For the past year, I've been composing a piece to combine all three!
Les glaces éternelles is the largest project I've ever undertaken, with over thirty minutes of music for sinfonietta, choir, and electronics. This piece is also the most complete realization thus far of my process of dialectical meaning-making, constructing a collage of ideas and forging new associative connections between them.
I started conceptualizing the sound world of this piece with a compositional mood board, listing a variety of influences that inspired my composition.
Other influences that emerged over the course of this long process included Ottorino Respighi's Lauda per la Natività del Signore, Maurice Duruflé's Requiem, and various choral works by Arvo Pärt, including Magnificat and De Profundis. Some consistent themes shared by these influences include minimalism (Philip Glass, Jóhann Jóhannsson, and David Lang), avant-garde vocal expression (Caroline Shaw and Ted Hearne), and patient, slowly building soundscapes (John Luther Adams and Travis Laplante). I gravitated to these long-form musical aesthetics as a way to sonically represent the main subject of the piece: glaciers.
The core concept of this piece is exploring the feeling of sublimity that nature can inspire in us. The more I thought about this feeling, the more I realized I feel the sublime in nature mostly when confronted with extremes of scale. That is to say, when confronted with something so much larger (or smaller) than ourselves, we are pushed to the limits of what we can comprehend and we are left feeling some combination of awe, terror, and inspiration. The main symbol of this experience that I decided to explore is glaciers. I could have picked something truly unfathomable, like the vast scale of galaxies, but I felt it would be more effective to select a symbol which was just barely on the limit of human comprehension. Imagine, for a moment, everything around us completely covered by a sheet of ice a mile thick. I find this exercise difficult, almost impossible, but close enough to the limit of our perception and imagination to spark a feeling of wonder. The added resonance of glaciers is the tangible impact they have had on the very land we inhabit, with the receding Laurentide Ice Sheet responsible for the formation of the Great Lakes.
This piece is not only about things that are very, very big. It is also about things that are very, very small. To put in contrast with glaciers, I began to consider neurons. Neurons are the cells that make up our brain, and somehow our consciousness resides within their vast networks of electrical impulses. Many people are made uncomfortable by the idea that everything they experience can be reduced to a complex, but ultimately physical neural network, but I find this assertion comforting. In fact, my mantra while writing this piece was "I am a pile of chemical reactions that thinks it is a person." Seeing the world in this detached, clinical way actually makes me feel more connected with nature, since the building blocks that make up you and me and the world around us are one and the same. Neurons acquire an additional resonance when you realize that they end in dendrites which branch apart in structures called arborizations. I find a deep beauty in the fact that the patterns we can see in the trees around us are also within the organs that enable our perception and thought. We are part of nature and nature is a part of us.
These are exciting ideas to ponder, but how do I take these complex and symbolically rich concepts and translate them into a piece of music? I began with selecting a text, or rather several texts, to be the source of words for the choir to sing. I ended up with five texts spanning four languages, which I recombined into a tapestry of interconnected ideas. To me, this is a process like writing an essay, drawing of various sources and employing rhetoric to communicate new ideas. Where this process differs is instead of using a causal mode of thought, organizing ideas via logic and reasoning, I employ an associative, poetic mode of thought in which new emergent meaning is created simply by the juxtaposition of different ideas by proximity to one another.
The first text I selected for this purpose was "Yosemite Glaciers" (1871) by naturalist John Muir, his first published writing containing heart-wrenching personification of glaciers and their impact on the land. Next, Louis Rendu, a French scientist and Catholic bishop wrote Théorie des glaciers de la Savoie (1874), an early scientific investigation into the motion of glaciers. His writing is fascinating, weaving together scientific observation with discussion of a "universal theory of circulation" describing how all things, including the humors of our bodies and our very souls, obey this law of circulation which governs the universe. Rendu quotes the biblical verse Ecclesiastes 1:7, "All rivers enter the sea, and the sea does not overflow; the rivers return to the place from which they flow to flow again," which I use as a third text in its Latin translation. My next text is possibly the strangest, Textura del sistema nervioso del hombre y de los vertebrados (1904) by Santiago Ramón y Cajal. This Spanish neuroscientist won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the structure of the nervous system, and this text is an anatomy textbook containing written descriptions and drawings of arborizations. Lastly William Wordsworth's poem Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798 (1798), much like my piece, is a reflection on the feeling of sublimity in nature and contains a lot of language that resonates with my feelings on the subject.
 Cajal's illustrations of arborizations |
 Muir’s illustration of a glacier |
With all five of these texts selected, I constructed a composite text out of fragments and excerpts, putting them in dialogue with one another and generating new meaning. This served as the structural backbone of the piece, and the musical decisions I made arose out of my interpretation of this "collage essay." I ended up with three movements, each with a title in a different language derived from one of the source texts.
Movement I, "Omnia flumina," is Latin for "All rivers" and comes from Ecclesiastes 1:7. This movement incorporates various vocal and instrumental textures such as microtonal glissandi, plainchant, minimalist drones, and alternates between atonal texture and more traditional tonal harmony. "Omnia flumina" explores Rendu's concept of a universal circulation, as well as the invisible but ever-present impact of glaciers on the landscape.
Movement II, "Arborización," is Spanish for "Arborization" and prominently features synthesizer as a representation of the electrical signals in our nervous system. This movement also uses minimalism to represent the slow-moving impact of glaciers, now drawing a parallel between the glacial impact on landscapes with the glacial impact on humanity. After all, we are part of nature and there are trees in your brain.
The final movement, "Mountain Truths," using a phrase from Muir's writing, finally explores the feeling of sublimity. This wonder and deeply felt joy is tinged with feelings of regret and shame, as not only do glaciers have a massive impact on us, but we have an impact on them through the accelerating destructive force of anthropogenic climate change. This movement ends with a coda, or denouement, featuring unaccompanied choir which can be performed as a short standalone piece titled "Lovely Forms." This section of the piece sets a fragment of Wordsworth's poem and offers a sobering warning that if the damaging effects of anthropogenic climate change continue, the majesty of glaciers could vanish entirely, persisting only in memory. Sonically, "Lovely Forms" emphasizes fricative consonants, extending the sounds within words and creating a sense of reverb which is embedded in the voices themselves.
The title of the entire work, Les glaces éternelles, comes from Rendu's writing and is translated as "The Eternal Ice." The question left open to the listener is will these mighty, almost unfathomably huge monuments to nature truly remain eternal, or will our carelessness result in their disappearance forever?
While the piece is written, there is still lots of work to do! I will be spending the next two months preparing for the premiere performance on Friday, November 14th, held at West Side United Methodist Church in Ann Arbor, MI. The performance will be accompanied by an educational reception with resources from local environmental organizations. If you've read this far, I hope to see you there!