(Sketch for Williams Lake, July 2003, Taos, New Mexico)
Songs of Love and Longing (2001-2003)
20>>21 featuring Mary MacKenzie, soprano and Yael Manor, piano
American Composers Alliance
Composers Now! Festival
Monday February 18
Symphony Space, New York City
After the concert where my Songs
of Love and Longing was performed, the composers were asked questions
onstage. I had prepared remarks
instead of being spontaneous because I prefer a considered response when asked
to participate in these public events. Unfortunately, I hadn't read the
questions carefully, which the moderator Beth Wiemann, current president of the
American Composers' Alliance, had sent well ahead of time. Consequently what I
prepared didn't work and I had to comment spontaneously after all. So I've
decided to use this blog as a way of communicating my current thoughts about the Songs. The Symphony Space performance can be heard here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g20UHFOxSA8
The Songs (performed by Leslie Umphrey and Falko Steinbach) can also be streamed on Spotify or purchased (as part of the CD Devisadero) by following this link:
This is what I wrote just after a rehearsal with the performers who I thought did a wonderful job:
Recovery versus discovery; experience versus "an
experience" (Dewey); to walk as long as it takes until I stop thinking.
What happens then?
After years of reading Henry David Thoreau, I decided to
"experience" Thoreau, to discover him and the world through, for
example, doing what he did, in this case taking very long walks. In his essay
"Walking," Thoreau wrote that a walk for him was of little use unless
it lasted four or more hours. So I did the same. I noticed for me that the result
was physical exhaustion and mental emptiness. My mind stopped talking. I
started listening. The poetry for Songs
of Love and Longing, written in four places--Williams Lake at the foot of
Wheeler Peak near the Taos Ski Valley; the Rio Grange Gorge Trail, just north
of Taos, New Mexico; and the Osha Loop Trail in the Sandia Mountains near
Albuquerque--took three years to write. The music took just one summer, during
a three-month residency in Taos thanks to the Wurlitzer Foundation. After daily
walks in the Taos mountains, the music poured out like water onto the parched
ground that inspired those words.
I write this having just heard Mary and Yael perform so
beautifully in rehearsal that it brought everything back, what I've written
about how I came to compose the piece, as well as all the secrets I didn't
write, which hopefully keep the songs as mysterious to listeners as they do to
me. After all, now ten years later, I'm a listener too. If wildness, as Thoreau
once wrote, "is the preservation of the world," then I would add:
mystery helps keep it beautiful.
When I began writing the texts ("Osha Loop," the last song, had already been written as poetry but I didn't consider it for the Songs until I composed the music in 2003), I traveled to Taos, where in the fall of 2000 I was inspired to finish my composition for soprano saxophone and wind quintet, "a little light, in great darkness". I planned to walk in the mountain wilderness but Taos in October was already too snow covered for that. Instead it was recommended that I walk along the Rio Grande Gorge, one of the most beautiful geological sites in the world. Where I walked, just south of the gorge bridge, the gorge depth is several hundred feet, with spectacular views both into the gorge itself and of the mountains to the east. Here is the first sketch I wrote for the Songs, in a notebook I'd bought in Taos for that purpose:
.jpg)
I also use my notebooks, which I always carry with me during walks and where I have sketched out every composition since 1995, as a diary and this is what I wrote that day in Taos:
"The sound of a cricket, its vibrato, it sings as long
as it can. Breathes? A pause, after several repetitions. Repeats. Once, twice
(longer), three times, four times, five (very short). Pause. Six (long), seven
(long). Another cricket finally answers at a distance a half-step higher. Other
one enters twice. They overlap. Then the other stops. When it next returns it
comes in on the same pitch as the first and sings a long time. As I leave them
the crickets are still singing, sometimes together, sometimes a half-step
apart. Or did I just think I heard them at the same pitch?
I love being in a place where I can't distinguish between
idea and experience.
