MAPPING MUSIC

Tag: Great Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes

  • 3. Sketching Places

    Ann Arbor, 1969 —

    From the beginning of my study of trombone, I was an avid player. In high school, I took lessons with top U.Mich. trombone students in Ann Arbor. Playing in high school band and the Michigan Youth Symphony, I also started my own little brass group, the Streetcorner Brass, to play on the snowy sidewalks of downtown Howell at Christmas. Adding drums, we began to play my arrangements of Tijuana Brass tunes and rock ‘n roll at youth dances.

    Brass

    At college in Ann Arbor, I played bass trombone in the University Philharmonia and Symphony orchestras, and the trombone choir.

    Goliard Brass

    I also joined the Plymouth Symphony and a part-time professional sextet, the Goliard Brass. We played for weddings, in churches, and Ann Arbor coffee shops. A sample of our repertoire:

    Giovanni Gabrieli – Canzona XIII

    Morley Calvert – Suite from the Monteregian Hills

    Where’s Waldo? (one of three beards)
    with dancer Risa Friedman

    As trombonist for the U. Mich. Contemporary Directions ensemble, I performed more avant garde works, such as this challenging brass piece:

    Gunther Schuller – Music for Brass Quintet

    My youthful composing had been mostly for piano and trombone. Brass chamber music compositions naturally followed in my student and early professor times.

    • NIGHT SONGS — trombone. TC-21 (1969) Borik Press
    • TRILOGY — brass quintet. TC-23 (1970)
    • ISOSTRATA — 2 trp., 2 tbn., tuba, perc. TC-35 (1977) Seesaw Music
    • ICESCAPE — brass quintet. TC-39 (1980)
    • MUCHA’S LIGHT — Brass quintet. TC-73 (1996)
    • KLADNO SKETCHES — Brass septet. TC-100 (2019)

    Kladno

    Kladno is a Czech city in the Central Bohemian Region 25 kilometers northwest of Prague. In the middle of the 19th century, the discovery of coal there led to the establishment of one of the great ironworks and then steel mills in all of Europe.

    Kladno is near Lidice, the village destroyed by the Gestapo in 1942. Of the Lidice men who were all shot in the atrocity, many had walked to Kladno each day to work in the coal mine or the Poldi steel works.

    Kladno Sketches

    Clark 2019 (TC-100)

    Zámek – peaceful gardens

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    The city remains a thriving place with a population of 70,000, a large church, municipal building, state library and archives, monuments, theaters, museums, and beautiful parks. The Czech people have always been hard working, they love gardens, especially roses, and they love beer in the fine pilsner style they created.

    Poldi – ironworks

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    Poldi has thrived and survived for more than 100 years, through two world wars and occupations of the country, but the factory finally closed and most of the buildings are now abandoned.

    Svobody – Freedom plaza

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    Suffering under so much occupation and oppression throughout their history in the center of Europe, Czechs especially value “svobody” – freedom.

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    Chicago

    Beyond brass, more chamber music scores inspired by places . . .

    Chicago Sketches

    Clark 2019 (TC-96)

    Fermi Lab

    December 1942

    Henry Moore sculpture on the University of Chicago campus, commemorating the site of the experimental pile that launched the atomic age

    Navy Pier

    March 2014

    A winter visit to the Lake Michigan shore

    Buckingham Fountain

    August 1976

    A pilgrimage to Grant Park with new family four months before the wedding

    Leelanau

    The “Great Lake State,” Michigan is two enormous peninsulas surrounded by Lakes Michigan, Superior, and Huron. Actually, there are many smaller peninsulas extending out into the lakes. The Leelanau Peninsula (north of the venerable Interlochen music camp where I spent many summers) extends about 30 miles from the northwestern corner of the mitten-shaped Lower Peninsula into Lake Michigan.

    Algonquian-speaking tribes occupied this area prior to European colonization. The land is now home to lighthouses, wineries, ski slopes, inland lakes, and coastal dunes and beaches.

    Leelanau Sketches

    Clark 2022 (TC-117)

    Shining Water

    The changing patterns of sunlight sparkling on water always fascinates me, particularly on Lake Michigan looking west from the Leelanau Peninsula.

    Ice Caves

    On the Leelanau Peninsula’s western shore, the Lake Michigan surf sometimes whips up and freezes in mid-air, forming weird ice caverns and ice dunes.

    Ojibwe legend tells of a fierce forest fire on the western shore of Lake Michigan, forcing a mother bear and her two cubs into the water to swim to the opposite shore. After many miles of swimming, the exhausted cubs drowned. When the mother bear reached the eastern shore, she waited on top of a high bluff in hopes that her cubs would finally appear. Moved by the mother bear’s determination and faith, the Great Spirit created two islands to commemorate the cubs, and the winds buried the sleeping bear under the sands of the dunes, where she still waits.

    Sleeping Bear Dunes

    The main dune is enormous, a mountain of sand rising dramatically above the shore of Lake Michigan. The bear’s bluff atop this majestic mass of earth is a serene vista of radiant sun, windblown sand and waves.

    Autumn on M22

    A scenic autumn drive around the peninsula on Highway M22 is a glory of light sifting down through a canopy of colored leaves. The 75-mile drive from Empire on M22 winds northeast to Northport then south around the east side of the peninsula along Grand Traverse Bay to Traverse City.

