Songs of Love and Longing (2001-03): Looking Back, Listening Again

(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:

http://www.amazon.com/Devisadero-Shultis/dp/B004TWOXBM

And if you are interested in my spontaneous comments regarding three questions: 1) the influence of nature and personal experience; 2) the question of style; 3) what piece (or composer) was an early influence, that can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NouE8kv8Gk

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:

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