LoL
Excited to present the NYC premiere of Christopher Stark's The Language of Landscapes, a commission from Chamber Music America, next weekend at Concerts on the Slope. This piece has been a labor of love since 2014, and Chris, Hannah, and I have been traveling and sound collecting rabidly. The piece incorporates found sounds and foraged instruments, blending four chapters into a meditative look at the impact of our physical landscape on our emotional being. New Morse Code premiered LoL last November in St. Louis, and are excited to take the completed work to New York (we presented an excerpt last May in Bryant Park)
Chris writes:
The Language of Landscapes is an exploration of our relationship with nature. The piece’s principal discourse is guided by the friction and/or harmony created by synthetic and natural objects and the sounds and ideals that accompany their existence. The single-movement work has four scenes that each incorporate found discarded objects, field-collected environmental recordings, and live electronic processing as a way of making commentary on our wastefulness and resourcefulness. We have arrived at an era of human history in which our relationship with nature is critical, and likely calamitous, and this work is ultimately an attempt to illuminate the importance of the geographies of our existence and how they shape our musical spirit.
Zoom in its natural habitat
Stark at Avaloch
Heavily mic'ed plastic bag
Over the piece's four sections, I blow into bottles, play tuned styrofoam bowls, rub planks of wood, and imitate flowing water. The pièce de résistance is a passage to rival even the third movement of Scheherazade : the coordinating turning on and off of a rotating fan.
Come out May 22 to St. John's Episcopal in Park Slope!