Composer and Sound Artist Uses Work of Donella Meadows

Composer, improviser, researcher and sound artist, Adam Pultz Melbye, used excerpts from Donella Meadow’s Leverage Points essay for one of his most recent musical creations. His podcast episode features his own unreleased work alongside spoken words by Silvia Andrade, and materials from the Academy’s Donella Meadows Project.

I am very grateful to the Donella Meadows Project for granting me permission to use excerpts of her important essay Leverage Points – Places to intervene in a system. The text is a strikingly clear exposition of many of the complex challenges facing us, but also offers paths to a solution. What seems central to me, is that the idea of economic and material growth needs to be challenged. Otherwise there is no hope for humanity. That is a blunt and dark prophecy, but I fail to see how unlimited growth on a planet with finite resources is possible, let alone desirable.

Originally trained as a double bass player, Adam Pultz Meybe’s work focuses on the design of and performance with adaptive and self-organizing sonic systems, often involving the double bass and various forms of feedback processes. These systems are also the subject of his practice-led PhD research at Queens University’s Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) in Belfast. In Adam’s own words, “some of the compositional and performative techniques involved in creating the music rely on feedback  and control mechanisms inspired by the theory and practice of cybernetics and general systems theory and as such quite related to the tradition that Donella Meadows was such an important part of”.