Molly Monahan is a cross-disciplinary composer and producer who creates music across genres, mediums, and styles. Using a combination of technical skills and traditional musical composition, she works to create audiovisual art spanning from acoustic to electronic, to a mixture of the two. Now based in San Francisco, Molly graduated from the Interlochen Arts Academy in Composition and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in Technology and Applied Composition, and her work has been featured and performed globally.
ClimateMusic: How did you first become interested in music, and when did you realize you could integrate your technological skills with traditional compositions?
MM: I’ve been making music my whole life! I started playing piano when I was 6, and always loved improvising and messing around on the piano. When I was around 10, my dad noticed that I had started jotting music down on paper and bought me a copy of Sibelius 5 Student as a Christmas gift. It’s still the best gift I have ever received! I’ve been hooked on composition ever since.
I would say that wanting to expand the scope of my composition is actually why I developed my technical skills. I saw what other composers were doing and didn’t want to limit my artistry to just acoustic music. When I was a senior in high school I decided to try my hand at electronic music, so I downloaded Reaper. I found some free VSTs on the internet, and I remember one New Years Eve I skipped out on all festivities because I was holed up on my computer trying, for the life of me, to figure out how to install them (pretty lame I know). I never figured it out! The first electronic piece I ever made I made using only the built in tone generator in Reaper, because that’s the only way I could figure out how to make sound. It was actually a pretty good composition exercise, haha. I remember in the performance of that piece there were people in the audience, like, cringing and covering their ears. I was so embarrassed, I’m not sure why I even kept pursuing electronic music. But I did! And here we are.
ClimateMusic: Your past composition “Breaking” combines electronic sound, percussion, and visual media to emphasize the growing effects of climate change on worsening weather events and human fatalities. Can you describe what inspired this project, and what the process of composing it was like? What led you to research fatal weather events, and how did you decide to use percussion rolls to signify the casualties caused by each “natural” disaster?
MM: When it comes to climate change, I think that one of the reasons that some people are deniers or at least apathetic about it is because they don’t think it affects them. The hardest proof that we have that climate change is real, causing problems, and going to continue causing problems mainly lies in statistics about things like sea level rise and C02 levels. This evidence is damning, however I think it is also hard for the average person to conceptualize and fully realize its impact. There have been many consequences of climate change playing out around the world, such as island nations planning on moving their populations due to sea level rise, regions experiencing prolonged drought, and communities losing their food sources due to rising ocean temperatures and acidity, causing the dying out of marine life. So far many of these consequences tend to impact people who are already economically disadvantaged and living in poorer parts of the world. Even with this catastrophic proof, I think that many willfully ignorant Americans can decide not to care since they believe that they, themselves, are not impacted.
I wrote this piece in 2019, and when I was coming into writing it I wanted to focus on making something that an average American audience could relate to, something really tangible. As Americans we hold an insane amount of economic power over the world, and us choosing to continue contributing to climate change is catastrophic for everyone, which is why I think it is really important to change people’s attitudes here at home. Throughout my life I’ve often had the feeling that we keep having more and more natural disasters as the years go on; as a kid I remembered the occasional huge disaster like Hurricane Katrina, but recently every year there seems to be something that kills or displaces large amounts of people. I wasn’t sure if this was just recency bias or due to changes in media coverage, but I knew I wasn’t alone in feeling this. I decided to put some research into it and came across a fantastic database, the EM-DAT International Disaster Database, which contains granular data about natural disasters all over the world. From just poking around the database I found that my suspicions were actually confirmed; there had been an exponential rise in catastrophic natural disasters in the past 49 years in America.
Even though I found such insane numbers proving the drastic rise in natural disasters, I was still hesitant to write a piece about it at first. My dataset indicated how many people were killed by these events. Weather and natural disasters are complicated, and there are many factors besides climate change that could lead to the rise of deaths in my dataset, such as the trend of people moving to coastal areas, general population increase, long cyclical weather patterns like El Niño, and improvements in data collection over time. However, there are also many factors that would conceivably lead to the reduction of deaths from natural disasters, namely improvements to infrastructure, emergency medicine, environmental science and early warning times, and general disaster preparedness over time. Upon doing more research on the direct relation between climate change and the natural disasters I was specifically looking at (hurricanes and wildfires), I found that there in fact was a strong correlation. If you would like to read more about it, I recommend this article.
