Big Basin: The Song of the Redwoods (2012/2020)
A California song!
Along the northern coast
You untold life of me
for voice, piano, and large spatialized ensemble (2012)
OR
for orchestra (2020) as a part of Oratorio for the Earth
Commission/Premiere: The work was commissioned and premiered by Peak Frequency Ensemble, University of Colorado (2012). The 2020 version of the work will become part of my concert-length work ORATORIO FOR THE EARTH, commissioned by New Music USA and National Endowment for the Arts.
Big Basin: The Song of the Redwood Trees is influenced by The Tuning Meditations by my mentor Pauline Oliveros and the concept of Deep Listening. In the work Big Basin performers interact with a fully notated score performed by the pianist and spoken/sung text of the poem Song of the Redwoods by Walt Whitman. The pianist/vocalist creates an environment in which the other performers move within—performers create a drone of sounds, the wind whistling through the trees and pitches that resonant with the earth that moves through the sonic image of the redwood trees portrayed in the piano’s massive linear chords. In addition to the layer of notated sound and drone there is also a layer of spoken text from Whitman’s poem which comments, reflects and intones with the pianist’s part to create a narrative about the work. The final effect is one of recreating the imagined image-music-text that inspired poet Walt Whitman to create the poem: The Song of the Redwoods Trees—creating a new environment for the text to exist.
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A CALIFORNIA song!
A prophecy and indirection—a thought impalpable, to breathe, as air;
A chorus of dryads, fading, departing—or hamadryads departing;
A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky,
Voice of a mighty dying tree in the Redwood forest dense.
Farewell, my brethren,
Farewell, O earth and sky—farewell, ye neighboring waters;
My time has ended, my term has come. -
Along the northern coast,
Just back from the rock-bound shore, and the caves,
In the saline air from the sea, in the Mendocino country,
With the surge for bass and accompaniment low and hoarse,
With crackling blows of axes, sounding musically, driven by strong arms,
Riven deep by the sharp tongues of the axes—there in the Redwood forest dense,
I heard the mighty tree its death-chant chanting.
The choppers heard not—the camp shanties echoed not;
The quick-ear’d teamsters, and chain and jack-screw men, heard not,
As the wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years, to join the refrain;
But in my soul I plainly heard.
Murmuring out of its myriad leaves,
Down from its lofty top, rising two hundred feet high,
Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs—out of its foot-thick bark,
That chant of the seasons and time—chant, not of the past only, but the future. -
You untold life of me,
And all you venerable and innocent joys,
Perennial, hardy life of me, with joys, ’mid rain, and many a summer sun,
And the white snows, and night, and the wild winds;
O the great patient, rugged joys! my soul’s strong joys, unreck’d by man;
(For know I bear the soul befitting me—I too have consciousness, identity,
And all the rocks and mountains have—and all the earth;)
Joys of the life befitting me and brothers mine,
Our time, our term has come.
Rental/Purchase
To acquire the scores and parts, email Pamela Madsen directly at pmadsen@fullerton.edu.