Bright Shiny Things Releases Seasons of Change, an Afrofuturist Meditation on Climate Change From Violinist/Composer Curtis Stewart

BRIGHT SHINY THINGS RELEASES SEASONS OF CHANGE, AN AFROFUTURIST MEDITATION ON CLIMATE CHANGE FROM MULTI-GRAMMY®-NOMINATED VIOLINIST/COMPOSER CURTIS STEWART

Digital soundscape incorporates deconstruction of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and recorded conversations with unhoused populations

“Combining omnivory and brilliance. He is a giant…”
— The New York Times on Curtis Stewart

“[Stewart’s] über passionate and virtuosic outpourings … grapple with reconciling the classical and jazz camps… it was abundantly clear that Stewart is capable of practically anything on his instrument.”

— Downbeat

NEW YORK, NY–On June 20, 2025, Bright Shiny Things releases Seasons of Change [BSTC-0222], a recomposition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons by violinist Curtis Stewart that serves as the frame for an

Afrofuturist meditation on climate change, class, and the nature of digital memory. The album blends classical forms with fragmented digital soundscapes that incorporate the recorded voices of unhoused populations Stewart encountered in Phoenix, Arizona, as well as newly written texts. Stewart is joined on the album for cadenzas in the first, second, and fourth movement by three other featured violinists – Lara St. John, Njioma Grievous, and Charles Yang – but otherwise all the music on the album is his own playing, multi-tracked into a layered ensemble. Seasons of Change is available for pre-order here.

The underlying narrative Stewart has devised for Seasons of Change envisions a future after climate change has ravaged the planet, when only a few people remain who have forgotten their history. To know where they have come from, they rely on an AI that retells the past differently, adapting it to each person in order to help them survive in the harsh new world. History becomes fluid and ever-changing, like a dreamscape.

The emotional core of Seasons of Change is a series of conversations and recorded interviews with people experiencing homelessness in Phoenix, Arizona. The conversations were facilitated by a partnership between the Phoenix Symphony and Circle the City, an organization dedicated to providing healthcare to unhoused individuals in Phoenix’s Maricopa County. Giving a much-needed voice to people for whom climate change is an acutely experienced daily reality, these recordings are punctuated by Stewart’s own original texts, which themselves echo and deconstruct elements of the four poems Vivaldi wrote as the basis for his concertos. These elements come together on Seasons of Change to explore the question: Who will climate change erase first?

As Stewart portrays the gradual disintegration of the climate, his movements also reflect a gradual erosion of Vivaldi’s influence on the piece. The first two, “A Recent Summer” and “Fallback,” contain the most material from the original concertos, while “Again” and “Life Times” grow ever more distant from it. The recorded conversations are meanwhile arranged in a separate trajectory, moving from a sense of pain and hardship in the first movement to a note of hope at the end, as though the renewal symbolized by spring takes place whether the climate can achieve it or not.