Birdsong Maps, Cow Pond, and Bartok's Echo

( Pond and Trees-- painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor on paper, 2008)

Mapped in these morning woods,
elevation-contours in birdsong:


Liquid and elegant, wood thrush and veery at
300 to 500 feet on
sun-dappled eastern slopes.


At 700 to 1,000 feet
the longer song of
hermit thrush
in the cooler, darker sugarbush
of the shadowed
western ridge and just below.


And here’s an old stone wall
--once tight-stacked, now hollow
and in motion--
tracing the edges
of ancient, overgrown pasture.

--But whose
cathedral spine

these rising stands of

strong white spruce,

spacious
white pine?





-Kevin Macneil Brown





--------------------------------------



The poem above began in my head last week while I was running on the old roads and trails of Irish Hill. I was searching for a place called Cow Pond, where, according to Agatha Fasetts's book THE NAKED FACE OF GENIUS, the composer Bela Bartok had once picnicked. Bartok spent a summer nearby this hill, at Fasset's house near Riverton. I've done some research and so far I've found no evidence pointing to where Cow Pond is --or was--located. But local history shows that this hill and ridge-- now fully forested-- were used as summer pasture even into the early 20th century. Taking that as a possible clue, my mission last week was to visit two small ponds shown on the topo map. Alas, dense summer undergrowth and my own lack of time hampered the effort. It was a great run nonetheless. I'll go back and continue the quest, probably in the fall.

Here's a short story I wrote a few years ago, inspired by Bartok's Vermont visit:

BARTOK'S ECHO

By Kevin Macneil Brown

(Originally published in BOOKPRESS, in 2001)

