Betsey Biggs

Composer, writer, director, editor, and producer of feature-length music-film sung to life by members of Moving Star vocal ensemble and Hazel Biggs, using sea ice data, archival footage and sounds, images, and stories collected through fieldwork on the Greenland Ice Sheet and in Ilullisat, Greenland. 4k color, Dolby Atmos sound. 74 minutes.

[See also MELT (Topographic Remix) and they called it.

Composer, writer, director, editor, and producer: Betsey Biggs

[Full credits below]

Since 2017, I have been at work on my largest project to date, MELT: The Memory of Ice — a feature-length cinematic song cycle which Boston's WGBH describes as “an immersive music-film… incredibly stunning visuals… an extraordinary work.” The film is a composition for sound and image, a contemplative invitation to sit bedside in communion with our earth’s body melting and spilling through climate change. Imagining a world where ice is a distant memory, MELT posits itself as an archive of the beauty of ice and snow for future generations who may never experience winter.

I structured the image around the music; some of my major influences included Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass’s hypnotic music-film Koyaanisqatsi, Julia Wolfe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning choral work, Anthracite Fields, which sets oral histories of coal miners to music, Meredith Monk’s meditative vocal music, particularly Facing North, and Sharon Lockhart’s slow, spare experimental documentary, Pine Flat. Like Koyaanisqatsi, my film employs neither plot nor character; instead, music and image are juxtaposed to create a powerful visual and auditory experience. The project, which cost $55,000 to make, was funded by internal grants from CU’s Graduate Committee on the Arts and Humanities (2018) and de Castro Research Award (2018), a competitive faculty fellowship from CU’s Center for Humanities and the Arts (2019), and dozens of crowd-sourced donations. MELT: The Memory of Ice also advanced to the second round of the Creative Capital Award, though I was not selected for an award.(1)

In the summer of 2019, after two years of fundraising and grant-writing, I headed to Greenland for four weeks with my 5-year-old, my mother, and my former CU student, cinematographer Troy Fairbanks. We spent our time getting to know locals, watching mesmerized as meltwater flowed out of the Greenland Ice Sheet and icebergs tumbled down the Ilulissat Icefjord, listening to the sounds of birds and ice and sled dogs and water, and wondering how long things would stay this way. I have struggled to give my child the same intimacy with the wild I enjoyed, and I found myself imagining a world where ice and snow were long-lost stories passed down by elders.

We returned with many hours of sound recordings, sketches of vocal music, and 4K and drone footage of the people and places of Greenland. Shortly thereafter, I invited New York-based vocal ensemble The M6 to collaborate, and performed an early and fairly different iteration of the material at the “Musical Ecologies” series in Brooklyn, NY (detailed in this portfolio as Music for MELT). Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic and its restrictions on travel and gatherings delayed the workshop and recording plans I had scheduled with The M6 in March and June 2020, and as the pandemic wore on, the vocal ensemble disbanded and dispersed. I focused my attention on projects more adaptable to pandemic restrictions (We Are Here FM and The Conduction Series), and continued to develop MELT: The Memory of Ice on my own. Eventually, I found an even more powerful collaboration with the New York-based improvising vocal ensemble Moving Star (an artistic community partner of Carnegie Hall). I finalized the libretto, score, and electronic music, acquired a producer and executive producer, raised money for postproduction, recorded and mixed with Jeff Cook and Michael Hammond in New York and Sean Winters in Colorado in the summer of 2024, and finished the final edit of the film in September 2024.

I call MELT: The Memory of Ice a cinematic song cycle because it is grounded by seven songs, each ten minutes long, each accompanied by a single panoramic Arctic landscape. An immersive soundtrack, rich with glimmers of Arctic sound — calving ice, sled dogs, trickling meltwater — surrounds the spellbinding vocal ensemble Moving Star and my own daughter chanting an unfathomable list of winter’s loss — flurries, ice skates, snow angels — while in each song, a landscape of melting Arctic ice, increasingly interrupted by audiovisual memory-flashes, slowly passes by. The timing of these memory-flashes is controlled by software I created in Max translating extant sea ice data from 1979-2023 into probability-based timing — the more melted sea ice in any given year, the higher the probability that at any moment an audiovisual memory-flash made from archival snapshots and sonic glitches will break into the existing music and image. At first, these memory-flashes occur only occasionally, then build to an almost constant climax, disappearing at the 50-minute mark, when a gradually fading and multiplying child’s voice sings a litany of words for ice and snow: “they called them ice floes / they called it calving / they called them glaciers,” mirroring the very first song, when the adult vocal ensemble chants “we called them ice floes / we called it calving / we called it sledding / we called them snowy owls.” The ice melts on. With ambient music made from Arctic sounds, aerial footage of glaciers giving birth to icebergs, and visual portraits of Arctic locals, visitors and scientists, MELT: The Memory of Ice evokes the experience of the north, acting as a powerful and emotional reminder of the physical immediacy of climate change.