I felt like this data really spoke for itself, and I didn’t want my composition to obfuscate anything. “Breaking,” as a composition, is just a bunch of data points plotted out over time. Unfortunately, due to the exponential rise in these disasters, the form happens to be quite musical. In order to make a coherent piece I filtered my data to wildfires and hurricanes that killed at least 10 people. I began using data from 1970 since that’s when the data from EM-DAT starting becoming reliable and I could also find consistent video coverage of each incident.
Something that weighed on me when planning out this piece was that I was writing about real people, and I wanted to make sure that I drove this point across. I had a problem with the idea of creating something melodic or even scary sounding. These were people who died in terrifying circumstances that I couldn’t possibly imagine; imposing my own musical voice on their real lives felt wrong somehow. Therefore, I decided to represent my data, the lives lost of thousands of people, with snare drum rolls. To me, the snare drum roll connotes respect. I think of funeral marches or honorable military burials. “Breaking” is performed by five percussionists who, for each disaster over time, do a drum roll of a length scaled to the amount of lives lost. The drum roll serves as both an indication of the severity of the disaster as well as a moment of deafening silence to the real lives lost. Each disaster is accompanied by video footage and announced by the word, “breaking.” Breaking news, breaking ecosystem.
“Breaking” starts very sparsely, with short, scattered drum rolls spread out over frequent long, silent pauses. By the time the piece is wrapping up, every player is doing drum rolls with very few breaks. Although I had spent a lot of time with the dataset, the reality of this increase in climate disasters didn’t hit me until I heard the piece being played for the first time, which I think is a testament to the vision and goals of the ClimateMusic Project. I wrote this piece in early 2019, and one of the last data points for me was Hurricane Maria. The media coverage at the time didn’t nearly portray its devastation; it had the longest drum roll of the piece by far. Almost twice as many people died in Hurricane Maria than Hurricane Katrina, and that didn’t hit me until I heard that snare drum roll go on and on for much longer than everything else around it. It is now 2022 and part of me wants to go back and update this piece. Hurricanes Elsa, Laura, Ida, and others resulted in large losses of life, and six of the ten largest wildfires in the history of California have happened since this piece was written three years ago. Unfortunately I think that this is a piece that will only get louder over time.
ClimateMusic: What drew you to electronic and electroacoustic music? Throughout your various projects, how have these forms, integrated with more traditional compositions and acoustic styles, been a unique way for you to express messages about themes such as climate change, home, and self-doubt?
MM: What drew me to electronic music was the new possibilities of sounds I could create! I came up in the concert music world where I was notating out all of my music for other people to play. I still love making that kind of music and collaborating with incredible performers, but learning how to create electronic music allowed me to put the finished product of what I was creating into my own hands, which was pretty empowering. Live performances are magical but there’s something really neat about being able to make a recording over which you have absolute control, and can manipulate the sound however you want. It unlocked a ton of new genres and methods of working to explore.
I would say that when it comes to concert music, I don’t approach electronic elements much differently than I do acoustic elements. It’s just another voice in your ensemble. There are ways that you can express intent with electronics that you can’t do with acoustic instruments, though. For example, when you are doing live processing, you are changing what the performer is playing and cycling it back out into the world. There’s a lot of things you can say with that technique! And with fixed playback you can incorporate real-world sounds in ways that you can’t with acoustic instruments. Thematically, it opens up a lot of possibilities.
ClimateMusic: Do you think your youth shapes your perspective and gives you a unique advantage in the fields of science, technology, musical composition, and artistic expression? How so? How do you see younger generations revolutionizing music and composition and performance today?
MM: This is an interesting question because sometimes I think my youth is an advantage but often I think it is a bit of a disadvantage, haha. One great advantage that I think my generation has is that over the past decade there has been a huge democratization in access to music creation, especially in the realm of electronic music. We have free tools like GarageBand and MuseScore that allow for people to make music with practically nothing, while earlier generations had to have expensive and lucrative access to recording studios or an institutional education. This allows for more of us to get into music making and benefits the music world as a whole because more people are creating and expressing their unique selves.
