Lea Brückner, Violinist and Climate Activist: “You can drive social change through culture.”
Lea Brückner, photo by Johannes Lunenburg
Lea Brückner is a violinist, moderator and climate ambassador who has carved out a unique career for herself, combining her passion for music with her commitment to sustainability. In addition to earning a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, she also holds a second master’s degree in cultural management. In 2024, she was awarded the OPUS Klassik award alongside the Tonhalle Düsseldorf for their concert series Green Monday. Lea also released her debut album Pangea in August 2024. She leads workshops on sustainability in culture and has been invited to speak as climate ambassador at numerous events. TWoA talked to Lea about the role culture can play in the battle against climate change, and about the specific steps cultural organisations can take towards becoming more sustainable.
What is your first musical memory?
My first memory as a musician is when I started to play a plastic flute. I was around five years old. The plastic flute was made to go into the dishwasher. I was practicing, I was packing it out, playing it, and I have the feeling that after playing it once, my parents already had to put it into the dishwasher. I remember clearly how I took the flute to my mom, and she would put it into the dishwasher.
How did you move from a dishwasher proof flute to the violin?
We figured out pretty quickly that the plastic flute might not be the optimal instrument. I got a normal wooden flute. I grew up in a very small town in Germany, almost a village, without a lot of possibilities for music education. I wanted to play an instrument. I didn't care which instrument. My mom said: “Okay, here's a flute,” and took me to some lessons. After two weeks, the teacher stepped out of her room before my mom could bring me into the lesson, and said: “Look, Lea cannot participate in these lessons anymore.” My mom looked at me: “What did you do? You are usually a well-behaved kid.” The teacher said: “She was behaving well, but last week, she learned everything the kids usually learn in one year in my course. She's frustrating the other kids, so please take her out.” I just had fun playing and practicing the flute at home. I had no idea what I was doing, and since I'm the only musician in the family, there was nobody practicing with me. The teacher then said: “I think Lea needs a more difficult instrument,” and suggested the violin.
I was almost six and started to play the violin. I was really not into practicing. I was getting very frustrated very quickly with the violin, because obviously, it's not like the flute, or like a piano, where you press a key and out comes a nice note. Initially, it's just a scratching sound, it's terrible. But I still kept going, playing the flute next to the violin. When I was around seven, I won a first prize at the Jugend Musiziert competition with the flute.
My mom thought that I must be somehow talented. She found a scholarship in Essen at the Folkwang School of Music. I started to get lessons with a flute scholarship, not with the violin, because I was very bad back then. When I was nine years old, I heard all these super talented scholarship kids playing the violin. I went to the director of the program and said: “I want to also have a scholarship for the violin.” He told me that was cute, but that I was really far away from the necessary level.
That was the motivation I needed. I started to practice the violin a lot. In one year, I reached a level that I could get the scholarship with the violin. I stopped playing the flute. But for a long time, it was not clear whether I would become a professional musician. Since nobody in the family was a musician, I always felt it's more a hobby. When I came to the end of my school education, I had to decide whether I would study music and put my time into practicing for the entrance exam, or whether I would fully concentrate on school and get high marks to study medicine and become a veterinarian, because I love animals and nature. I decided to go with music, but always with the intention of using my voice as a musician to transport messages, to target social problems, social difficulties, and to give more to the audience or to the society than “only music.”
When and how did you try to implement your vision of giving more than “just” music?
I was fifteen, sixteen, and I told myself: if I become a musician, I want to find a different way to be a musician. I didn’t know how difficult this would make my life. As a student, I began moderating all my concerts. This was not very common ten years ago. Now, after COVID, it's more common, even the chief conductors of big orchestras give introductions before concerts. But even today, if you're the soloist, you don't really talk at the concert. I was moderating even the normal class concerts, introducing a piece to the audience, and the audience really liked it, because not everybody who comes to our concerts is musically highly trained and educated. My mindset was, let's explain the piece to the people who don't know it, so they understand it better and can use their imagination better.
Back then, I had discussions: “Lea, why are you doing that? Either you play so well that they understand, or you don't!” I find that ridiculous. It’s not pop music where you listen to the text. If it's a song about heartbreak, nobody will think about a smiley kid having a great day. I always had people telling me: “Lea, just shut up, no talking on stage.” I had a period in my bachelor studies when everybody was telling me: “Lea, don't be different! Do exactly what the classical music business wants. Don't think about innovative things. Nobody wants innovation. Nobody wants new things. Nobody wants new programs. Nobody wants a musician who uses their own voice to moderate, to talk about topics. Just be silent and try to fit into the box. Otherwise, you will make your life very difficult.”
For a year or two, I really tried to fit into this box. I was practicing eight hours a day. Now I know it's not really healthy to practice eight hours. But I think we all go through this craziness when we think, if we just practice, practice, practice, we will become the best. But I cannot just “play” and not do anything beyond that. Then came COVID, and I broke out of the box again. I had time to ask myself what I wanted, instead of everybody telling me: “Try to fit in.” During the first year of COVID, I went down the road of sustainability, of nature protection and the environment.
