I’m passionate about environmental topics and I’ve written several songs about the beauty of our Earth.

I composed the worldbeat tune Let’s Clean it UP! in 2013 as the finale for Global Water Dances-Cincinnati, a vibrant community dance & music event presented at Serpentine Wall, downtown Cincinnati, during Paddlefest 2013 & again in 2015.

Composing this piece was a collaborative process incorporating input from the entire corps of dancers and musicians. I facilitated an iterative brainstorming process using ideation, divergence, and convergence to determine the best statements to set to music.

Step 1: The performers each contributed two or three brief statements about water, its meaning and importance.  I collected the statements and compiled them into one master list

Step 2: At the next week’s rehearsal I presented all the statements the group had created and asked each performer to select their 3 favorite statements. I collected everyone’s favorites and identified the top 12 statements which received the most votes.

Step 3: From the top 12 vote-getters, I selected 6 statements which seemed most useful for composition, then created the song from them:

Let’s Clean it Up!

Water gives us life. Without it we will not survive.

When the well is dry we know the worth of water

There is no life without water

More people die from water than war

We can’t all live upstream

Then added an ancient Proverb (Rabbi Hillel, AD 71) as a call to action:

If not us, who? If not now, when?

Global Water Dances-Cincinnati (GWD-Cincy) was the brainchild of renowned Choreographer and Movement Therapist Fanchon Shur. Working closely together she & I developed and directed a corps of around 100 area dancers, musicians, and volunteer crew to present our homage to the sanctity of clean, available water for all people & animals on the planet. We timed our performance to occur during Paddlefest, a large annual gathering of paddlers on the beautiful Ohio River.

Excerpts from our professionally produced video of the 2013 performance are found on this website in the “Compositions, Soundtracks, Audio Production” section of this website.

I’m featuring the song here as a stand-alone plea to honor the sanctity of water and inspire us humans to take note of this irreplaceable, limited, and vital source of life.

Personnel: 

Shari Lauter: Composition, Production, Music Direction, Gourd water drums, world percussion

GWD World Percussion Orchestra: Baba Charles Miller, Dr. Larry Sherman, Dr. Pete Carels, Sebastian Donati, Madeleine Mitchell, Lauri Aultman, Cherri Forest

Suzanne Bona: Flute

Bjorn Knudsen: Bass

Kathryne Gardette: Lead Vocalist

Cincinnati GWD Choir featuring Reverend Todd O’Neal and the choir from House of Joy, Cincinnati