This area more than any place I've ever been gives me a
feeling of balance. I'm walking through a stark desert, nothing but scraggly
bushes, volcanic rock, and tarantulas. And yet all around me are these
beautiful things--amazing cloud patterns, the mountains, the gorge ever
present. And all of sudden that starkness, it too becomes beautiful, and that
produces in me a deepness that I feel in my heart, a quietness, a feeling of
well-being I very rarely experience. Only in walks. In the mountains near the
DH Lawrence ranch, the wind blowing through the trees sounds like water. Here
the wind blows near the Rio Grande and you can compare the two sounds, wind and
water. Interestingly enough, I have to stand near the edge, so I can see the
water, in order to hear it, or at least hear it as equal to the wind. In fact,
the wind fades as I draw closer and I can hear only the water away from the
edge when the wind dies down. I wonder what it's like down there looking up?
seeing an eagle fly over the gorge
seeing a bee being pulled into the ground
seeing a bee being eaten by ants
I usually don't like walking a trail that isn't a circle
because I don't like to repeat, I don't like to turn around. But this time my
return does not feel like a repetition. I missed things first time around. I'm
also seeing for the first time what was behind my back the last. It's easy to
forget and important to remember that the beauty of this place requires shadows.
Now sitting on a bench, looking again at the bridge, the
mountains, the sky, the river, the gorge. I had planned on woods, mountains, trails
that are narrow because the terrain is dense. But this place has always been
about the unexpected for me. My last time here I had expected to finish my
piece in the wilderness, which I did. But woods was what I'd expected, not the
burned down remains of one. Today I found inspiration in the desert seeing bugs
instead of bears, shrubs instead of trees. The unexpected, the surprise. The
place of not knowing is the only place I ever get anything. To walk until you
stop thinking. Only then do I ever hear anything. Don't talk. Listen."
10.10.01 Taos (Rio Grande Gorge Trail)
Here are the words as they eventually became, in total, my Songs of Love and Longing:
I.
Williams Lake (8 July, 2003)
oh
love, how fleeting
nature,
our nature
in
moments
measured,
no not
measured
in moments
instead
fixed somehow
in
photographs, or
memories
beyond
measure
an
infinity, that
lasts
only an instant
everything
else:
imagined
conceived
thought
we
live from moment to moment
moment
to fleeting moment
an
eternity of such moments
an
eternity between . . .
II.
Rio Grande Gorge Trail (10 October, 2001)
to
express
what
cannot be spoken
what
words cannot
express
our
secrets
from
each other
from
ourselves
to
hear it at least
to
feel it
that
would
be enough.
III.
Song Without Words
IV.
Rio Grande Gorge Trail (10 October 2001)
the
touch
of
someone who wants you
the
electricity of that
the
ephemerality of that
so
fleeting
so
soon a memory
longing
replaces
desire.
V.
Osha Loop Trail (5 October 2002)
of
what beauty
felt
no,
seen and felt
together
just
not thought
no,
the wind
heard
then vanished
the
quietness blows softly
not
heard, seen and
then
heard
again
oh
waves
of
beauty
oh
wash
me
clean
of
all
that's
not worthy
sounds
of planes
remind
me
take
me, that former self
that
deserves to be
on
that plane
as
it disappears and
the
wind returns
hard,
heavy
yes,
oh yes
oh
passion yes
fill
me with your nature
I
long for its embrace
carry
me
take
me
to
that beauty
of
what beauty?
unnamed
unspoken
only
heard,
felt
and
seen
dancing
on air
like
a bluebird sailing
across
the tops of trees
mottled
with color
seasoned
for a moment
ah,
how fleeting . . .
gone.
Looking back, I hear the tonality of these songs quite differently now than I did when composing them. I had spent the 80s and 90s reading the radical back into the canonical writings of Henry David Thoreau. And Songs of Love and Longing was written when I was doing the same with Robert Schumann: listening for the radical in his equally canonical music. And what I thought at the time, why should only conservative music have access to tonality, influenced my composing. Of course context determines how anything in music sounds--whether that be three layers of complex rhythms performed at once or a C-major chord. I now hear my songs in the context of a kind of "dissonant counterpoint" in reverse. They are not tonal so much as the reverse of dissonance, with dissonances being the norm (which was certainly the case for me when I was composing) and tonality being the exception. But that only accounts for pitch and again context seems key as these songs really have much more to do with the spatial placement of sounds in time. I heard and composed Songs of Love and Longing in a big space, physically and spiritually, and in that space the simplicity of the songs also existed as a reversal: complexity was the norm, the conventional. The simple had, for me, become radical. I felt a strong and powerful desire then (and still do) to hear things in their native simplicity. That's what I hear in mountains and woods. And when I listen, the simple sounds revolutionary.
Christopher Shultis
21 February, Ardmore PA
+II.jpg)
.jpg)