Getting it on tape

 

Early this morning, I was out driving on a narrow two-lane county road that winds and rises and falls through the hilly Maine landscape.  It's essentially a two-car-width path cut through a dense and expansive forest.   Maine is full of these kinds of roads, and I find that driving on them can be spiritually transformative.  While driving this morning, I was listening to/meditating on Keith Jarrett's Staircase album.  This is an album to which I've listened for literally decades, but driving through the forest in the rainfog Maine morning, the music changed my perception of the forest, and the forest impacted how I heard the music.   [Side note: the photos in this blog post were taken on the drive this morning.  I pulled off the road, or stopped, as there was no other traffic.]

As I looked out at the zooming-by forest, I was taken by its rather limited palette, as the dominant color is a vibrant spring green, contrasted by the dark tree trunks.  As I moved deeper into the forest and it became denser, I stopped thinking about Keith's music and starting thinking about my own.  I love this forest view so much that I was again thinking about how to translate this view into music.  How to capture the forest on tape.  My 5th string quartet was based on forest geometry, but this kind of spring forest is different.  This forest is pure; unpunctuated by houses or other roads.  There is a pattern to the planting location of the trees, but not one I understood; rather, one devised by nature. 

The longer I drove through the forest, the more I could start to hear.... something.  I eventually realized that it was an intangible music.  Or intangible at that moment; perhaps not always.  I had the thought, "How can I get this on tape?"  In other words, translate this visual environment into music, and actually record it.  I don't mean music that sounded like a forest, or music intended to invoke a forest in the listener, or something with "forest" in the title.  But a piece or pieces containing or built upon the textures and fabrics and secret geometry in which I was immersed. 

The music that started to form was not simple, but somewhat complex.  I could hear dense and deep harmonic structures in the visual forest depths.  I have a little bit of synesthesia, and to me, this kind of spring green always sounds like the key of G major.  However, this morning, it was far more polytonal and contained multiple and simultaneous harmonic centers.

To return to the central question of how can I capture this on tape: I'm not yet sure.

But I'm working on it.

-kk