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Part 3: Final leg of Acadia National Park Residency!

Brown Mountain Gatehouse was built as a deterrent — to keep people from driving their cars on Acadia’s Carriage Roads. It’s also where I got to stay these last few days: in a huge space, which meant that the quiet was immense. I got used to hiking with poles and stabil-icers on my boots, despite the fact that I was mostly choosing very flat paths. It was thrilling at times to be out there despite the cold. Plus, in the gatehouse, it was toasty warm— kept that way to make sure the bones of the historic house stay in tact.

I worked on a slew of new fiddle tunes, a new song, and a new string quartet. Inspiration for a couple of the fiddle tunes came from hearing about Acadia’s first superintendent George Dorr’s winter swims, and also from seeing what looked like a completely frozen waterfall but was making so much noise that you could hear how much was bubbling underneath.

I experienced bits of Acadia and the surrounding towns in ways I hadn’t seen them before: snow and ice-covered beaches and ponds, roads and ticket-taking booths closed off, Carriage Roads groomed by volunteers for cross-country skiers. Compared to the summer time, it seems at first glance that all the businesses are closed, but there are a surprising number of determined coffeeshop and restaurant owners serving the locals, plus events that really draw crowds at the libraries and museums.

On Thursday night, I gave a workshop at the beautiful Jesup Library in Bar Harbor. Joined by pianist Christina Spurling, I performed many of the new tunes, and then we moved into the more interactive portion of the evening.

Attendees used two colors to draw a favorite Acadia spot or winter walk, and those two colors became the instructions for piano and violin to follow. After we played through each of these graphic scores, I ended the night with a solo version of “Follow the Invented Constellation.” This was a piece I created for Thread Ensemble after last September’s visit to Acadia’s Night Sky Festival. Audience members control the music in real-time by turning on and off different colored flashlights in a darkened space. It was a delightful way to finish my artist residency time here.

Workshop photos by Jay Elhard.

Huge thanks to Jay and everyone at NPS who determinedly made this residency and workshop happen, despite all the uncertainty and delays created by the shutdown.

#findyourpark #acadia national park #artist residency #composing #brownmountaingatehouse

the other corner of the map

Part 2 of Acadia National Park Artist Residency, September 2018:

Schoodic Peninsula

In the upper right hand corner of the Acadia National Park map, you can see Schoodic Peninsula. At the southern tip of that is Schoodic Institute, where the second part of this residency has been based. Schoodic Peninsula has its own set of great hiking trails, and we’ve made sure to visit all of them over the last few days. This place is just as stunning as the more trafficked parts of the park, with deep blue water on all sides, giant rocks, all kinds of mosses, and birds starting their migratory travels. And it feels like we have it all to ourselves. It’s been a great place for me to work on new pieces for string quartet, strings & vibraphone, and fiddle & guitar.

(from the top of the Schoodic Head Trail)

It’s about a 90 minute drive to most trails on Mount Desert Island, the central part of the park. We made sure to hike the Precipice Trail there -- only open for a few months of the year due to falcons who like to nest on it -- and we also went out to the Bass Harbor area. We experienced the big “Star Party” on Cadillac Mountain, where 80 volunteer astronomers had their various telescopes set up and pointed at different parts of the night sky.

(on the Precipice Trail)

I have an even greater appreciation for Acadia’s trail architects - and everyone who works to keep up these trails - after this trip. So many well-placed wooden planks, ladder rungs, and boulders designed to make you feel like even more of an adventurer than you probably are...

(Rich at low tide on Schoodic Peninsula)

Many thanks to Jay Elhard, the AiR program manager, for making this residency possible! I hope to be back for a Part 3 before too long.

#acadianationalpark #artistresidency #findyourpark #schoodic

On the kindness of Rangers

Part 1 of my Acadia National Park Artist Residency, early September 2018:

Isle au Haut

The rustic piece of this artist residency came first at the Eli Creek Cabin on Isle au Haut. No electricity or running water (even the creek wasn’t running!), but we had an immense amount of help from Alison, the head ranger there, and from Kristen and Charlie, too, getting some water jugs out to the cabin, and dropping us at different parts of the island each day so that we could experience all the trails by Duck Harbor, the Western and Eastern Heads of the island, the fresh water Long Pond, and the store up in town. Even with the coleman gas lantern and our headlamps, it was still pretty dark in the cabin for working, but being limited by daylight had its own cozy feel. The trails were incredibly beautiful, and had so much variety in the types of landscapes they offered (cobbled shores, marshes, spruce and fir woods, and even rock scrambles called “the puddings” (this tune is already complete!)