How did you become a climate ambassador?
COVID was a huge thing, but there was something much bigger going on, even during COVID time: climate change. I was thinking: I don't really see musicians talking about it. I developed this initiative, “Music for our planet.” I did the first action in 2020 together with the “Orchester des Wandels” (Orchestra of Change). I called on musicians and orchestras to share a one-minute video on social media on the day of the global climate strike, introducing the video with the phrase: “I play for our future planet. We have no planet b.” The intention was to bring the climate topic into the classical bubble.
I was also doing a second master's degree at that time in cultural media management in Hamburg, in addition to my master's degree in violin. Whenever I could choose a topic, I navigated it in the direction of sustainability, to see what was happening in the cultural industry. I quickly realized that there wasn’t really something happening at the time.
In the last five years, things have started happening. Things are also moving because the “Last Generation” was often so direct with their actions, people couldn’t ignore the subject. I don't want to say if I like what they do or don't. But since they existed, my work got much easier, because five years ago, I was the radical one just because I was talking about climate change. Now, everybody is like: “Oh, Lea, that's great. We invite you for a workshop, because you are not sticking yourself to anything anywhere. We are more than happy to open the stage for you and to listen to you.” That’s the weird thing: everybody is judging what the “Last Generation” did, but they actually made people more open to listen to people like me.
Things have developed in the last five years in the cultural sector, but it mostly stops when it comes to communicating with audience. More and more concert houses are doing something backstage, like trying to develop a more sustainable way of management and business. But when it comes to putting these things on the website, their marketing team says: “Let's not put it there. We don't want to be in this green bubble.” Instead of communicating what they are doing, they're hiding it in order to not to be labeled “left” or green. They are afraid of losing subscribers, and that people don't want to hear anything about sustainability in the concert business. They don’t want to distract their audience. This is right now the biggest issue. Everybody talks about sustainability, but when it comes to communicating with the audience, it pretty much stops.
What are the positive developments that you've seen in the last five years?
First of all, you can talk about the topic of sustainability. You can mention it to organizers. But whether they will change something or not, that's still a very open question. Second of all, many concert houses and theaters are now open to take the first step in sustainable development: the first step is always making an emission calculation of their house. In Germany, especially, there are more and more free tools to make these calculations. Also, more and more people want change, whether it's managers or festival directors, but wanting is not the same thing as doing. In the past five years, they’ve made a step forward, but now it's really time to act, because we simply don't have time for these baby steps in combatting climate change.
What are the top five sustainability priorities for the classical music sector?
Everybody should calculate their emissions, a real calculation considering every aspect. It should become basic, that at the end of the year, when you calculate whether you are in a plus or a minus financially, you should do the same calculation with your emissions.
Secondly, we need to communicate these things to the audience. We have a positive weapon in the classical music business: for example, in Germany, the high culture sector – classical music venues, theatres, opera houses etc. - have a larger audience than the first, second and third German football league. Imagine the football league would go green and sustainable, and they would really drive the image of sustainability as something cool, and achievable. You can imagine what impact the cultural business could have if we really promoted this. The annual audience across the whole high culture sector in Germany is twenty-five million. Imagine if only half of them talked with one more person about sustainability. You can really drive social change about sustainability through culture.
If you take the “Bildungsauftrag” seriously, the idea that publicly funded institutions need to offer educational options to the public, then you have to give more to the public than culture, you have to care about what is happening in the social and natural environment. We could have much more impact. But there are so many people who are still afraid we will lose our subscribers, who think the audience is mostly sixty years and older, that they don't care about this topic, because it's not relevant for them and that it has nothing to do with culture, that culture is not a place to communicate sustainability, not from the stage. That's the best sentence I ever heard: “The stage is not a place for words, it's just a place for music.”
Thirdly, the management - organizers and concert houses - need to shift their business mindset into a new direction. At the moment, as management, you want your artists to play wherever, whenever, just that they get enough concerts. But concert houses, managers, festival leaders could work together to coordinate when and where artists perform to avoid unnecessary travel. When travelling was much more difficult, that was totally normal. Nowadays, because it's easy to just take a plane whenever you want, and go to the other end of the world, there are no borders to random planning. Concert organizers focus on competing, they won’t offer an artist a concert if he just performed nearby. We should all work much more together and not against each other. It’s about communicating and shifting the business mindset of when and how it makes sense to travel. Venues could also put into their contract that everybody who can take a train that would take less than five hours, has to arrive by train, but this would need to be a decision across regions so that artists don’t have an alternative nearby.
Another idea: if you're a promoter or an artist who wants to rent a concert house, it could be part of the process to ask: which energy contracts do you use? I would definitely ask that before I sign a contract to rent a hall, because that's something I don't have influence on. In the end, every concert has emissions, and around forty to fifty percent goes to the building itself, for energy, electricity, etc. and that I cannot change. But I can just choose where I want to play and where I want to go.