I am a maker of sounds, but lately those sounds have gone silent for me, and I am haunted only by images. The clearest of those images is before my eyes now, outside the open window: in the late summer green of this place called Vermont, in America, one tree has begun to turn red beneath blue sky, under shining sun. Here, the air is hot and dry by day, clear and chill at night. In the mornings, a damp, cold fog rises up from the little river lined with railroad tracks in the valley below. By noon, the fog lifts, and I can see far beyond this strange tree, to lines of distant mountains. Blue-grey and stony, they rise above the green slopes where the sun sets.
The other images are fading quickly, which is a fine thing for that of the view from the ship that brought me here. I do not wish to always remember that grey Atlantic, Godless, cold and endless, that stretched before me as I stood on the deck. Unfortunately, I suspect that I will always be remembered that way, as I was photographed, gazing out across the rails of the ship——a man leaving his home in fear, pride, anger, sorrow, driven away by the realities of a barbarian invasion. As we turned toward the fortieth year of our century, a mechanical horror descended upon my country and the rest of Europe; inhuman men destroyed humanity with hatred and terror.
Ah, but the image of home——not cold, not grey, not hard and stony, but my sweet, sweet Hungary! Flowers, wet earth, small cobbled streets rich with people, songs, the smells of cooking...my heart breaks to think of it on this hot day of silent trees. At home, there were birds singing in every tree. Here in Vermont, in August, there is only the harshness of crows across the sky. No wonder I feel this terrible silence from inside.
Perhaps I mentioned that I am a man of music. In my youth, I studied the great composers of our European music, and mastered the masters, if I dare say so myself. After this, my ears opened to the folk songs and dances of my homeland. I have such sweet memories of my youthful wanderings, alone or with my dear friend Kodaly, sleeping in the country, collecting songs like a bird watcher collects glimpses. Such hard work, with such flashes of joy! Later, I did the same in northern Africa. My ears opened to a universe of sound——all music became like the physicist’s atoms of energy and meaning. Every atom vibrated in my whole being. I cannot bear to think that all this can be reduced to the ashes of human beings destroyed in war, or, for that matter, to the view of a bare granite mountain top visited only by the cackling shadows of crows.
Perhaps it is my constant tiredness that brings these thoughts——my exhausted, fevered energy as I walk the country roads here, or pace the dark wood rooms of gracious Agathe’s cool, comfortable summer home. My dear Ditta does all she can to lift my spirits: the walks, picnics, reading out loud in the evenings. Thanks to her I can still laugh, still smile. But, secretly, I am crushed by this silence. It is a silence not of the world, but of myself. Though I wander the hills each day, I fear I am drying up like those red leaves on the tree, as if the blood of my heart is showing on the outside.
But today, something strange and wonderful happened, and I write this in the hope that I can shed light on this dark thing inside me, this shadow that I fear grows larger each day.
This morning, after the usual fog had lifted and we had breakfasted, I played piano (working through some Bach) then set out to catalog some pieces from my huge trunk of manuscripts——local songs, brought from home. There are so many regional styles, and my intent is to organize and sort them. It is, of course, a large task, one that makes me tired just to think about. As I sat at the rough-hewn, crowded table that serves as my desk here, I heard Ditta and Agathe’s voices outside, laughing like schoolgirls.
"Bartók Béla!" Ditta called, "Come out here. There is something we must show you!" I was only too glad to be interrupted, and went outside to join them. Still giggling, in a chaos of English and Hungarian, they led me out into a sun so bright it hurt my eyes. It took me a brief while to figure out that it was a sound they wanted me to hear that was causing all the excitement. We walked a short way up the steep dirt road above Agathe’s house to a small, overgrown clearing by the side of the road. In the clearing stood an old wooden barn, broken down, letting blue sky show through where the boards were missing. As we approached it, Ditta clapped and shouted; I heard a quite striking echo——first, distinctly from the barn’s side, then two more repeats, softer and more distant, from the hills around us.
"Béla," said Ditta, breaking into my concentration of listening, "Isn’t it a lovely echo? Like the one at home in Tihany..." In a flash, I remembered a place in Hungary: hillside, stream and cataract. With the memory came an echo of laughter from years ago. "I must listen again. It does not seem to be as strong an echo as the one in Tihany," I said, and began to clap and shout myself. I listened for the sound’s return, shouted again, stopped to listen. Then, the strange thing happened. I stopped listening and the words flew out of me, all in Hungarian: "Tree, rock, stone, sound, music, echo, song, bird, Ditta, Bartók Béla, echo, Tihany, Tihany!" I shouted loudly and for a long time, stopped as the circling echo spun around my head and Ditta and Agathe stood silently watching me. It was like an exertion, this shouting. My shirt was damp with perspiration, and I was a little out of breath.
The three of us walked down the hill together, and I was grateful for the help of gravity to bring me back to the house. To Ditta and Agathe I said, "It is not as good... not as good an echo as the one in Tihany at all." But this afternoon, as I sit at my table and work, that echo crowds out the rote of black notes on the musical staves and begins to replace the grey ocean, even the brittle red leaves of the tree outside my window. The scientists say an atom never stops moving. In autumn, when all the leaves have fallen from the trees and have made a thin mulch on this hard land, I should like to imagine that restless echo under it all, waiting to be heard.
——


And a composition for guitar and looping devices, made around the same time as the story:

http://search.jukeboxalive.com/player/player.php?sid=2239133&method=play

Running Through History and Memory in Gloucester, Massachusetts

(Homage to Fitz Henry Lane, painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
acrylic on canvas, 2009)

RUNNING THROUGH HISTORY AND MEMORY IN GLOUCESTER, MASSACHUSETTS.

By Kevin Macneil Brown

(This piece appeared, in slightly different form, in NEW ENGLAND RUNNER magazine.)


Some dreams actually hurt. For example, there’s the recurring one where I’m running on the beach. It’s a beach from my childhood summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts; a beach that, in my memory, shines as an image of alluring mystery; of joy and discovery: Good Harbor Beach. There’s a long, gently curving stretch of pale sand; a scatter of rocky islands that seem to float on an incoming tide; the twin lighthouses of Thacher’s reef rising from the waves to the northeast.
In my dream, I head out for a run from my home in the Vermont mountains; a run through woods or meadow or brick-built downtown. Then I turn a corner and my heart takes a leap of joy inside me: I’m all of a sudden on Good Harbor beach. The sense of happiness, of being truly “home”, is vivid, even through the filter of dreaming.
And that sense still lingers when I awaken to realize that it was only a dream, that Good Harbor Beach is nearly two-hundred miles away; that in reality I won’t turn a corner and find myself there when I head out for a run today.
So maybe it’s not exactly the dream that hurts. It’s the waking up.


