Listen. Read. Ponder. 

Composing the 21st Century Wilderness: Audio Journal (Duration: 17 minutes) Music, recordings, story and presentation by Justin Ralls.

By Justin Ralls

In the summer of 2012, nestled in the central Alaskan wilderness of Denali National Park, nine composers participated in the first ever “Composing in the Wilderness” seminar. Sponsored by the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival, Alaska Geographic, and the National Park Service, nine composers from all over the world, signed up for the most unique of musical journeys. We all would compose short pieces in the Park, and hear them performed at the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival; all in less than 10 days. Nothing quite like this had ever been organized before. Nine strangers in a strange land, doing what composers do best: encountering the unknown. I was one of them.

I stepped off the airplane in Fairbanks in late July at almost one o’clock in the morning, nearly dusk. Stephen Lias, the self-professed adventure-composer and project leader met me at the airport. He held up a sign “Composing in the Wilderness,” and upon seeing my backpack, hiking boots, and wild hair told me he knew right away who I was. “Wilderness composers” stand out he said (at least in airports). Twenty-four hours later we were being given our “bear talk” at the small Teklanika field camp in the middle of the park.

Stephen Lias had been spending a lot of time in Alaska. Before joining us in Denali he had been dropped off by helicopter in Wrangles-St. Elias National Park, making a three day descent done by only one other person: the pilot himself. After Denali he was heading up to Gates of the Arctic National Park as Composer-in-Residence, where he was scheduled to follow the caribou migration. For him wilderness and inspiration were inseparable, and with the help of a few others, he organized this seminar in the hopes of making this connection contagious.

Western classical music has frequently taken cues from the natural world; waters, winds, seasons, and especially birds highlighting our musical relationship with nature. Re-evaluating this relationship in contemporary terms for me turned out to be just as arduous as the cross-country hikes up steep moraines, land sculpted by ice, millennia before humans likely had any conceptions about “High Art.” I’d spent a lot of time in the outdoors I’d never experienced a wilderness like this; quiet and still, the winds gently rustling against withered grasses, a small bird puncturing the sonic panorama. My ear gravitated toward sonic references—the murmur of distant creeks and rivers—the winds along with feint calls and tweets of small animals and birds.

Each day in Denali we would be guided on hikes, stopping for thirty minutes or so of “creative time.” Our sketchbooks and field recorders out of our packs, we’d sit on hillsides or beside glacial streams, conjuring up musical responses to this vastly intimidating landscape (a healthy place for the ego-ridden creative). Some of us just found a spot away from the wind and listened. I wondered in the expanse of Denali what my place here really was, was I just a creative tourist? I wondered about the first people to contact this land, Athabascan hunters and gatherers, shaman, and certainly musicians. What meaning was there to be found in this place for the contemporary composer?

Music inspired by nature is not new but one of the oldest human traditions. The first instruments, flutes made of bird bone and mammoth ivory found in cave sites along the hillsides of the Danube River valley are at least 42,000 years old—when the first modern humans moved into Europe from Africa. The Koyukon people of central Alaska claim to receive their songs from the birds. Emerging from the Pleistocene, our intrinsic need to hear relationships between sounds was likely stimulated by the sonic environments where we camped and hunted; the voices of the forests, plains, tundra, deserts, and coasts, seeding our imaginations.

Environmentalist, Paul Shepard once wrote: “Symphonic (classical) music is indeed great in its skills, technique, and esthetics; but it is also the supreme articulation of the dissociated state of our species and our personal lives. It co-opts the melody and rhythm so essential to our health by subordinating them to execution and complexity, denying them ecological, egalitarian, and participatory function. In its amazing scoring the music disintegrates our connection to nature by making elaborate musicality an end in itself.”

For Shepard and others, classical music may reveal the worst of industrial civilization; a complex art to match a complex society, decoupled from ecological reality. To a composer concerned with nature, Shepard’s sentiments are deeply troubling.

If classical music is not the way to reconnect with nature, then, what is?

Hiking above the visitor center at Eielson, only miles from the base of Denali (translated as ‘the high one’) we spotted several Collared Pika, also known as rock Rabbits. These little rodents dart along the talus as if it was a track field stopping only to make sharp “enk” calls, a characteristic solo of the alpine boulder fields. Pikas are a strong indicator species of climate change. In their mountainous habitat, gathering food in caches to sustain them through the long sub-arctic winter is the key to survival. They don’t hibernate, but hole up in insulated dens deep beneath the snow. They are vulnerable to changing weather. Pikas die if there is not enough snow to provide insulation; a late spring growth of vegetation means not enough gathering time and starvation.

