We sat down for an exclusive interview with composer and vocalist Supriya Nagarajan to discuss ‘Meltwater’, an immersive performance exploring the beauty and accelerating loss of the polar ice caps.
‘Meltwater’ will be performed 23rd June at the Royal Albert Hall – Tickets here
MELTWATER brings together Carnatic vocals, field recordings of melting ice, and visuals of glaciers in their final stages. How did you find the through-line between those very different elements?
For me, the through-line was always the glacier itself. I wanted to anthropomorphise the glacier — to think of it as something living, breathing and changing through the course of a day. The Carnatic voice became its emotional language, the field recordings its physical reality, and Richard Sidey’s visuals its visible fragility. I used ragas to map an emotional and temporal journey from dawn to night, allowing the piece to unfold almost like a living ecosystem. Although the elements seem very different, they are all responding to the same question: what does it feel like to witness something beautiful slowly disappear?
The piece is informed by real stories from communities affected by flood and drought across four countries. How do you translate lived human experience into a musical and sonic language?
It begins with listening. Through the Terrarium project, we gathered stories from communities living with flood and drought, and what struck me was how deeply personal people’s relationships with water are. I wasn’t interested in literally retelling stories through music, but in capturing emotional truths — uncertainty, grief, resilience, memory. Sound can hold emotion in ways words sometimes cannot. Field recordings, vocal textures, silences and repetition became ways of expressing disruption and fragility. My hope was to create space for reflection, where audiences might recognise something of their own experience in somebody else’s story.
You collaborated with climate scientists and researchers from the outset. What did that process look like, and did it change the direction of the work in unexpected ways?
Collaboration with scientists was incredibly important because I wanted the work to be emotionally resonant but also grounded in understanding. Working with researchers, including Professor Natasha Barlow at Leeds, opened conversations that challenged me to think beyond my own artistic perspective. Scientists and artists often speak to very different audiences, and I became interested in how we could build bridges between those worlds. It reinforced my feeling that climate change cannot remain inside academic or artistic silos. Rather than changing the direction of the piece entirely, the collaboration deepened it — helping me think more carefully about water, time, fragility and scale.
Carnatic music carries centuries of tradition. What does it offer to a conversation about something as urgent and contemporary as the climate crisis?
Carnatic music has always carried emotion, devotion and deep reflection, so for me it feels entirely relevant to the climate conversation. Tradition is not static — it evolves with the world around us. The raga system is incredibly nuanced and able to hold complexity, grief, beauty and contemplation all at once. Climate change can feel overwhelming or abstract, and sometimes facts alone do not move people emotionally. Music offers another route in. I think Carnatic music, with its meditative and deeply expressive qualities, creates a space where audiences can slow down, feel and perhaps listen differently to the world around them.
MELTWATER has been described as both meditative and urgent, two feelings that can pull in opposite directions. Was that tension intentional, and how do you hold it in performance?
Yes, absolutely. Climate change unfolds slowly, and that slowness can make it deceptively easy to ignore. I wanted MELTWATER to inhabit that contradiction — something deeply meditative, but carrying an underlying urgency. The glacier does not collapse dramatically in front of us; it changes gradually, almost imperceptibly, and that felt important to reflect musically. In performance, I try to hold that tension through pacing and restraint. I am not asking audiences to feel panic, but attention — to sit with discomfort, beauty and fragility long enough for reflection to happen. Sometimes stillness can be the most urgent thing of all.