maples, father, sheep, fog (2015)

percussion trio

maples, sheep, father, fog (2015) is inspired by the view out the back window of my childhood home in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts. Our house was on a gently sloping hill, overlooking a five-acre field guarded by a sentry line of towering maple trees and ending abruptly at a thick grove of Douglas firs. My father raised sheep in this field, and we would often see him and the sheep in the distance, small figures. Quite regularly, a thick mist would partially or completely obscure my father, the sheep, and even the maple trees—only for them to emerge as they or the fog moved.

So when I first encountered Chinese landscape painting, I felt a connection to memories deep inside of me. Those canvases, where forested mountains would suddenly give way to blank canvas, representative of clouds, fog, or lakes, could well have been of the view from my own home.

What interests me as a composer about the dual influences of my memories and Chinese landscape paintings is the sense that the world continues to exist, to have its own courses, its own narratives, its own meanings, even when it is shrouded for a time, enveloped in impenetrable fog. The emptiness of the canvas, the blankness of the mist, is a paradoxical place where time is frozen and yet continues unimpeded. In maples, sheep, father, fog, these same paradoxical places unfold in sound.