However, technology has also hurt the musicians of this generation in a huge way. When I was a young kid Napster was at its height, and growing up I illegally downloaded all my music. I didn’t consider it to be theft whatsoever, because it was just something I was downloading from the Internet (don’t worry, as penance I now buy all of the music that I listen to, haha). Modern streaming is barely a step up from this outright theft, pennies as opposed to nothing. This idea that music should be both free and of highest quality has permeated through our modern minds, and I don’t think that idea is ever going to go away. Combined with the other many economic hurdles my generation faces (lower wages, higher cost of living, home prices, underemployment), I feel it is very hard to be a young musician these days.
That being said, I draw a ton of inspiration from artists my age. Just like artists of any generation, we are creating by using and misusing the tools that we have access to, and the past few decades of technological advancement have given us a ton more tools to do that. I think that my generation cares less about making music in a specific way than previous generations have. You can make a solo clarinet piece with electronics about sitting on the toilet and messaging people on Grindr, and it’s honest and real and good (shouts out Solomon Frank). Especially in the concert music world we are starting to care less and less about what is “proper,” which to me is a very good thing.
ClimateMusic: Going off our last question, at The ClimateMusic Project we are passionate about music’s unique role in eliciting emotional responses to climate change and inspiring action, especially in a way that plain scientific facts cannot. How do you see ways in which your art—whether in past or future projects—can communicate and inspire action on the urgent climate crisis?
MM: One of the reasons why I think that people are apathetic about climate change is because numbers and data can be difficult to conceptualize. I mentioned this earlier when I was talking about “Breaking,” but I spent a lot of time with the dataset for that and even I didn’t fully realize the severity and impact of this rising trend in disasters until I heard the piece. Sonifying or music-ifying actual data is really cool because you can straight up deliver the facts to people in ways that they can experience and fully appreciate. The aspects of storytelling you can do through music are strong, as well. It hits home when you see how climate change has actually deeply affected someone.
In general, the act of producing any content about climate change serves to spread awareness. I’ve been seeing more and more artists start to incorporate climate change, thematically. The more we saturate these themes in the media that people consume, the harder it gets to ignore.
The thing that I am struggling with in trying to inspire action on the climate crisis is that the levels of deliberate misinformation fed to people in order to sway them to deny climate change runs so, so deep. I truly think that Fox News is one of the greatest enemies of our climate. It gets pretty disheartening when you’re investing so much time and effort into spreading awareness and creating art about climate change when you can’t even convince your own relatives to believe in climate change because they spend most of their time consuming conservative media. Sometimes I get discouraged because what can I, as an individual, do about that?
One thing that I would really like to explore in a future project is less on the climate science side and more on the political side of climate change awareness. The people who stand to lose, financially, from the general population investing in things like renewable energy already have a substantial amount of political power, which they use to protect their own interests at the cost of our climate and my generation’s future. The inner workings of our government and the American media industry are so obfuscated and I want to make something that makes it clear who is benefitting from our opinions. I think that if people know how they are being fooled by the media they consume then they will be more open to listening.
ClimateMusic: What exciting projects are you working on now, and what inspires you to pursue them? What other fields and themes do you see yourself venturing into in the future?
MM: Ah man, I’m working on so many things! During the pandemic I started producing dance music under the pseudonym Papa Molly and have been having a lot of fun with that, and am continuously producing more dance music and performing around San Francisco. The pandemic caused a bit of a hiatus with concert music for me but I am finally starting to see a return to that. Currently I am working on a piece for the Recombinant Media Labs Cinechamber which I am pretty excited about, and also getting a string quartet piece of mine premiered in the coming months, which I hope to officially announce soon.
As far as what I see myself doing in the future, I hope to keep doing what I have been doing, meaning everything! I love working on diverse projects, it helps keep me sharp in all areas of my artistry. One thing that I haven’t done too much of yet and would like to get more into would be film scoring, but otherwise I love being in the moment and catching anything that comes my way.
ClimateMusic: Where can we keep up with your future work?
MM: You can keep up with my future work by checking out my website, mollymonahanmusic.com! I also post a lot of my stuff on Instagram, you can find me @papa____molly