Artist in Residence Symphony Scheduled for World Premiere

The Great Basin is a vast area of the United States that stretches from the Rocky Mountains of Utah to the Sierra Nevada of California, out of which water does not flow to any ocean, but rather to basins where it then evaporates. The topography is characterized by hundreds of parallel, north-south mountain ranges between wide, flat valleys. The valleys are vast, open seas of desert sagebrush, and the ranges are towering oases of lush forests and wildflowers. Among the tallest of these is the Snake Range, which reaches over 13,000 feet and is the site of Great Basin National Park. The park is most known for having some of the world’s oldest, living, non- clonal trees, the ancient bristlecone pine (pinus longaeva). One of Nevada’s two state trees, they live on the rocky, nutrient poor, slopes of the mountains, right at treeline, at about 9,000-11,000 feet in elevation, and represent some of the highest elevation plants that are able to grow before the terrain becomes too inhospitable to support anything besides the tiniest shrubs and grasses. Unlike many other old tree species such as the giant sequoia and coast redwood, bristlecone pines are not very large, as they grow in density rather than in height, and the relentless winds have sculpted them into twisted and tortured shapes, giving them a distinctive and otherworldly appearance.

In 1964, a graduate student was studying the ancient bristlecone pines at a time when their extraordinary longevity was coming to light. Due to the inhospitable environment in which they grow, microscopic decomposers are few, and the pines can remain standing for a few thousands of years after death. Fallen logs longer still, some having been dated to approximately 11,000 years ago; the end of the last ice age. Studying the ancient bristlecone tree rings has provided invaluable data about the world's climate and the study of these trees gave birth to an entire scientific field, the study of dendrochronology. The student wrote to the forest service to ask permission to cut down a specific tree for further study, which was granted. Upon felling the tree and studying its rings, it was discovered that this tree was the oldest known, non-clonal, living tree at the time, dating to at least 4,862 years, and very likely older than 5,000 years old. This tree was named Prometheus, after the mythical titan who gave humans fire (and metaphorically, knowledge). After this incident, it became clear that the mountain and the ecosystems that live on it needed more protection, and the event accelerated a movement to establish a national park, which was signed into law in 1986.

Because the park is hundreds of miles from the nearest city, and at a high elevation, it is also known for having some of the darkest night skies in the country. It houses the nation park service’s only research grade telescope, the Great Basin Observatory, and hosts a large astronomy festival every September. Additionally, the park is the home of Lehman Caves, a beautifully and intricately decorated cavern that was the centerpiece of Lehman Caves National Monument, which established in 1922 and later incorporated into the national park upon its establishment. Among its many chambers is “the music room,” a passageway in which several cave formations form a type of natural xylophone. In decades past it was played as such for visitors, however the practiced was stopped in order to protect the million-year old formations. While the caves are not the focus of the narrative of the piece, I did want to pay homage to them in the piece through extensive usage of mallet percussion.

My piece depicts the following, quasi-autobiographical story: an outside disturbance awakens a sleeping camper, who groggily peaks outside of their tent, only to be astonished by the magnificence of the night sky. Meteors streak across the heavens one after another, and the Milky Way hangs in the air like a cloud suspended in time. A myriad stars twinkle like distant lighthouses in the open ocean of infinite space. An internal voice whispers, beckoning them into the forest, and they make their way through the dark forest and eventually among the bizarre shapes of the grizzled and twisted ancient bristlecone pines, the oldest trees in the world. The voice leads them further into the grove, until they reach the stump and fallen trunk of Prometheus, which reveals itself as the voice, demanding “What Have You Done to Me?” Conflicting emotions ensue: the deep sorrow over the needless destruction of such a magnificent tree, the gratitude for what it taught us, and the acknowledgement that its sacrifice ultimately led to the creation of this wonderful national park, which will ensure the protection of the bristlecones for the foreseeable future so that they may live to even older ages. 

As far as I know, the premiere of this piece will be the first performance of a piece for solo bass oboe and full orchestra in the history of the United States. My choice to feature a solo bass oboe has been met a range of reactions, including bewilderment, skepticism, curiosity, incredulity, and laughter. When I had devised this narrative and asked myself, “which instrument that orchestral musicians at least occasionally play has a timbre that is bizarre, inscrutable, and esoteric enough to depict the psychic ghost of a 5,000 year old tree?” the answer to me was actually quite obviously the bass oboe. One of its most prominent solos in the orchestral literature is from “Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age,” from Gustav Holst’s, The Planets, which is one of my favorite works of music ever and is some ways a model for From Sea to Shining Sea. “Saturn,” in particular is my favorite movement from the suite, and to me it is about a figure who is so old and has seen so much, that their knowledge of humanity has driven them to the brink of a terrible insanity. Holst’s use of unsettling harmonies and unusual timbre’s, such as that of the bass oboe, are keys to its success in my mind. My use of the bass oboe is a sort of meta-reference to this, and also connects the astronomical aspects of the piece’s narrative as well as the central figure having to do with old age.

The piece also utilizes electronics, which are sounds obtained from the ancient bristlecone pines themselves. As a plant photosynthesizes and transports water and nutrients, the degree to which it is a conductor of electricity is constantly changing. By attached medical-grade electrodes to the trees, I used a device that was able to record these changes, map them onto a wave, and turn that wave into a sound wave, thus providing a musical representation (in the form of pitches and rhythms) of the plants’ biological processes. The electronics in the piece are excerpts from many hours of “recordings,” and these excerpts form the basis for several of the piece’s central motives.

Another source of musical material is a tone row that appears in every work within From Sea to Shining Sea. It was given to me by the varied thrushes of Redwood National Park in 2022. The bird’s most frequent call is one long, clear note which sounds not unlike a piccolo playing with a light flutter tongue. The birds having little no formal training in music theory, they call at seemingly random pitches (though the ones during that particular visit did seem to favor G#), and in numbers their calls resemble a serially-constructed composition. Due to the redwoods’ massive trunks, and their propensity to dominate the ecosystems in which they grow, redwood forests tend to have much more pronounced echoes than other forests. Thus hearing these thrush calls with their somewhat serialist-sounding notes echoing hauntingly through the woods always felt somewhat surreal, as if I had accidentally invaded Arnold Schoenberg’s dream. While the bird calls aren’t exactly tuned to equal temperament in the way that most modern, western, orchestral instruments are, further reflection on these ideas yielded the realization that just as most of the music I listen to and write is more or less made of the same dozen or so notes, so is much observable universe mostly made up of a dozen or so elements. The varied thrushes of Redwood National Park, the lava from Lassen Volcanic National Park’s volcanoes, the ancient bristlecone pines of Great Basin National Park, and even the stars in the night sky, are all made of the same basic building blocks. In this piece, the tone row appears in the harp, celesta, crotales, and glockenspiel in their tapestry of twinkling toward the beginning of the piece after the introduction in the strings (as well as at the very end).