I began running for fitness at the age of fifteen. That was over thirty years ago, and, as might be expected, my running has changed, just as I have, over the years. From fitness training, through road racing, to long endurance and exploration runs on wooded trails, my running has evolved into a moving meditation, a way to connect with my deeper self, and with the history and geography of the world I run through. Often when I run, my head and heart and energy systems seem to work together better than they do at any other time in my day.
A few years ago, after a four-month period of particularly intense effort in my life, I decided to give myself the gift of a return--to run-- to Gloucester. I had no agenda other than to run on the beach, to look at the Atlantic, maybe take some time to peruse the canvases of New England marine painter Fitz Henry Lane on display at the Cape Ann Historical Museum. Knowing full well of Gloucester’s fabled past as America’s premier fishing port, I had a pretty good idea that by running in Gloucester I would once again be running through history and geography.
What caught me by surprise, though, was that, for the first time, the geography and history I ran through and into would be my own.


So now here I was. This was not a dream; it was really happening. I ran along the sidewalk beside a strip mall and road busy with Friday night traffic. I turned a corner, and there it was: whitecapped blue water on the horizon, long, pale sands in the sun. Now, faced in a waking state with the reality of Good Harbor Beach, I could feel the full force of the yearning for this place, a yearning I had for so long carried inside me.
I flew over the wooden walkway over the dunes, onto the sands, where just a few off-season walkers and kite-fliers moved, with plenty of distance between them. And I ran, feasting my senses, for more than an hour: loops and circles, up and down, on the pale, heavy sands above tide-line, the hard-packed and sandpiper- tracked sands at water’s edge.
The water grew silver and the sky pale gray after sunset, and I ran back to my motel. A white egret flashed by me in the roadside salt marsh. I knew I’d sleep well tonight.

The city of Gloucester is about the sea; about fishing; about the perfect harbor that Samuel Champlain called Beau Port when first he saw it in 1606; the same perfect harbor and headlands where English adventurers from the Dorchester Company laid out fish racks to dry their catch in 1623; the same perfect harbor that Lane painted over and over in the 1800s as a harbor full of working ships and boats beneath a huge, luminous sky.
Not far from the harbor was the place on East Gloucester square where my grandfather, Johhny Brown, worked in a little grocery store in the 1950s and 60s, selling canned goods and boxed cereal and fresh clams and linguica sausage and golden Portuguese sweetbread to fishermen and their families. Just a long stones-throw away were the wharves and piers where he’d take me walking, and we’d look at boats-- draggers and seiners and schooners and swordfish boats-- in the crowded harbor.
Back then the harbor had plenty of stories. Anybody in Gloucester’s Portuguese community in those days could tell you about Smoky Joe Mesquita, an Azorean-born schooner captain legendary for his uncanny, almost supernatural, ability to find fish. He was also legendary for his bravery and generosity: having brought all but one of his crew back from sea alive in a terrifying November storm in 1898, he wore the crown of honor at the Church Our Lady of Good Voyage, offered grateful prayers to his patron saint, and gave bread to the poor of the city.
My grandfather had told me the story of Gloucester fisherman Howard Blackburn, who, lost in his dory on the foggy, wintry Grand Banks off Newfoundland, with the frozen corpse of his dory mate beside him, rowed for days through ice and snow with his hands frozen to the oars--his fingers fell off later. Blackburn became a local hero, and went on, years later, to cross the Atlantic alone in a twenty-five foot sloop.
As I set out early, breaking into my stride for a long morning run, these stories returned to my memory, filling my mind with a slightly different perspective on what we runners call endurance.
It was a perfect clear May morning with a splash of silver sunlight across the blue ocean, the air already warm at six AM as I ran along the back shore at Bass Rocks, where waves broke, with infinite variety and energy, in white foam against the dark rocks below. I followed the road as it curved inland through a neighborhood of fine old homes and cool, dark patches of shade, then arrived again at waterside in East Gloucester, a crowded but appealing village defined by its boatyards and docks. An amazing profusion of vessels of all shapes and sizes, in all states of rigging, repair or dis-repair, filled the narrow harbor here, and scumbled, inverted images of mast and keel and bowsprit reflected back from the water, broken and shimmering in the pale morning light.
That same morning light filled East Gloucester Square, where, as if caught up in a deja vu, I recognized the shape of the storefronted building where my grandfather had worked.
It was already hot and humid as I took some hilly detours on the streets nearby. I was sweating, and my skin felt to me extra salty in the saturated, maritime air. Here was the street where my father had grown up; a while later, I reached the head of the harbor, with its long view of the fishing fleet and the fish- processing factories along the pier. Every place I ran seemed strangely familiar this morning; I realized that my memories were running alongside me.