    Compared to brass, my list of chamber music pieces for strings is more recent but longer.

    Highlands

    There are many Highlands in my life. I am part Scottish, though my great grandparents are from Glasgow, not the Highlands. I do enjoy its single-malt whiskeys, though, and I went to Howell High School, the “Highlanders.” And I now live in the Texas Hill Country.

    Then there is Českomoravská vrchovina . . .

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    Býkovice below Velký Blaník massif

    I first visited what was then still Czechoslovakia in 1991. The Bohemian-Moravian Highlands are between the two main regions of what is now the Czech Republic. The ancient town of Tabor and the legendary Blaník mountains are two points of scenic and historical interest. Highlands Sketches sound paints climbing the mountain’s rugged slope, a thunderstorm of dissonant accents, and the quiet harmonic progression of an autumn dusk.

    Highlands Sketches

    Clark 2023 (TC-137)

    Massif

    “Velký Blaník”

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    Storm

    “bouřka”

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    Dusk

    “soumrak”

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  • 2. Musique Française

    Ann Arbor, 1968 —

    Having begun composing in 1963, I started formal composition study in 1968 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. American composer Eugene Kurtz, based in Paris but filling in that semester at Michigan, was assigned to teach the new freshman. A proponent of modern French music, his compositional models included Debussy and Ravel.

    Sonatine

    Kurtz assigned me to immerse myself in deep study of their music, in particular Ravel’s Sonatine (1905).

    Ravel: Sonatine

    Judith Valerie Engel on YouTube

    Fifty years later in my career as a more experimental composer, my compositional style began to mellow toward a gentler Impressionistic approach and a lush, bright harmonic language reminiscent of Debussy and Ravel.

    Homage to Ravel, my new Sonatine is spun from a single harmonic progression, seven chords each stacking a Perfect Fifth interval high above another.

    This material (what Schoenberg would call a Grundgestalt) generates melodic lines and many arpeggiation patterns, in successive variations of changing register, intensity, and rhythmic pace.

    Sonatine

    Clark 2025 (TC-155)

    Nocturnes

    In 1907, French composer Claude Debussy wrote, “I am more and more convinced that music, by its very nature, is something that cannot be cast into a traditional and fixed form. It is made up of colors and rhythms”. Color, light, and texture were also the hallmarks of a new style of painting developed by French artists — Impressionism.

    At the threshold of the 20th century on 15 December 1899, Debussy completed the first of his Impressionist masterpieces for orchestra, Trois Nocturnes. He avoided labeling it “symphony” or “tone poem” by calling the movements “three symphonic sketches”. The first sketch of Nocturnes is subtitled “Nuages,” premiered on 9 December 1900 in Paris.

    Debussy’s biography describes the genesis of the piece while crossing the Pont de la Concorde in Paris in stormy weather. The composer’s notes say, “‘Nuages’ renders the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow, solemn motion of the clouds, fading away in grey tones lightly tinged with white.”

    Debussy: Trois Nocturnes

    Vienna Philharmonic on Youtube

    Adopting the French language and musical style recognizes the early French explorers of the Great Lakes region of North America. The first decades of my life began there in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula (the “mitten”). It has its own smaller Leelanau Peninsula in the northwest corner (the mitten’s “little finger”) near Interlochen’s National Music Camp, where I spent many summers. Nearby Grand Traverse Bay has its own even smaller Old Mission peninsula, where I loved to visit its lighthouse. The Leelanau has a grand lighthouse at its northern tip and a scenic drive, state highway M21, winding for 64 miles all the way around the peninsula’s shoreline, through forests and past the Great Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes.

    In 1984 my piece titled PENINSULA for piano and sound synthesis was a more experimental work that traced a map of the Leelanau and its landmarks to determine by their spatial coordinates the timing and pitches of sound constellations.

    Moving forward from that mapping phase of my compositions, my Impressionistic phase produced the sound sculpture Leelanau Sketches in 2022. Some of its musical material reappears now in five symphonic sketches, Belle Péninsule. Here is the fourth movement, which quotes Debussy’s “Nuages.”

    Belle Péninsule

    IV. “Nuages blanc“

    Clark 2024 (TC-147)

    La Mer

    Debussy’s completed his second composition of three symphonic sketches for orchestra, La Mer, in 1905. It is a monumental work of Impressionist sound-painted textures and a textbook model of lush, beautiful orchestration. The three sketches are titled:

    “De l’aube à midi sur la mer”

    “From dawn to midday on the sea”

    Jeux de vagues”

    “Play of the Waves”

    “Dialogue du vent et de la mer”

    “Dialogue of the wind and the sea”

    Debussy: La Mer

    Orchestre national de France

    My homage to La Mer, Sea Sketches, sound-paints waves, deep currents, wind, and sun-sparkling surfaces, employing swelling sound colors and post-modern cyclic techniques in a pan-diatonic tonal setting. The end briefly quotes the opening arpeggio of Debussy’s “La fille aux cheveux de lin” (“The Girl with the Flaxen Hair”) from Book I of his Préludes for piano (1909-1910).

    Sea Sketches

    Clark 2023 (TC-132)

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