The Land Shifts - Suite for String Orchestra
Duration: 20 Minutes
Difficulty: Grade 5 (grading system details)
Written: 2024
Instrumentation:
-Violin I
-Violin II
-Viola
-Violoncello
-Double Bass
Program Note:
2024 was the tenth anniversary of my working at the University of Rhode Island Summer Music Academy. As I drove back and forth to campus in July, I noticed a dense, viny ground cover on the sides of the highway that appeared to be charred and burnt at the very top. As I noticed it more and more, I wondered what it was, and worried if our warming and unpredictable climate was to blame. The scope of both the problem and its solution were revealed in due time.
Twisting, pulling, seeing, and burning: The Land Shifts explores these four land-based actions, where either the land or our perspective on it is altered.
Movement I. Twistability lashes out, frustrated and confused about the present. Writhing sforzando’s fade and return like the seasons, and a quintuplet motif (“Twist-a-bi-li-ty”) twists the six-beat bar into five. The music asks if we can allow ourselves to twist, to be changed by new knowledge—even if it scares us. How twistable is the history we're taught, when other histories have been hidden from us? Are we open-hearted enough to accept what we might learn?
Movement II. Kudzu Pull is about a group of friends gathering to pull up “the vine that ate the south,” bit by bit. This plant—invasive to the Americas—takes over entire landscapes, choking out every competitor. Which plants lived there before Kudzu took over? What seed bank might be waiting, underneath? What is the land's history?
This brings us to Movement III. Seeing with different eyes. In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer recounts the following:
“One morning in March I stopped by Tom’s place to talk about planting [...] in the spring. I was full of plans for an experimental restoration. [...] We put on our jackets and walked out over the fields. With the right eyes you can almost unsee Route 5, the railroad tracks, and I-90 across the river. You can almost see fields of Iroquois white corn and riverside meadows where women are picking sweetgrass. [...] But the fields where we walk are neither sweetgrass nor corn."
-Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) pg. 259-260
To know ourselves and the land we are on, we have to practice unseeing, and notice how the land shifts. What defines a place like america, if not endless roadways, plastic, and overdevelopment? How can we live in a place that is both so loud and so silent?
Movement IV. Prescribed Fire—the raucous finale—nods to the ancient land management technique of burning portions of land during the cold and wet season, which reduces the amount of flammable ground cover. This prevents larger wildfires during the summer, while feeding the existing the seed bank underneath with nutritious ash.
Growing up, I thought global warming was to blame for summer wildfires. In adulthood, I learned that Indigenous people routinely introduced fire to the landscape for its benefit. When millions of them were taken from these lands, the ground-cover was not routinely burned, and the flammable material on the forest floor was not maintained. Today, Indigenous people make up only 5% of the world's population, but protect approximately 85% of the world's biodiversity.
On the final drive back from the string academy, things clicked for me. That ground cover was an invasive species––either Knotweed or Kudzu. Rather than being pulled or burned to make room for native species, the state government sprayed it with chemicals before it reached the highway. The climate was not drying the plant out; the land was being mismanaged. This heartbreaking shift in perspective on the highway is what inspired this piece of music, which I hurriedly sketched on a friend's keyboard later that afternoon.
If we are to love the land how it deserves to be loved, sovereignty movements like Land Back must guide our thinking, actions, and refusals. Singeing the edges of our problems will never be enough. We have to love pulling them up by the roots.
*Click on each title to view a score preview. Movement II and Movement IV are excerpted for standalone performance