As we had taken the Mailboat to and from the island, we were happy to also get to see the post office. About 40 people live on Isle au Haut year-round, and it was great to get to get a tiny window into life there from our ranger guide.

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https://nationalzoo.si.edu/webcams/panda-cam

This was an improvisation to go with the Smithsonian panda cam -- they have two views, so if there are no pandas in camera 1, you can switch to camera 2 while listening to this short audio clip.

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In the spirit of Hilary Hahn’s sharing bits of her practice through her violin case’s instagram feed, I’m sharing a 3-minute improvisation created as part of my practice with live webcams. The images and movement on the webcam (in this case, penguins under water at the Aquarium of the Pacific), serve as as sort-of duet partner. Sometimes we’re working together, and sometimes we’re not. You can watch the cam while you listen:

#penguinimprov

Remembering

I’ve vacillated widely these last few weeks between feeling on the one hand:

Art and music is so weak, and seems powerless in the face of the challenges we are facing as a country. I should be doing something else, anything else.

and on the other hand:

Art and music is the only way we’re going to get through. We need creative ways to share knowledge, stories, experiences, to better understand each other.

And one of the things that helps me stay in space #2, is the memory of the music that Boston’s Artist in Residence Shaw Pong Liu put together for the Mother’s Day Walk for Peace back in May.

I was initially skeptical about this being the right venue for music-making, wondering how on earth music could have a palpable impact on those walking for peace. However, it was a reminder of how powerful it can be just to be present and offer up the thing musicians know how to contribute. We set up in bus stops along the route, small groups of musicians paired with posters created in memory of those who had been lost to gun violence. What stays with me from that day are the looks of touched surprise, smiles, and thank yous, repeating over and over again as people marched by.

Evelyn Glennie's essays and open letters

In early April I spent a week in Vermont with the CELVT, performing with a chamber orchestra that accompanied Evelyn Glennie. There was so much involved in the week: we experienced and participated in the conclusion of many Arts Integration projects, we rehearsed with Dame Glennie, and performed in four very different settings around Vermont.

Two things stick in my mind about Evelyn Glennie, even now, 6 months later:

1. The way she addressed the audience.

The kindness and compassion that she talks about in her essays came through every night. Even though she was the only one talking, it was almost like she was having a conversation with the audience. She shared her love of the pieces, and invited the audience to engage in new ways with the music. None of this was done in a patronizing or overly-simplistic way, and none of it was overly-technical either. This compassion and commitment to listening didn’t end after the performance. She came to the orchestra after-party, and stayed to chat with everyone.

2. Her commitment to excellence.

This should have been obvious going in, as she is such an elite, international, performer, but she was consistently practicing when she was off-stage. When the orchestra was having a snack or taking a break, she took that time to fine-tune the piece she had been performing since her teenage years, or to warmup for her snare drum solo piece. Oh yeah, and she was always early.

Video

So much good back-log, but I've got to start by sharing this: I (and my music) show up around 35 seconds in!

This Spring, the epic landscapes of Zion, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite will be brought to life in Boston. New Music of Our National Parks is a concert of new chamber music inspired by nature, honoring the national parks in the centennial year of the... #composersnetwork #concertsevents #nationalparks

#national-parks

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – This April, the epic landscapes of Zion, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite will be brought to life in Boston. New Music of Our National... #composersnetwork #concertsevents #nationalparks

The press release for our concert on April 15th at the Advent Library in Boston, 8pm!

#national-parks

Psychologist Laura Carstensen says that as people get older, they usually become less stressed and more content.

I listened to a lot of audio this year. This one stuck with me from way back in June. In the spirit of looking forward to the year ahead, it’s about what we have to look forward to about getting older – specifically, and scientifically, what’s so good about it?

Laura Carstensen says our experiences start to be filled with much more layered and complex emotions – especially poignancy.

She says: “poignancy increases with age. that tear in the eye happens as we think about chapters ending. as we move through life and we celebrate graduations, marriages, the birth of a child…these are positive events, but they signal the end of one chapter and the beginning of a new one…we experience a tear in the eye at the same time we’re smiling…can you imagine any emotional experience that’s richer than that? you’re seeing the past, you’re in the present, you’re thinking about the future, it’s all there, and it’s incredibly gratifying.”

Here's why Marina Abramović, one of the world’s most famous performance artists, is making audiences sit in total silence for 30 minutes.

More podcast talk!

I’m always more interested in the experiences of so-called “non-musicians” than in the artist/musician in-group. Here, the host and producer of Note to Self talk about their very different experiences of sitting together in a silent audience for 30 minutes before the music was to begin.

Everyone’s talking about listening, it seems...Only Human had a short series recently about listening techniques that I enjoyed listening through, too.

Perhaps I should rename this blog: "And then on THIS podcast..." but really. I can't stop referencing these awesome things I'm hearing. This one won't go away. It’s from the Happier podcast with Gretchen Rubin. It’s about getting to know your tendency around how you meet (or don't meet) your internal and external expectations. I didn’t initially like the category I found myself in (obligers). But instead of trying to change it, I’m figuring out how to work with it! How can I keep creating opportunities for external accountability for the things I really want to get done “for myself”?

Next week: more podcasting inspiration!

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Improvisers tend to like juxtaposition. These two contrasting sounds were happening inside the most magnificent church I’ve ever seen, and I had to record a little piece of it. The Sagrada Familia was the part of Barcelona that we kept hearing about before we got there, and we were still not prepared for what this church, still in progress after over 100 years of construction work, would look like inside and out. And rather than detracting from the experience, the presence of the construction workers seemed to add to it.

Thanks to Liza Barley’s creative educator book recommendations, I found myself taking this colorful composition notebook out of the library. It’s Lynda Barry’s Syllabus, and it is packed with her assignments and reflections from when she developed her course that helps college students reconnect with their creativity through text and drawing. I say reconnect, because she believes in going back to the time before we thought our drawings were “good” or “bad” -- when we were just doodling and not judging.

She wants students to be able to experience the focus that allows them to get carried away in their work, but also the kind of daydreaming that happens when you’re drawing a tight spiral, but letting your mind wander elsewhere.

The types of diary entries she asks students to complete have a lot to do with just simply noticing things that happen around them during their days.

There are parts of the page for

what you did

what you saw

what you heard someone say

I heard scientist Ellen Langer being interviewed on On Being, and she seems to agree:

“Mindfulness for me, is the very simple process of actively noticing new things. When you actively notice new things, that puts you in the present…it turns out, after a lot of research, that it’s literally - not just figuratively - enlivening.”

Langer gives the same short, simple, noticing assignments that you find in Syllabus:

“If you’re actively noticing things — so if you go home tonight and if you live with somebody, notice 5 new things about that person. What will happen is that the person will start to come alive for you again.”

When I ask my students “what did you notice about that?”, I sometimes feel like they are lost — floating, with nothing to grab onto. But both of these women remind me of the fundamental importance of getting in the very regular practice of noticing.

http://www.onbeing.org/program/ellen-langer-science-of-mindlessness-and-mindfulness/6332

Velasquez & Picasso

One day, we’re walking through the Prado in Madrid, looking at Velasquez’s famous Las Meninas painting. Three days later, we’re at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, viewing all 58 (!) of Picasso’s paintings of that same Velasquez creation. What you call these is important -- are they copies? studies? interpretations? variations?

What rang true to us was thinking of them as recompositions.

And walking through rooms filling with these recompositions, you could sense that Picasso had the utmost awe and respect for this painting...so much so that it became part of him. In copying it over and over, he couldn’t help but give it his own unique take. And in some ways, his versions are incredibly different. But they all carry a reverence for the original, just like the best musical recompositions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Meninas_(Picasso)

The stuff you don’t plan

We had just transported 25+ instruments in 90 degree heat. Campers and counselors had just walked 20 minutes in that heat to get to our performance location. A flash flood watch was still in effect after the performance, but nothing had happened yet. The clouds seemed to say that we had a few more minutes left. So, freezy-pops in hand, campers and counselors made their way back to our home base. With one block left to go, the rain started coming down, and everyone gleefully ran inside. A few minutes later, huge claps of thunder started, but most of the campers were already gathered around a couple of counselors and their guitars, singing pop songs.

I was standing in the doorway, looking in on the scene, wondering if I should start another “organized” activity. I asked the my fellow staff-member, “is this good? are they ok? are they having enough fun?”

I’m glad we decided to just let the last 45-minutes of the camp day roll by in that un-guided way, because if we hadn’t, we might not have received this comment when students were asked about their favorite part of the week:

“My favorite moment from this week is walking back to CMW right before it rained, then coming inside to then sing songs while August and Luis played and everyone was singing!”

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little gems learned through improvisation