Utowana

I posted this piece on a different blog - but I wanted to put it up here because it came out of my experiences of Blue Mountain - it also talks a little about the place itself:

Here’s a suggestion if you’re reading this blog – as it centres on a piece of music, you may want to hit play now and then read the story behind it as it plays. (It will sound best on headphones or on full range speakers, rather than the speakers of a computer. If you just want to read about the piece of music just scroll down to where it says ‘About the piece’).

Utowana

Lake Utowana

The Adirondacks, as I recently discovered, are a 6,000,000 acre wilderness in upstate New York about 5 hours north of New York City. For September of this year I was offered a residency at the Blue Mountain Centre to work on an opera and, while I had been told it would be beautiful, my friends in New York City had sternly warned me: “it’ll be cold!”  their voices had sounded concerned, “have you got thermal underwear?” they asked.

So I headed off on the train from Penn Station, journeying north with the expectation of spending the next month hunkered down in a studio peering out through icicles at a bare, prematurely wintered woodland.

But as it turned out I rarely needed a coat at Blue Mountain, most of the days in September required no more than a T-shirt. I rowed on Eagle Lake by moonlight, listened to the mysterious dreamlike calls of the loons in the night, participated in a moose-calling competition at the local fair, played far too many games of bananagrams with great people and ate and drank like a rogue hog on vacation.

Eagle Lake from near the composer studio.

The only problem I had was that sitting in my studio during the day writing a heavyweight opera turned out to be difficult when outside a glittering Eagle Lake gently lapped the shore, especially as I’d occasionally glimpse one or two of the other residents whisking past in a canoe, looking fabulously happy in the sunshine.

It’s no great surprise: I didn’t complete the opera as planned on the trip. Even though I felt that was the important thing to be doing, the interaction with the other artists and activists, the days of canoeing, kayaking and hiking – even with the distinction of being the only person to overturn his kayak – brought me such a wealth of new experience and joy that in the end I concluded that my time there was spent in the best, most productive way possible.

Does that sound like an excuse? Do you require proof?

It was hard for me to describe in words the previously unknown world of adirondack lakes, but I’m a composer, so I took to music. The work for orchestra that plays at the start of this page is a little of what I'm talking about, it wouldn’t exist but for those excursions, the imprint they made on me and which I carry with me, influences and informs new pieces and approaches.

Lake Utowana, Eagle Lake, Blue Mountain Lake

Utowana is a lake that connects to Eagle Lake, where I was staying, which in turn connects to the much larger Blue Mountain Lake. It can be reached by a footpath through the woods or by rowing through the narrow strip that connects the two lakes. 

I went there many times; it was extraordinarily peaceful, I was often the only person there so far as I could tell and it felt downright greedy to have so much beauty to myself.

About The Piece:

The idea of 'Utowana' the piece of music is that it represents a year in the life of the lake: Literally, the piece has a periodicity of 3.33' seconds per day (this happens to work out as a bar length at 72 beats per minute). I didn’t want this to feel like ‘accelerated time’, the kind of thing we’re used to with time-lapse photography. I wanted it to feel as though this was a natural sense of time, that what might feel like a year to a person might feel the equivalent of 20 minutes in the existence of the lake. I felt music offered a way to explore and experience this idea.

It was therefore my hope to make a piece that was not so much ‘my perspective on Utowana’ (though that’s inevitable) as ‘Utowana’s perspective’.

In the deep midwinter, where this piece begins and ends, I imagine there’s little sign of change on the lake but what I was interested in, which is represented by the slow moving strings at the start and end of the piece, was the idea of ‘energies’ or potentials, perhaps deep in the ground or in the movement of water beneath the ice.

I was interested in the way one thing arises in relationship to another in nature – this interdependence suggested to me a natural ‘harmony’, though one that also embraces the ‘dissonance’ of competition; the survival of the fittest. In the music, as in the lake, each major structure contains numerous minor structures: as musical motives evolve, emerge, interact and disappear, each instrument or group of instruments acts independently but they also respond to other sounds and instruments, much as the ecosystem of the lake is both complex and subtle, containing numerous independencies in a complex entangled web of interactions.

I also wanted to factor in the unsteady curve of development during a year – warm weather, snow storms and the like that can suddenly create growing spurts or put populations under strain, sudden changes across the entire system. So I contrived a few things over my fictitious year that would influence the music – to give a few examples:

• At 5.40’ I imagine sudden warm weather causing a thaw and more rapid growth.
• At 6.40’ a cold snap that inhibits or threatens development
• At 7.10 warmth returns
• At 8.00’ a dense snow storm blankets everything

And so on.

At 10.00’ I have changed the descriptive process a little – in the first half I have tried to evoke a picture of the lake in its entirety, but in the second half, where we’ve hit full summer and everything is going full tilt (its equivalent soundworld just felt too frenetic), I have created the equivalent of a moving camera that focusses on individual elements – so here it perhaps comes closest to a score for a wildlife documentary.

Ultimately, I’m just another artist seeking to reflect nature – I know I can’t hope to do justice to it, but perhaps with this piece I can convey a sense of not just standing there taking in the extraordinary peace of the place but a sense of the hidden, the life of the lake itself, the broader palettes of nature that, being human, we cannot fully take in with our eyes.