After shower and coffee, I spent a little more time on my feet, taking in the Fitz Henry Lane paintings on permanent display at the Cape Ann Historical Museum. To my eyes it seemed that, despite the passage of a century and a half and the urbanization this city and its waterfront, Lane’s perspective of water and boats beneath a massive sky still held true: the suffusing maritime light that Lane captured so well had not changed at all.
There were more treasures to be found at the museum: the actual crown that Smokey Joe Mesquita had worn in 1898; the sloop GREAT REPUBLIC that Howard Blackburn had sailed single-handed across the Atlantic in 1901. .
But now I needed sustenance, and my legs needed rest. I settled down with a west- ender sandwich from Virgilio’s Bakery: rosemary-scented prosciutto ham with provolone cheese, red peppers, and herbed olive oil on a sesame-coated scala roll, crusty on the outside and chewy inside. For good measure, I threw in a hand-made cannoli, scattered with chocolate pieces. After all, I did have more running to do, and I’d need plenty of fuel.

The next morning, an intense symphony of bird song rose from salt marsh and scrubby woods and pulled me awake just before the sunrise. Without thought, I put on my shorts and shirt and running shoes in the darkness. Still groggy, I went outside and broke into a run beneath soft, gray, and drizzling skies. The Sunday morning road was free of traffic. I could hear rolling waves on Good Harbor Beach, and I headed toward that sound.
I had the beach to myself this morning. A pale orange ball of sun, made eerie by an intervening bank of thin fog, rose above the water. Gulls screamed above the breaking waves. My body woke up, moved faster, spurred by the soft and cooling drizzle, the kelp and salt smells in the air.
Just before a rising fog swallowed them, I caught a glimpse of the twin light towers of Thacher’s Island. I remembered the haunting and terrifying story that went with this place and the dangerous shoals nearby. In August of 1635, a pinnace had set out from Ipswich, to round the rocky coast here and make for Marblehead. Aboard were twenty- three people, including Anthony Thacher and his wife and four children. Caught in a hurricane that ripped her sails, the pinnace anchored to ride out the storm. But fierce winds and waves caused her anchor to drag, and she was driven into the ledge. High seas washed the passengers into the waves and against the rocks, where they suffered the ordeal of shipwreck and exposure to the sea’s absolute power. Anthony Thacher scrambled at last to safety upon the island; before long he found his wife, safe and dry also. But their children, and all the other passengers aboard the pinnace, were lost to the storm.
The only survivors of this ill-fated journey, Thacher and his wife were stranded for a day and a half on the island, until another Marblehead-bound vessel could take them off. Anthony named the island Thachers’ Woe, that it might always tell his sorrowful story. In 1771 the first lighthouse was built upon it, to mark these dangerous waters.
Again, an old story made me think about endurance. And it made me think about my own small yearnings, casting them in a different light in the face of thoughts of a loss as profound as was that of the Thachers.
The lines of Gloucester’s history are tangled up in loss: the sea has taken more than its share of the brave and adventurous souls who set forth from these coves and harbors. I meditated on these things as I ran, and some words came to my head, in rhythm with my footfalls and my breath. They were the words of Gloucester’s greatest poet, Charles Olson:

It is undone business
I speak of this morning
with the sea
stretching out
from my feet
Another twin towers showed from inland: the sky blue domes of the Portuguese church, The Church Of our Lady of Good Voyage. I circled the beach once more, and headed toward town, keeping the domes on my horizon. There were a few vehicles on the road now; pickup trucks mostly, with fishing gear in the beds, men with ball caps and Styrofoam coffee cups in the cabs. I reached the church, took in the stunning sculpture of Our Lady herself, holding a Gloucester Schooner safely in her arms. I ran further up what those of my grandfather’s generation called Portugee Hill, into a steep neighborhood of close-together white houses with a surprising view to far blue water under the low, gray sky.
Running up the hill felt great; running down again felt even better. I retraced my route, back to the beach.
The twin lights were gone now, swallowed up by a squall line, and the orange ball of sun was lost in thickening fog. I was running on Good Harbor Beach again. Not in a dream, but for real. The pealing chatter of sandpipers sang from the misty tideline.
With each stride, my feet found the water’s edge, closing the yearning circle, rooting me in history and memory and a sense of this powerful place.

