Ecopella – causing harmony to the environment at rallies, protests, festivals and concerts since 1998.
Ecopella is an environmental choir that sings about the beauty of our world and the struggle to protect it from exploitation and destruction. Founded in 1998 by musical director Miguel Heatwole, the choir serves the environment movement by providing activists and audiences with the opportunity of enjoying a very high standard of a cappella singing. The strong environmental message of Ecopella’s Save-The-World Music encourages positive change in people’s thoughts and actions and offers support to a wide variety of green organisations.
Ecopella originated in Sydney and we now have branches in the Blue Mountains, Illawarra, Canberra and the Central Coast as well. We have over 325 performances to our credit, embracing a wide range of events: benefit concerts, protests, campaign launches, community gatherings and folk festivals.
You might expect a choir that sings about the environment to be a gloomy ensemble, but Ecopella’s sense of fun fills each performance with positive and satirical messages. Even when the mood becomes serious the beauty and solemnity of the music uplifts the listener. A lot of the pieces are original compositions and most of the arrangements are ours also. Stylistically our influences include folk, classical, popular songs, and occasionally jazz.
I add this comment in the hope that I may demystify a couple of things. The first is deliberately and specifically applicable to the publicised music event of the article above. The second takes a step back and is only relevant to the above article in a veeery indirect manner.
It took me a couple of moments to work out the meaning behind the music group’s name i.e. ‘Ecopella’. It was not until relatively recently that I learned what ‘a capella’ meant. Essentially, it is singing on its own i.e. without any musical instruments. ‘Ecopella’ then is ‘a capella’ singing for an ‘eco cause’ 🙂
This is a beautiful illustration of how one can use one’s own particular talents and direct them towards a cause one is passionate about and believes in. My gosh. Kudos to ‘Ecopella’, to ‘The Armidale Club’ and to ‘Sustainable Living Armidale’.
*****Note: the remainder of this comment is off topic. It is not specifically in relation to the performance at The Armidale Club on the 25th of September.*****
As an aside, ‘eco’ comes from the Greek ‘oikos’. ‘Oikos’ translates to ‘house’.
‘Economy’ translates to ‘management of one’s house’. The derivation of the word ‘economy’ is centuries old. It is much older, for example, than the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s and 1800s. It literally is the case that if you show me a degraded environment, I will show you a decimated economy.
The two – the economy and the environment – are *not* in opposition to one another. If any concepts operate in tandem, it is these two. It just doesn’t make sense to “sacrifice the economy for the sake of the environment” or “sacrifice the environment for the sake of the economy”. How may anyone illustrate this? It is akin to saying, “I’ll sacrifice my health for the sake of my lungs”. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Further comments and/or replies are welcome.
Tom.