each artist asking them to find a voice for different aspects of fire on their instruments. The answers to these “homework assignments” became the genesis material of her finished composition Solastalgia. Little by little, the concerts took shape – a mixture of originally-composed and carefully-chosen chamber music, written-on-the-spot poetry fueled by audience feedback, and dynamic videography. Distinct artistic voices became a conversation as elements wove themselves together synchronistically and took on a life of their own, the whole becoming so much greater than the sum of its parts. Over the course of the tour we welcomed over 300 audience members as participants in the concert experience. One concert informed the next, and at each of our six concerts everyone present created a mutual understanding and left the space changed – each person able to see in themselves an artist, a fire practitioner, a human. Together, we asked ourselves the questions, “What is the past we are reckoning with?” “What is the future we must imagine together in the present?”  “What will each of us give to the circle?”

Here is a taste of the video that was featured in the concerts, videographer Rob Wadleigh’s piece A Walk to the Fire’s Edge.

Humbled by the generosity of our mentors and the vulnerability of our audiences, we have come away from this pilot year forever changed. We now understand in our bones that fire matters, and fire is a part of everyone. No matter how paved-over someone’s modern urban existence, every human shares the lineage of having ancestors that maintained a personal working relationship with fire. That lineage, no matter where we live, is also our responsibility.  

From our artists:

“I talk about fire all the time now.” 

“This has been the most impactful interdisciplinary project I’ve participated in.” 

“I think on a much longer timescale now. I see myself as part of a long process that spans much more than my lifetime.” 

“I really believe now that art can change what people think, because I’ve seen it happen.”

From our audiences:

“I’ve been crying for most of the performance. I’m an art teacher, and the fact that this presentation exists, and what it achieves, means so much. I needed to be here today.” 

“Julie’s piece – It was amazing. I haven’t heard anything like that in fifty years.” 

“I’ve been blaming fire. And I’m not going to do that anymore.”

May this ending of our pilot year be the seed of more beginnings. May we all continue collectively to include art, to invest in artists, as part of the fabric of the work we do together. We leave you with an ember, both acknowledgement and offering of gratitude: our videographer and producer Max Savage’s short film Fire Says, titled after project artist Silvi Alcivar’s poem that it frames.  The film is meant to be a gift-seed, sown in the far-and-wide. Please share this and all links here widely and as you see fit to spark the right kind of disturbance. For the comments here and elsewhere, may we suggest the questions: “Who does watching this connect you to?” and “What current actions of yours locate you in place?”

We are forever grateful to all of our funders, mentors, participant-audience members, land stewards, friends, fellow fire practitioners, ancestors, fire, and the land itself.  The project is currently seeking funding to continue the work we’ve started.  Please reach out with any ideas or connections you think may be a good fit.

Instagram: @fireandmusicproject

Website: fireandmusic.org

Youtube: FireAndMusicProject

In Gratitude,

-The Fire and Music Project

This activity was funded in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency, through the Upstate California Creative Corps program. In addition, the work upon which this publication is based was funded in part through a Regional Forest and Fire Capacity grant awarded by the California Department of Conservation, and through funding from the Fire Learning Network and the Watershed Research and Training Center.

****