MELT: The Memory of Ice premiered at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s Infinity (IMAX) Theater in September 2024 with a crowd of nearly two hundred people as part of the Digerati Experimental Media Festival. It is currently under consideration for dozens of festivals and other screening opportunities, was selected for both the prestigious Visions du Réel Film Market in Nyon, Switzerland (2) and the Agora Doc Market in Thessaloniki, Greece, and will screen at the 2025 Lake County Film Festival in Lake Forest, Illinois; academic screenings and visits are also currently being scheduled at several institutions including Emerson College, Mount Holyoke College, and Simon Fraser University. I am still in the process of getting MELT: The Memory of Ice out into the world, and I anticipate further screenings. I also plan to release its soundtrack as an album. I was recently commissioned by the Peninsula Women’s Chorus to compose an arrangement of Song 1: We Called It, and look forward to a performance of it in Spring 2026. Finally, I very much hope to stage MELT: The Memory of Ice as a live multimedia opera in New York City, where the singers reside, in the next three years.

(1) According to an email Creative Capital sent to me on June 14, 2018, the top 20% of the 5,200 letters of inquiry advanced to the second round. Only 57 projects were ultimately selected for funding.

(2) Only 435 films out of 3,437 submissions were selected for the 2025 Visions du Réel Film Market according to the Visions du Réel Film Market 2025 catalogue and the Visions du Réel Film Festival website.

FULL CREDITS

Composer, writer, director, and editor:
Betsey Biggs

Producers:
Betsey Biggs
Susan Capitelli

Executive Producer:
Jill Mazursky

Contributing Producers:
James and Elinor Biggs
Susan Capitelli
Ann Reeves and Bill Swanson
John Wrobel

Director of Photography:
Troy Fairbanks

Vocal ensemble
Moving Star
(Sasha Bogdanowitsch
Emily Eagen
Tim Kiah
Jeremy Lydic
Holly Nadal
Onome
Peter Sciscioli)

Solo vocalist:
Hazel Biggs

Recording engineer & vocal mix:
Jeff Cook
2nd Story Sound

Music producer & mixing engineer:
Michael Hammond
Big Ship Audio

Atmos surround sound mix:
Sean Winters

Postproduction services:
Peder Morgenthaler, Frame Linear
Mass FX

Special thanks:
Eric Coombs Esmail
Christian Hammons
Amy Harrison
Tara Knight
Sharifa Lafon
Jeremiah Moore
Laurids Andersen Sonne

GRANTS, AWARDS, COMMISSIONS

2025: Visions du Réel Film Market, Nyon, Switzerland.

2025: Agora Doc Market, Thessaloniki, Greece (declined)

2018-2024: Crowd-sourced donations ($33,319)

2018: University of Colorado, Graduate Committee on the Arts and Humanities Award ($3,000)

2018: University of Colorado, de Castro Research Award, ($5,000)

2018: University of Colorado, CHA Faculty Fellowship (two-course teaching leave)

2018: Second round, Creative Capital Award

SCREENINGS

2025: Green Film Festival, San Francisco, CA, USA.

2025: Lake County Film Festival, Lake Forest, IL, USA.

2024 (world premiere): Denver Museum of Nature & Science IMAX Theatre, as part of the Digerati Experimental Media Festival, Denver, CO, USA.

PRESS

2025: Jared Bowen, “January 6, 2025 - Arctic Voices, The New Garden Society, and upcoming screenings at The Brattle Theatre,” The Culture Show, WGBH, Boston, MA, USA. January 6, 2025.