High in the mountains, Pika are on the ecological edge of survival; there is nowhere else to go.

As a contemporary “classical composer” I can’t help but relate to the Pika’s story. The marginalization of living composers, especially in America, is astounding. Perhaps, composers are also an indicator species of the spiritual and ecological health of a society? Composers gather much in the form of cultural data, holing up in studio dens, gathering food for the soul. Composers are vulnerable to changing cultural weather; starvation can be a real concern. In a society, which seems only to consume, composers consistently create, often lending their voice to the voiceless, strengthening our resolve to weather adversity through elemental creativity.

Like the Pika, many of us also feel pushed to the margins, we

too are often lone voices in a wilderness.

Denali Soundscape: Pika alarm call, glacial creek, chamber ensemble (excerpt), music and field recording by Justin Ralls, featuring San Francisco Conservatory New Music Ensemble. 

Shepard’s ‘dissociated state of our species’ is precisely why I find myself, as an artist, drawn to nature to begin with. And when thinking of his concerns, I realize they make sense. For all the time I’ve spent camping and backpacking, as a composer and musician I’ve lived, worked, and studied in cities. Part of the project in Denali was to bring some ‘wilderness’ back with us; to inspire others to come to the park—to have their own transformative experience.

Inspiring composers through nature in order to inspire others toward nature is a dynamic idea. Especially when it works.

At the Museum of the North, in Fairbanks, Alaskan composer John Luther Adams was asked to create an installation. He designed a small room with surround speakers and walls white as snow. He systematically assigned electronic tones to real-time seismological data transmitted from several active meteorological stations in central Alaska. The temperature, time of day, season, even the seismic shifts of the Earth’s crust are translated into a richly dense texture of drones, waves, and vibrating timbres. When the sun is out one can hear what sounds like soprano and bell-like timbres chorusing at high frequency with lights in the room shifting, corresponding to the aural colors. A low mellow tone is assigned to the moon and over the course of the day one can hear its slow rise into the evening. Adams calls this The Place Where You Go to Listen. The sound world enraptures you, taking hold not just of your senses but your being—as if you were dreaming. The idea that you are hearing a translation of the Earth’s own expression is a powerful realization. It was the most convincing experience I’ve encountered of hearing the Earth as music.

Though a “classical composer” Adams creates musical experiences as a contemporary mode of ecological awareness.Adams strongly believes in creating these new myths to serve a changing cultural and physical climate. Perhaps culture on an industrial scale is no longer truly possible in a world increasingly fragmented by its very site-specific political and ecological concerns.

The awe and mystery we activate in music is analogous to our experience in nature.

 

 

Denali Soundscape: Ground squirrel alarm call, glacial stream, chamber ensemble.

Classical music still holds sacred the ancient primacy of sound. If understanding deep ecology informs this primacy, the act of deep listening may be one of the most easily reached and powerful of tools, providing templates for new cultural expression.

Paul Shepard’s arguments are partly true only because too many musicians and audiences sympathize with him and often perpetuate stereotypes of Classical music being somehow unnatural. Shepard is right to connect music, culture, and nature, but dismissing this music is to deny our society a real opportunity. Why couldn’t this tradition, with its ‘skills and techniques’ of classical music not be used to create meaningful and lasting bonds between communities and environments? Why could it not heal the dissociated state of our personal lives?

Every evening after dinner Stephen Lias would lead a ‘Coda’ where all of us would meet in the giant yurt (which served as dining hall and composing hut) and discuss our progress, ideas and concerns. Every one of these meetings was engaging, extremely personal and revolutionary. We all said something along the lines of “we didn’t know other people like us existed!” The energy around what compelled us as composers to come all the way up to the Alaskan wilderness was electric and life changing. The petty differences of approach and opinion, ever present in our academic, personal and professional lives was overcome with a deep sense of purpose and solidarity.

Composing for us was not just about self-expression or the tenets of our craft, but a process of discovery in which we explored our inner and outer environments. A process as easily tapped in a city park as in a national one.

The relationships formed between composers and nature, and between each other was extraordinary. It really seemed that for those brief days and nights, composing late in the midnight sun of Alaska, we had created an entirely different world. I came away feeling that contemporary composers have a real opportunity to cultivate an ecologically centered cultural identity and awareness: a new indigenous music to articulate and sustain new myths of our place in a twenty-first century wilderness.