IN A LANDSCAPE

In a Landscape leads off with "Elysium," which imagines a prelapsarian world before the impact of humans. The song is based on a simple I – V/V – I – vi – I progression that is intended to evoke a hymn, though it's an odd, Lydian progression that wouldn't be found in any hymnal. I was also trying to evoke some of the "American" sound of Aaron Copland from pieces like Appalachian Spring though we use slightly different progressions.

Myths sit at the heart of every culture, shaping how we understand ourselves and the world, and Mythos—inspired by fragments of Bach’s Violin Concerto in A minor (BWV 1041)—tries to tap that universality by focusing on one devastating instant: King Aegeus, standing at Cape Sounion, sees Theseus’s ship return from Crete still bearing black sails (a sign of death rather than the promised white of victory), assumes his son has been killed, and throws himself into the sea—giving the Aegean its name. The video’s imagery lingers in that suspended moment as the ship approaches and Aegeus waits, but then a different figure rises behind the boat: the Palaikastro kouros, a mid–15th-century BCE Minoan statue discovered at Palaikastro in eastern Crete in hundreds of fragments, perhaps from the town’s destruction—an extraordinary work, unusually large and refined, fashioned from opulent materials like hippopotamus ivory and gold. That abrupt shattering stands in stark contrast to Senescence, the second movement, which evokes the slow, incremental wearing-down of living systems—the loss of function, repair, and renewal over time—and it leads into the larger arc of In a Landscape: the question of whether civilizations ever sense their own decline, and the sober recognition that the Minoans, the ancient Greeks, and our own Anthropocene moment all drift toward extinction and replacement by whatever comes next.

This movement is about that moment when civilization has developed into a state of pastoral innocence, an idealized (and idyllic) moment when humanity had a fleeting balance in harmony with nature. This idea has long been an inspiration for artists and writers ("idyll" comes from the Greek word for "little picture" or "small poem"), so I've picked a number of idyllic landscape paintings to illustrate this video for the piece.

In order,* you see:  

Pastoral Landscape by Asher Durand

The Hay Wain by John Constable 

Extensive Pastoral Landscape by Marco Ricci 

Noonday by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot 

De Molen by Rembrandt van Rijn 

Pastoral Landscape (The Roman Campagna) by Claude Lorrain

The Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel the Elder 

Heart of the Andes by Frederick Church 

The View of Toledo by El Greco 

Homer and the Shepherds by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot 

Le Concert champêtre by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot 

Landscape with a Calm by Nicolas Poussin 

Pastoral Landscape by Asher Durand (again, bringing us full circle) and, finally, 

Great Northern Diver, or Loon, by John James Audubon  

The imagery ends with a loon because that is the bird call you hear throughout the track. I recorded it earlier this year on a serene (you might say "idyllic") lake in Maine.

* if I didn't miss any....

"Arcadia" is the fourth movement of my suite, "In a Landscape."  Coming, as it does, right on the heels of "Idyll" it might seem at first to be covering the same ground (pun intended), though musically they are very different pieces.  

"Arcadia" is written in E minor--the only movement in the suite in that key--which, like all minor keys, evokes a sense of melancholia. As you will see in this accompanying video, the inspiration isn't just the pastoral charms of nature, but Nicholas Poussin's famous painting, "Et in Arcadia Ego," which is translated as "Even in Arcadia, I am there." The "I" in this case is death--even in the most peaceful, bucolic world, death is always right around the corner. (Or, to quote Matthew 24:35-36, "Heaven and earth shall pass away...but of that day and hour no one knows.")  

Nimble ears may hear a strain of Mozart's Sonata for Piano and Violin No. 21 in E minor (K. 304) toward the end of the piece. Surprisingly, that is Mozart's only instrumental work in that key, and it was written right around the time his mother died. I don't know if it's reading too much into it, but I feel like it displays some of the somber quality of Mozart's grief, which I grafted onto my own piece.  If you've been following my work you know that I often create videos by feeding poetry or scenes from Shakespeare into a program that chooses stock footage to create a video. This time, I picked "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" by Christopher Marlowe; I created the video in such a way that the stock imagery weaves in and out of focus, so that images appear and disappear in a ghostly manner. Slowly, Poussin's "Et in Arcadia Ego" emerges toward the end of the piece.

I saved making the video for "Babel" until the end because it's the movement of "In a Landscape" that is least like any of the others. And by "least like" I mean "totally not like them at all." The piece's genre is basically musique concrète ("concrete music"), which simply means that the entirety of the piece is made up of snippets of recorded sounds that are assembled into a collage.  

Beatles fans will know musique concrète--even if they aren't familiar with the term---because it is how John and Yoko's song "Revolution No. 9" was built for The White Album. I realize most people skip "Revolution No. 9" when they listen to that LP and I have no doubt that many people will skip "Babel," as well--but I would hope you might give it a listen at least once, as I think there are some rewards here.  

Babel comes at the midpoint of "In a Landscape." It represents both the pinnacle of civilization and, as in the Biblical story from which its title it borrowed, the point where humans reach too far and it all comes crashing down.   I mentioned before that "Babel" is *basically* musique concrète; the reason it's not entirely true to the genre is two-fold: one, toward the end of the piece, you'll hear the faint strains of "Arcadia," the previous movement in the "In a Landscape." (Each movement is paired with another part of the suite; this is the only time such twinning happens back-to-back.)  

Second: you'll hear a voice in Greek throughout the piece. That is a woman reading a passage from Ovid's Metamorphosis about the fall of Icarus. While every other sound in the piece is something I recorded in situ around the world (in Greece, Alaska, New York City, Hawaii, Chicago, Scotland, and many, many other places), this narrative thread was created in the studio.  

The Icarus story is also the subject of the famous Breughel painting, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," which is featured in this video. As you watch, you'll see the people and objects in the painting slowly morph from the 16th-century to the modern world, thanks to some photo-manipulating tricks.

As the title suggests, "Collapse" is supposed to depict the moment when civilization has reached the point of no return. But rather than cymbals crashing and trumpets blaring, this collapse is actually quiet. Sure, there's some dissonance--especially in the insistent twin bassoon lines--but there's also a haunting and almost cheerful melodic strain that comes and goes throughout the piece. (That motif may appear in the second movement, "Mythos," as well -- I guess we'll find out when I write it!)

The gentleness of this piece is because when something collapses -- a person, an eco-system, a civilization -- it can happen so quickly and so quietly that we don't even notice. Until it's too late.  

I'm fun at parties.

What will the world look like after we are gone?

"Aftermath" is a meditation on a post-human world.  To make the video, I fed a stanza of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" into a video generation software, which chose the following stock footage. (Except the last image--a lake in Maine--which is shot recently, and is the same lake that you hear in movement no. 3, "Idyll.) 

Here's Eliot:  "What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust."