Ep 35 / The Music of Melting Glaciers with Konstantine Vlasis with Konstantine Vlasis, Environmental Composer
National Geographic Explorer shares his research and compositions with the glaciers of Iceland.
Iceland’s glaciers are likely to disappear within 200 years.
That doesn’t sound that far away. And Konstantine Vlasis is making sure we know exactly what that disappearance sounds like.
Hailing from Chattanooga, Tennessee, Konstantine might not be who you’d expect to find on one of Europe’s largest glaciers in Iceland. With crampons strapped to his boots and the kit of both a musician and a mountain guide in his pack, the 2024 Fulbright-National Geographic Award recipient is creating music from the sounds of moving air, water and ice in glaciers.
In addition to making sure we capture the sonic presence of these moving ice forms before they disappear, he is translating what he records into song as a means of science communication. His compositions include ‘2124’, which uses drumming to share the speed of the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier’s expected recession over the next 100 years, and ‘A Song for Lost Trees’, which brings the Skógarfura (Baltic Pine) into an ensemble with human percussionists.
In the latest episode of Ecosystem Member, we talk with Konstantine about these compositions, his intention and process in creating the work, and his journey from the Great Smokey Mountains of Tennessee to the great glaciers of Iceland.
In past episodes, we’ve had artists who’ve worked with scientists, and scientists who’ve worked with artists and adventurers, but Konstantine is sort of all in one. His approach blurs the lines in the best way and his creations are a perfect example of the type of collaboration that is needed to not just inform people about climate change and our imbalanced relationship with the more-than-human world, but make it stick.
As Terry Tempest Williams said in her famous commencement address to the University of Utah:
The humanities are not peripheral, but the very art of what it means to be human. Beauty is not optional, but essential to our survival as a species. And technology is not rendered at the expense of life, but developed out of a reverence for life.
Konstantine translates the output of advanced technology of sound recording into song so that we don’t have to just read about the rate of glacial recession, but we can actually feel it, even if we are hundreds or thousands of miles away.
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