The last thing would be sponsoring and green banking. Green banking and green sponsoring are all about thinking where my money comes from and where I save my money. If cultural businesses would shift the money to green banks, to sustainable banks, who are investing in green energy, in solar parks, in wind parks, this would mean a real shift, because in the end, money is power. As for sponsoring, the biggest festivals always have the same type of sponsors, big brands like Rolex or Lufthansa, creating the same image. But nowadays, we have more and more brands that are producing sustainable products. For example, if you look for an energy company, choose not an energy company that produces mostly energy from fossil fuels, but one which uses solar and wind. This would also create a shift for the audience. If you suddenly see different brands as sponsors, it's a possibility for the brands to get new customers. High culture is really in in the hands of a few sponsors. For the companies, this would be a possibility to establish a “high culture image,” and not just a green, ecological, sustainable image.
These are steps everybody could take without needing a huge budget, unlike something like building reconstruction and or making a whole building more energy efficient.
What is your vision for using the concert hall as a venue to communicate directly with the audience?
The Tonhalle Düsseldorf and I won the OPUS Klassik 2024 award for innovation and sustainability for the following concept. Every month, they have three subscription concerts, they play the same program on Friday, Sunday and Monday. We turned Monday into Green Monday. It would be the same repertoire, apart from one piece, which would be a green piece about the topic of the evening. We would choose a different sustainability topic, like biodiversity or energy efficiency. A composer would write a piece about each topic. Every Green Monday, we had another topic, and we would have a “star talk” before the concert where we invited different guests to give a talk in front of the audience. One hour before the concert itself, we opened the doors and everybody could join. For the concert evening itself, we thought about one particular thing we would change. For example, heat efficiency. We changed the temperature by one degree. You can save the amount of energy that a fifty square meter flat uses per month in one concert evening. That's really something very concrete you can do.
We were communicating all this to the audience. Afterwards, we always asked the people to vote whether they liked the measure we took that evening or not. All the things we did got a democratic “yes.” The most difficult topic was the topic of food. With the vegan and vegetarian catering we offered, about sixty-something percent was for vegetarian or vegan foods, and around forty percent were against it. But I think that’s the only vote which was close. The people didn't have the feeling we were deciding something above their heads, they were part of a process of change.
We now have a new record of subscribers. We have the proof that the audience is not running away when you do that. I think that this is exactly what culture can do: switch the narrative in the communication of sustainability, because that's what we need. We need a new narrative about sustainability. It is not “extra” and annoying and not needed. It's not just something for a few weird climate activists who are flipping out on the street. It's something that we all need, because climate activists are ambassadors. I always say about myself, we don't try to save the planet Earth, because planet Earth is going to survive climate change. We are trying to save humanity. That’s what many people simply don't get, that there's no way around.
What changes have you introduced in your daily practice as a musician that makes it more sustainable?
In my personal life, I only buy second-hand clothes, I eat vegan, or vegetarian.
The biggest and hardest thing I'm doing is deciding which offers I'm taking and which ones not. If I get an invitation to play at a private wedding in Milano on a Friday evening for half an hour, with the offer to be flown in and flown back the next day, I will say: “That's very kind, but no. I wish you a nice wedding.” Because this would have nothing to do with what I stand for as a musician. That’s the biggest thing you have to decide as a musician. Who do you want to be as a musician? It’s no longer just a question of musical interpretation, but also of social values, and I know that not everybody has the choice. I very rarely fly. It's not completely avoidable, but whenever I can, I take the train, also a night train. This also means not being afraid of the confrontation with organizers. For thirty, forty years, they have checked for the cheapest flight. I say: we have to figure out another solution, for example train tickets.
What advice would you give to young musicians?
I would advise young people to try to do what you think is right. Be critical about what people tell you, what people think is normal and what you should do. They might tell you to never decline a concert for reasons of sustainability. If it feels right for you to decline it, then do it! It’s your life and it's your decision how sustainable you want to live.
I think it's very important that we have a new generation, that tries to have other expectations of the business than being only the “musician on the stage.” We are the most important person for everybody, for the promoter and for the audience, because the audience comes only because of us, and the promoter knows that. They need us, but actually, in any kind of deal making, we are often the last consideration, especially if you're not the biggest name. We should try to grow a generation that really expects changes, because only then we will have the possibility to really “move the elephant.” Never underestimate the small things you are doing, however small they might be, for sustainability. Be critical about the system and the business itself. Don't take anything for granted just because we have always done it like that. That’s the most common sentence I hear: '“We have always done it that way, why should we change it.” Be aware of that sentence. Mostly, it's just a habit and there is no real reason behind it. We can change habits easily. If there is a reason, we have to find a solution. From the older people who have the power and the name, I would expect much more of them to try to develop the business. Listen to somebody who comes with a new idea. Don't be so stuck in your classical box.