Climate and songs of spring/May around Germany: Interdisciplinary lesson practice at university on the regional variety of the seasonal cycles and seasonal feelings as an important base to perceive the changing climate

To promote the students’ ability to perceive how the climate has been changing and to understand how it is likely to change in the future is an essential base for the Climate Change Education (CCE) in ESD (Education for Sustainable Development). The change in the climate in each area could be recognized rather easily with the “distortion of the seasonal cycle” there also by the non-experts.

It should be noted that the detailed cycles show rather different features from region to region, even within middle and higher latitudes. Thus, in the CCE, deeper understanding of the detailed seasonal cycles themselves would be also necessary. By the way, interdisciplinary approach with cultural understanding education such as music, and so on, sometimes gives a great help for understanding of the regional climate including the detailed seasonal cycles. In addition, selection of the study areas or targets which are not so familiar to the students in their usual lives could also provides considerable advantage for deepening the students’ perception of the heterogeneous others. Based on the above concepts, we have continued the interdisciplinary studies as summarized by Kato et al. (2023).

This time, interdisciplinary approach including the lesson practice for the university students with the above concept was made on a topic of the climate and songs of spring/May around Germany. Around Germany, there are so many songs and literature works in which “May” is treated as the special season. However, without knowing the detailed seasonal cycle around Germany, it seems rather difficult for the people in the other regions, such as in Japan, to realize why they celebrate not simply spring but especially “May”.

According to our analysis, May is the very month when the appearance frequency of the days with daily mean temperature corresponding to the ordinary summer days increases rapidly, while the intermittent appearance of the extremely low temperature days terminates completely around the end of March. With considering such climatic backgrounds, musical expressions of spring/May in several German lieder, such as “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai” (In the especially wonderful month of May) by Schumann, “Andres Maienlied (Hexenlied)” by Mendelssohn, “Trockne Blumen” by Schubert, and so on, were analyzed for demonstrating the importance of the word “May” in these lieder for the interdisciplinary lesson at university. In the lesson practice, details of the climate and seasonal cycle around Germany in association with the seasonal feeling of the special season May were firstly presented, by comparing with those around Japan. Then, several German lieder, a film music, etc. were appreciated, paying attention to the relation between expressions of the songs and their climatic backgrounds. It seems that the students were able to realize the characteristic expressions of the songs relating to the seasonal feeling of “the special season May” around Germany, mainly from the song lyrics, although how to promote further the students' deepening of such perception including musical expressions themselves together with the climate data is a remaining problem.