In My Third Act: Warren Senders on Making Noise that Matters

In this month's In My Third Act, Lynn Armentrout speaks with Warren Senders of Third Act Massachusetts, Creatives, and the Welcome Team. He is a musician, educator, and activist who stands outside with a sign about climate change every single day.

 

Every weekday morning, 50 weeks a year, Warren Senders stands for an hour at a busy intersection near his home, holding a sign about climate change. Sometimes he sings. If, like one of the regular commuters who shouts “get a job!”, you assume Warren had nothing better to do, you would be mistaken.

A musician, educator, and activist, Warren lives in Medford, Massachusetts, with his wife, Vijaya Sundaram, a musician, poet, and English professor, and their college-aged daughter. For nearly all of his 67 years, Warren has lived in the world of music. Although he has studied, written, and performed in many genres, his primary area of expertise is Hindustani classical singing, which he studied for years in the oral pedagogical tradition with master teachers in both America and India.

 

 

While Warren felt an immediate affinity for this specific art form, he has always been fascinated by music as a whole, as an expression of human culture, values, and interconnectedness, as a way a culture embeds and transmits to future generations its understanding of time, narrative, and meaning. He notes that no human society has yet been discovered that has no music.

Seeing music this way is integral to Warren’s activism, which is rooted in the Indian concept of time. In Hindi, the word for tomorrow and yesterday is the same; the individual carries within an equidistant past and future. For Warren, this engenders a responsibility to teach the songs he has been taught, some of which go back 20 or 30 pedagogical generations, in order to ensure their survival 20 or 30 generations into the future. Climate action is therefore intrinsic to the survival of meaning in what he does. “How can you have a future full of song if you don’t have a future?”

Warren’s degree is in music systems. He created the curriculum himself at a college that had no faculty and no longer exists, just like the education reform movement that gave rise to it. He studied ethnomusicology, African music, Western music, Indian classical music, music history, acoustics, the physics of sound, anthropology, social justice movements and the role music played in them, how to build musical instruments, and how to train his voice and hands. It was up to him to find his teachers and compensate them, basically home-schooling himself through college, and writing a few dozen grant proposals in order to graduate. 

 

 

Joining the music education faculty at the New England Conservatory, Warren eventually ended up in interdisciplinary studies, a better fit for him. Today he teaches a course in which students make their own instruments from recycled and trash materials, and then teach one another music using those instruments. While science fiction imagines music in the future as involving elaborate computer consoles, according to Warren, it’s far more likely that the vast majority of music will always be made “with whatever’s left over after we eat.” Bones and skin, a dried-out gourd, once. Moving into the 21st century, a tin can, plastic water bottle, plastic membranes. By turning these materials into musical instruments instead of trash, we add, rather than sacrifice, value.

It wasn’t until 2009, when his daughter was four and his duties as a stay-at-home parent eased some, that Warren was able to fully embrace environmental activism. He began by starting a series of benefit concerts, including one in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the 2009 Global Day of Action sponsored by 350.org. He spent the next 11 years putting on benefit concerts in categories of “playing for the planet” or “world music against climate change.” The musicians didn’t necessarily sing about climate or perform nature-themed pieces—they just presented their art, its own justification for climate action.

 

 

Warren’s activist conscience was cultivated early in life. He grew up in the 1960s with parents who were socially conscious university professors. He went to left-wing summer camps where he learned the Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger songs. Warren’s father had strong opinions, but he was not an activist, while his mother threw herself into social justice work post-retirement. Warren recalls that she was getting arrested “pretty much all the time.”

Warren has been arrested three times. He was part of the Roxbury 13, a group that engaged in civil disobedience at a pipeline construction site and was the first to successfully use the necessity defense in the ensuing court proceeding. Warren’s arrests have brought him many hours of community service.

As for the weekday morning vigil, he has been doing it without fail since 2015. He may not always feel like leaving his warm home and morning coffee to stand roadside for an hour, but consistency creates ritual, and he is clearest and most present during this part of his day, simply standing with his sign, bearing witness to climate change.

In addition to the daily vigils, Warren sends 10 voter postcards every day in an off election year, 20 in an on year, and 30 in a presidential year. Every day. Between 2010 and 2014, he wrote a letter to the editor about climate, to newspapers and magazines all over the world, every day. He’s not religious, but believes “very deeply that there’s a moral dimension to repeated action.”

 

 

Warren has several roles in Third Act. He handles the music and chat for the Welcome Team calls. He is in a Third Act Creatives supgroup that creates a podcast called Cool Tunes for a Hot Planet, and he is in the Massachusetts Working Group, where he writes a letter to the editor—you guessed it, every day.  

Being in Third Act hasn’t changed Warren’s view of his responsibilities, but he does feel a greater degree of “intellectual, philosophical, and ethical consanguinity” with the people he’s met in Third Act than any other activist organization so far.

As for hope, it isn’t something you feel. Hope is something that you do. Hope is action. Every day.