Headwaters
fl, ob, clar, bsn, hn, string quintet (2vln, vla, vcl, bs)
The headwaters of the Huron river lie in Indian Springs Metropark in Oakland County in southeast Michigan; in the spring of 2008 I took a walk with my friend Keith Taylor there. The Huron river flows past my house; it’s been dammed 17 times (and probably damned as well), polluted, bridged, and hemmed in by residential development as well as industry. It’s even been straightened out in places. All of its one-hundred-and-thirty-six-mile course is thoroughly populated. I’m told it might well be one of the most studied rivers in the US, so it’s not necessarily associated with wildness and mystery. In fact a local song refers to it rather dismissively as “just a working river...”.
At the start of the Huron, the sound of the highway is still there in the distance, as are the local traffic and train whistles, but the place seems somehow to attend fully to itself. You cantell that it is an old place—the plants are all native, the trees venerable, and there is a palpable sense of of the place obeying its own nature. It’s hard to be in the presence of the first gathering of waters without feeling a touch of magic.
Moving from the bright scrub bursting with birdcalls and into the wooded swamp, the air turns cold. Dew–drops fall heavily from the trees onto the broad leaves of abundant skunk cabbage with bursts of rubbery thwacks. Here is where the first pools arise in darkness and begin to gather together, each one a little micro-climate, with it’s own shape, color, temperature, depth, and rate of vibration. The connections between them are often unseen, and little rivulets that may or may not seem to consolidate the flow twist off quietly in all directions. Once the water has reached the surface, it begins to settle, imperceptibly gathering down through the muddy places and the marshes, to pause in the opening expanse of a woodland lake before slowly dropping in a great curving arc all the way to Lake Erie.
This piece was inspired by that place. While it is difficult to describe the ways in which the natural world might find its way into something as abstract as music, the movement, the stillness, and the qualities of attention I experienced in those surroundings form the wet soil that the rather fragile fronds of the piece grew from. The music winds and gently swirls around small chordal centers, leaving some questions unanswered, and begins and ends with stylized birdcalls.
EKC
fl, ob, clar, bsn, hn, string quintet (2vln, vla, vcl, bs)
The headwaters of the Huron river lie in Indian Springs Metropark in Oakland County in southeast Michigan; in the spring of 2008 I took a walk with my friend Keith Taylor there. The Huron river flows past my house; it’s been dammed 17 times (and probably damned as well), polluted, bridged, and hemmed in by residential development as well as industry. It’s even been straightened out in places. All of its one-hundred-and-thirty-six-mile course is thoroughly populated. I’m told it might well be one of the most studied rivers in the US, so it’s not necessarily associated with wildness and mystery. In fact a local song refers to it rather dismissively as “just a working river...”.
At the start of the Huron, the sound of the highway is still there in the distance, as are the local traffic and train whistles, but the place seems somehow to attend fully to itself. You cantell that it is an old place—the plants are all native, the trees venerable, and there is a palpable sense of of the place obeying its own nature. It’s hard to be in the presence of the first gathering of waters without feeling a touch of magic.
Moving from the bright scrub bursting with birdcalls and into the wooded swamp, the air turns cold. Dew–drops fall heavily from the trees onto the broad leaves of abundant skunk cabbage with bursts of rubbery thwacks. Here is where the first pools arise in darkness and begin to gather together, each one a little micro-climate, with it’s own shape, color, temperature, depth, and rate of vibration. The connections between them are often unseen, and little rivulets that may or may not seem to consolidate the flow twist off quietly in all directions. Once the water has reached the surface, it begins to settle, imperceptibly gathering down through the muddy places and the marshes, to pause in the opening expanse of a woodland lake before slowly dropping in a great curving arc all the way to Lake Erie.
This piece was inspired by that place. While it is difficult to describe the ways in which the natural world might find its way into something as abstract as music, the movement, the stillness, and the qualities of attention I experienced in those surroundings form the wet soil that the rather fragile fronds of the piece grew from. The music winds and gently swirls around small chordal centers, leaving some questions unanswered, and begins and ends with stylized birdcalls.
EKC