Vermont Environmental Consortium

And

BRATTLEBORO REFORMER

#47, March 2, 2008
Water Music Moves Us to Reverence and Action
by
Daniel Hecht

On January 24, 2008, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon laid it out plain for the delegates at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: “Throughout the world, water sources continue to be spoiled, wasted, degraded.” Scarcity of water is the world’s most pressing problem, he warned, one that could provoke international and civil conflicts. A life or death matter for millions.

Marjorie Ryerson, of Randolph, is well aware of the plight of the world’s waters and of its thirsty people, and she has embraced protecting water as a personal mission. But she seeks solutions not through science, politics, or social services, but through the arts.

A poet, journalist, and photographer, she weaves together a spiritual reverence for water with an environmentalist’s understanding of its role in the world. She founded the organization Water Music and wrote the book of the same name to foster the same sensibilities in others.

“The underlying principle of Water Music,” she explains, “was to create a modality for people’s awareness of water that went straight to their hearts, not just their brains. I wanted people to literally fall in love with water and to want to be good stewards of it.”

Marjorie is fine-boned, elfin, with graying hair cut short in a style that sets off her eyes, very bright beneath dark brows. In bearing, she’s serene, elegant; in conversation, soft-spoken, lyrical. At work, ferocious, tenacious as a bulldog.

The job of putting together Water Music required lots of the latter trait. Published by the University of Michigan Press, it features 100 of Marjorie’s photographs and water-focused poems, essays, lyrics, and musical scores contributed by 66 musicians. The star-studded roster includes Vladimir Ashkenazy, Emanuel Ax, Dave Brubeck, Bruce Cockburn, Jaime Laredo, Kenny Loggins, Taj Mahal, Bobby McFerrin, Randy Newman, Christopher Parkening, Pete Seeger, Paul Winter – luminaries in every musical genre.

Tracking down dozens of famous people, persuading them to contemplate water and to add their voices to the book, took Marjorie five years.

Between writing the book and her innumerable lectures, classes, residencies, and exhibitions, she has traveled the world. She’s been interviewed on National Public Radio and has presented multi-media concerts with Paul Winter. She has exhibited her photos at major galleries and has travelled with Vermont pianist Michael Arnowitt for joint concerts in Holland and Germany. She has also served as guest artist/instructor at many grade schools, high schools, and universities.

Rationally, Marjorie traces her obsession back to childhood: She grew up canoeing, sailing, swimming. In high school, whenever she had an existential crisis, she’d head to the ocean: “I’d come back healed and clear about what I needed to do.” Her undergraduate study of physics also helped her glimpse the laws of the universe embodied in water’s endlessly-varied forms.

But discovering her calling was not rational. It grew upon her unnoticed, evolved intuitively. She earned an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers Workshop, then took jobs in publishing and teaching art before moving to Vermont in 1973. Many years of teaching at Castleton State College later, she was reviewing her own photos one day and noticed the prevalence of water images. “I was actually quite mystified,” she says.

It’s not an uncommon process among artists: the work begins not with the reasoning mind but with a subconscious, intuitive impulse, its purpose discovered only in the act of expression, working with the medium.

Researching water in today’s world, you quickly come up against very bad news. Industrial pollution, devastated ecosystems, privatization of water supply, rivers literally gone dry, oceans marred by enormous floating trash islands: Marjorie knows the hard facts and the scientific and political considerations involved.

But she felt that nobody needed yet another dire statistical datum or warning. Instead, she sought to kindle reverence -- to celebrate water and move people to care about it.

A cross-disciplinary approach came naturally, not just in combining music and images, but in marrying science with art, the spiritual with the material, abstraction with pragmatism. Her most rewarding teaching experience was a residency at St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s School, in Manhattan. Working with teachers in art, science, music, social studies, history, biology, English, even gym, she coordinated a program that showed students the importance of water in their lives. Every student, in every grade, participated.

It proved very effective. Afterward, parents noticed the change in their children: “Now he’s outside my shower every morning with a stopwatch!” one mother told Marjorie.

Art had made a bridge from the inspirational to the material, harnessing deeply-felt emotions and putting them to service in positive, practical action.

Walt Whitman once wrote: “After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on . . . what remains? Nature remains.”

Today, that’s no longer a safe assumption. Thus the importance of reminders like Marjorie Ryerson’s: that we can, must, retain our joyful awareness of nature and at the same time work to preserve it.

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Daniel Hecht is a novelist and executive director of Vermont Environmental Consortium. For more information on any Green Grapevine topic, contact vec@norwich.edu. To learn more about Water Music, visit www.water-music.org; to see a fascinating collection of environmental visual art, visit www.greenmuseum.org.

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