He’s playing free concerts in every municipality in Vermont to raise awareness of the climate crisis
By RJ Crowley, Standard Correspondent
If David Feurzeig’s commitment to his craft of piano playing is as deep and impassioned as his commitment to raising public awareness of the climate crisis, then the town of Barnard is in for an extraordinary evening of music this Friday, Sept. 15!
For the past two years, Feurzeig has been traveling from town to town throughout the Green Mountain State, as part of his “Play Every Town” tour. Let’s call it a crusade. The plan is for Feurzeig to ultimately play in every municipality in Vermont. Two hundred fifty-two, to be exact, and his concert in Barnard will represent number 40 on that list.
The mild-mannered and thoughtful Feurzeig — pianist-composer and University of Vermont (UVM) music professor — recently sat down with the Vermont Standard to discuss his career, along with the many aspects of this ambitious undertaking, as well as the motivation behind it.
Feurzeig, 57, grew up in and around the Cambridge area of Massachusetts and, as a child, was enrolled in a music program on Saturdays at the New England Conservatory of Music.
“I was really lucky to be raised in the Boston area because the New England Conservatory of Music had a very good Saturday prep program, which was really unusual because they not only offered but required anyone who was enrolled to also take classes in music theory,” he said. “It was very enlightening. I had a casual but unusually well-rounded start to things.”
He majored in music as an undergraduate at Harvard and then attended Cornell as a post-graduate student where he obtained an advanced degree in music composition. His first job teaching in the “real world” was at a small, liberal arts college in Kentucky called Center College, and from there he went to Illinois State University, where he taught for ten years.
He and his family had been wanting to relocate back to the Northeast — “the climate didn’t suit our clothes” — and in 2008 he took a job at UVM.
“I wasn’t planning or trying to get to Vermont specifically,” he confessed, “but once it happened, it kind of felt like winning the lottery.”
It wasn’t until he and his family settled in Vermont, that his journey as a climate change activist truly began. Fuerzeig spoke candidly about how the “Play Every Town” idea came about: “I was in a situation which was a sort of paradox,” he said. “I was having incredible emotional anguish about the climate situation. Not anxiety, because anxiety suggests there’s a problem but you’re worrying too much about it. And this, in my opinion, is the exact opposite of that. Everybody is worrying, if anything, too little.”
He went on to explain that the project is also a reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. He had played his first post-pandemic gig in 2021 and felt rusty. “So, I asked myself: ‘What would be the opposite of not performing a single recital in over two years? How about 252 in seven years?’” Thus, a movement was born.
Feurzeig is in year two of what he estimates will be a seven-year project to bring the vitality and talent of his music-making to every town in Vermont in an effort to raise awareness of the global climate crisis.
“I felt completely alone, because it wasn’t polite to talk about the apocalypse, and it’s also not polite to talk about personal virtues. I don’t eat meat, animal products, I don’t fly. Nobody wants to hear that,” he said, self-deprecatingly.
“But to me, this is the single most important issue in the history of humanity, and nobody was talking about it,” he continued.“Then, after the summer that we’ve had, people are finally beginning to talk about the climate crisis, so my plan to play every municipality will be an excuse. I can tell people what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. That I don’t fly for example, and we have to make real and not always convenient sacrifices, and they can’t get mad at me because I’m playing a free concert,” he said half-jokingly.
“And sometimes people will say to me: ‘Oh you don’t travel. That’s so sad. You’re always in the same place,’ and I say: ‘I’m never in the same place. I’m in the hills one week, the valley the next, the lake, the north and the south. Every place is really different, and we have not gotten bored after 40 concerts.’ I think to myself: ‘Wow, there are all these amazing places, I’m so glad that we’re forcing ourselves to experience them.’”
When asked what, if anything, has surprised him the most as he plays all these different towns, Feurzeig perks up.
“Vermont is amazing. I rarely travel long distances. So, traveling throughout Vermont is an opportunity to explore so many different and authentic places. There is this real ‘village and town’ culture that persists and that is not easy to maintain but Vermonters work hard to maintain that.”
Feurzeig is bringing his immense talent to the Universalist Society Church in Barnard this Friday night at 6:30 p.m. for a one-time, free recital that promises to be unlike anything local residents have heard before. For each concert, he collaborates in some way with a “local talent,” usually a musician, although on Friday night his collaborator will be the ceramicist, artist, and writer Pamela Fraser.
One final fascinating aspect for Feurzeig as he “plays every town” is the discovery of so many different, and sometimes very old, pianos that exist.
“I wanted to make a significant effort to play piano in all the various places I play. Pianos provided by the host or venue. I didn’t anticipate the enormous variety of all the old uprights that were out there. By old I mean 90, 120, 130 years old. There was one that was 140 years old. And these pianos have some issues, but they have character.”
After one recent recital he gave, the host said to Feurzeig off-handedly: “I don’t think that piano has ever been played that way.” Precisely!