Climate and music (Toward development of the interdisciplinary climate and cultural understanding education of ESD with special attention to the seasonal cycle and seasonal feeling around Japan and Europe)

Abstract. Most music pieces have their own cultural background, and the origin and expression of songs are closely related not only to their languages and customs but also to the regional characteristics of natural environment including the climate and its seasonal cycles. Thus, scientific study of the climate and seasonal cycle in a regional context would be also useful for understanding the context of music, as well as the other background. Inversely, such approach enables us to sympathize with the feeling of the people and to sing and appreciate the songs, even for the other regions.

By the way, climate education is an important part of the ESD (Education for Sustainable Development), relating to education on environment, disaster prevention, climate variability, and also cultural understanding. Furthermore, it could contribute greatly to promoting the Fundamental ESD Literacy such as thinking of various complex relations, diversity, understanding of Heterogeneous others, and so on.

Based on the above concepts, we have continued the interdisciplinary integration of the knowledge on climate and music, and have developed the crosscutting study plans on the climate and cultural understanding education. A part of these results have been just published in a Japanese book titled by Climate and music (Cultural understanding and ESD spreading from the Doors of Song) (Kato, H. and K. Kato 2019), building mainly our papers written in Japanese, some of which were also introduced at EGU2014–2019. This article will re-integrate our above results, mainly for the climate and songs/traditional seasonal events around Germany, Northern Europe and Japan.