Walden Miniatures Premiere

This week's blog entry updates a previous one about my Walden Miniatures, which was premiered last Sunday at Ardmore Presbyterian Church. The Haverford High School Chamber Singers did a wonderful job with its difficulties. And the director Marsha Core was able to clarify, thanks to her interpretive sense of tempo throughout the piece, the centrality of time passing that frames all the sounds and where I placed them. I especially enjoyed the basses singing "the sun is but a morning star," and not only because it featured Christopher's singing, although it is a pleasure hearing his voice in the mix.

Christopher was the reason behind my writing the piece for this outstanding group. And he was also responsible for reminding me about the possibility of going back to Walden Pond for inspiration. Smart advice.

Here's a recording of the premiere, made with my hand-held Edirol, which is also what I used to record the sound of a train that I heard at the pond and which is what is heard between the second and third miniature. Thoreau, unlike many of his contemporaries, did not automatically bemoan the encroachment of technology, in this case the railroad tracks just a few yards away from where he built his cabin. That doesn't mean he favored all kinds of advancement but, regarding the railroad at least, it is an early example of the "co-existence" I see as central to how he lived in the world.

https://soundcloud.com/cshultis/walden-miniatures-premiere

You can also find an article about the premiere written by local journalist Lois Puglionesi at this link:

http://www.delconewsnetwork.com/articles/2014/01/10/news_of_delaware_county/news/doc52d025df2d4c5637098321.txt

Finally, here is the program note I wrote to accompany the finished score, which like everything I've written, is published by the American Composers Alliance:

I read Walden in high school and it made no impression on me. I was a small town Midwestern boy and for me "the woods" was definitely where I didn't want to be. Only in the late 1980s, where I began working with (and studying about) John Cage did Thoreau and his writing come back into my life. At this point I was living in New Mexico and for me the wilderness was no longer woods but mountains.  As I was writing my book about John Cage (Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition, recently reprinted by Northeastern University Press) I read everything Thoreau ever wrote, including all fourteen volumes of his journals. But with my head buried in books, there was one thing I never tried to do.  I read what Thoreau wrote but never did what Thoreau did: take long walks in the wilderness. As he mentions in his essay "Walking," "I think I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least--and it is commonly more than that--sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements." When I began taking walks like that, it changed my life. And it also determined how I write music. All the music I've written since 1995 has been found while listening during walks, initially in the mountains of New Mexico and now in the woods of Pennsylvania.

An exception to that are these short pieces, written thanks to an invitation from Marsha Core, one of the best choral conductors I've ever met, to write a piece for her highly acclaimed Chamber Singers. Hee Sook Kim and I have been working on a large scale work using Thoreau's writings and we decided to include choral interludes between acts. So two summers ago we traveled to Cape Cod and Walden Pond; we even tried to climb up Katahdin in Maine like Thoreau (he didn't make it all the way either but that's another story). The idea was to be where Thoreau was when he wrote what he wrote. Walking around Walden Pond, even swimming in it, inspired these miniatures, which use as a text the last four lines of Walden.

One final note: as I was finishing the Walden Miniatures, with most everything already sketched out, my work came to a complete halt. I remembered a similar moment as I was writing  "a little light, in great darkness" for soprano saxophone and woodwind quintet (my first composition where sketches were all written during walks)--I left my studio and traveled to a wilderness area just outside of Taos, New Mexico. The inspiration was immediate, I wrote down what was needed, and the piece was finished. In this case, the drive took a little longer, but sitting on the edge of the pond in early October, not far from where Thoreau built his cabin, I sketched out the final miniature, "Morning Star." (This is also where I recorded the train passing by that is heard between the second and third miniatures.) Every note of this last miniature was written in the same place Thoreau's text was written: at Walden Pond.

Christopher Shultis

25 October, 2013

Ardmore, PA