Music archive entry

Flexible - four melody lines

I live in the northern New England countryside. It's an area which is very hilly and wooded, with much in the way of old-growth forests. Many of these forested areas are protected as nature preserves or conservation land, and are traversed by narrow and winding hiking trails. One windy and blustery day, I found myself out on one of the trails. The wind was made audible by the movement of the trees and leaves, which produced a range of sounds from whispers to roars, punctuated by brief moments of silence and stillness.

I began to imagine these periods of sound within the context of a compositional framework, and this had the effect of altering my sonic perception as I listened to the wind and trees. A composition began to take shape. I imagined the varying gusts of wind as chordal and harmonic elements; as clouds of tonality blowing in. I listened to the rising and falling; both in pitch and dynamics, and imagined this transcribed for instruments. I envisioned instruments playing the parts of the wind and the trees. Arborescence for Quartet was the product of this interaction with the forest.