She sings – and plants make the music

Editor’s note: Listen to a Catholic Review Radio interview with Alexandra Palting and hear some of her music by clicking play on the radio link at the end of this story.

It won’t be anything like the carnivorous alien plant that crooned Motown in “Little Shop of Horrors,” but an upcoming concert at St. Louis in Clarksville promises something almost as unusual: music made with the help of plants.

In a one-of-a-kind concert called “Offering for the Earth,” Alexandra Palting will fill a chapel with living plants and sing sacred medieval chants inspired by St. Hildegard of Bingen – accompanied, in the most literal sense, by the natural world itself.

Each plant will be connected to technology that measures subtle changes in electrical conductivity in its leaves and stems and converts those signals into MIDI data, which will then trigger the sounds of musical instruments in real time.

The concert draws inspiration from St. Hildegard, a 12th-century German Benedictine abbess, composer and mystic who wrote extensively about the natural world. Considered one of the earliest environmentalists, she promoted a theology of “viriditas” – or greenness – that celebrates the divine life force flowing through all living things.

“Her music came to her through heavenly visions,” Palting said. “So her music quite literally came from above. And the music we’re listening to – the biorhythms of plants – that is music that’s coming literally from below and from the ground in the soil.”

At her April 19 performance, part of the 20th season of the St. Louis Concert Series, Palting plans to bridge the two.

A New York-based actress, composer and writer, Palting grew up at St. Louis Parish and graduated from Mount de Sales Academy in Catonsville in 2012. She has performed at the Lincoln Theatre in Washington, D.C., and Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, and has appeared on “Law and Order.”

St. Hildegard, named a doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XVI, combined theology, spirituality, science, knowledge and the pursuit of wonder, Palting said. She credited St. Hildegard as among the first composers to marry song and long-form storytelling, in works that might be considered early precursors to opera.

The plants will participate through PlantWave, a patented bio-sonification device that works by clipping two small electrodes onto a plant’s leaves to measure its internal electrical activity – the fluctuations that occur as a plant moves water, responds to light and reacts to its environment. The music it generates is unrepeatable, a direct expression of whatever the plant is experiencing at that moment.

Palting said part of the inspiration for the concert came when she was experimenting with the PlantWave technology and simply breathed on a plant while singing. The sound, she said, “just exploded.” As a singer, breath is central to her art and spirituality alike – and the exchange of breath between humans and plants felt like a natural bridge.

Colleen Daly Eberhardt, assistant director of music at St. Louis and artistic director of the St. Louis Concert Series, said the concert invites listeners to reconsider what they take for granted.

“I think many of us look at plants as inanimate things – or things that certainly fuel us in certain ways or things that adorn our gardens,” she said. “To be able to see and hear the very active life of a plant will allow us to more fully appreciate the miracle and mystery that is life all around us in all its different forms.”

Also performing will be pianist and arranger Isaiah Shim, who previously collaborated with Palting on her one-woman show at the Kennedy Center in Washington that celebrated her Filipino heritage, and Laura Hill, a childhood friend who has known Palting since kindergarten at St. Louis. The St. Louis Treble Choir, a parish children’s choir, will also perform.

The St. Louis Parish garden club is providing the plants for the concert. During intermission, audience members will get to manipulate the technology to hear differences between plants.

The concert will be followed by a discussion on theology, art and environmental responsibility with Palting; Father Michael DeAscanis, pastor of St. Louis and St. Francis of Assisi in Fulton; and environmental activist Jose Aguto.

For Palting, a longtime cantor, the concert is ultimately personal. She and others of her generation, she said, “barely remember a time when climate change – and the fear and guilt that come with it – wasn’t part of the cultural conversation.”

But she refuses to leave it there.

“Thomas Aquinas wrote that anxiety is sorrow with no exit,” she said. “This concert is that exit.”

For information on the April 19 concert at St. Louis in Clarksville, click here.

Email George Matysek at gmatysek@CatholicReview.org

Click play below to listen to a Catholic Review Radio interview with Alexandra Palting and hear some of her music.

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