DESCRIPTION:
A year ago I went to Redbud Valley Nature Preserve to record the sounds of the woods so that I could one day use them in a piece. That day I captured all manner of sounds: birds singing, the snorts of a startled group of deer, water dripping from the mouth of a cave, a lively spring gushing from the side of a boulder. A year passed and I gave little more thought to the recording, but as the sounds of spring returned this year I was once again enthralled with their beauty and was reminded of the recordings. I started by re-listening to all the ma- terial I had gathered, then I cleaned up the background noises as best I could, separated out interesting sounds, and began layering and sequencing them to create a rich tapestry of natu- ral sounds. I then experimented with using the piano to respond to those sounds, using both extended and traditional piano techniques. The resulting work, Hear the Forest Sing!, asks the listener to consider nature, to hear its voice, and to view more broadly what music can be.
Hear the Forest Sing! is arranged in six continuous movements that are somewhat palindro- mic in nature. The first movement, “The Hum of the Woods I” starts with purely avian voices (provided by the recordings from the forest) that are later joined by the pianist who creates reactionary sounds on the strings of the piano with a rubber spatula. In “First Re- sponsorial” the pianist plays a chorale melody on the keys of the piano while frequently in- terjected birdlike responses are heard both in the upper ranges of the piano and in the re- corded track. “Water Music I” begins as the sounds of water begin to fall and gather into streams of increasing power and force. Once again, the pianist first responds with the un- usual sounds produced using the spatula before joining in a more musically traditional way in “Water Music II”. As the rain subsides and the strong voice of the birds is heard once more a second responsorial episode unfolds (V. “Second Responsorial”) before giving way to the pure sounds of nature (VI. “The Hum of the Woods II”) once again.