From  RUNNING DEEP:  MOVING MEDITATIONS THROUGH NEW ENGLAND PLACE, TIME, AND MEMORY.
      http://www.amazon.com/Running-Deep-Meditations-Through-ebook/dp/B0078F0K6E/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1370781913&sr=1-1&keywords=running+deep+macneil

New Harbor Dawn

NEW HARBOR, JUNE DAWN, painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
acrylic on canvas, June 2009)

Two years ago this week I was on a road trip to Maine, playing a weekend of shows with Rusty Romance. It being our anniversary weekend, Robin and I stayed at a nice little inn overlooking the water at New Harbor, while the rest of the band bunked elsewhere. Music and travel meant not much sleep; but I made sure to rise early and fully take in those amazing down east sunrises over the quiet harbor. I sketched, and, most of all, I stored impressions deep inside.
The beauty of New Harbor—its range of color and light like no other place I’ve seen -- still haunts me. I will go back someday, but for now I will continue to make images from my memory of this powerful place.

Memory of a Certain Tide/ After Reading Dante in the Morning

(Memory of a Certain Tide, painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
acrylic on canvas, 2009)

---------------------------------------------

AFTER READING DANTE IN THE MORNING IN THE NORTHERN SPRING


The deeper
Music calls,

all silence
shuttered.

(Investigate this, all
the time,

with heart held
fully awake.)


While, in the rain,
the lilac-blooms

fall heavy-headed,
full, effulgent,

bringing unbound
miracles unbidden

and always
taking true form.


-Kevin Macneil Brown

A Soundscape for Early Summer: The Fog in Lilac Waves

(Island Waters 2- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
acrylic on canvas board, 2008)



Below is a hazy ambient piece I made on four track cassette about fifteen years ago.
The sonic elements include various sounds recorded through my open studio window and layers of direct-recorded electric guitar. (A borrowed 1965 Guild Starfire that I still really miss!)
This source material was looped and layered utilizing the now-vanished technology of endless telephone answering machine cassettes. ( Somewhere I have a big box full of these short tape loops; I suspect that listening to them now might unlock many lost memories. iframe width="400" height="100" style="position: relative; display: block; width: 400px; height: 100px;" src="http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/track=2535816022/size=venti/bgcol=FFFFFF/linkcol=4285BB/" allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0">The Fog in Lilac Waves by Kevin Macneil Brown

North Shore Light

North Shore Light, 1 and 2 (Paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown,
acrylic on canvas board, April 2009)


North Shore Light


Something happened this
morning so that
the warmth of rising sun
on my face was

strong as the knowing of god,
or the heat of human love.


I could turn my back
on all of this, even
look away completely, but

I’d still
feel it in full.

It’s as if there were
more than one
sunrise today,
and from more than one
direction.


I could be forever
uselessly
describing this,
so maybe it’s best to

Triangulate:

In this moment, here I am,
on this beach in north shore light

Over there, to my left and
inland,
stands Our Lady of Good Voyage
with her bells and lilac breezes

Over there, to my right and
offshore,
those mountains of waves rise,
with clearing fog, and gliding
ships.

And in all this

the living
north shore light
now finding,

beginning

another voyage


-Kevin Macneil Brown

Morning Calligraphs, Part Two

(March 12, 5; March 12, 3; March 19, 1 -- Calligraphs by Kevin Macneil Brown, 2009 )

Here are more calligraphs and some notes on the process:

http://kmbliminal.blogspot.com/2009/03/morning-calligraphs.html

Harbor Song

Sunset Harbor-(Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor on paper, 2009)


Harbor Song

Dark sails find my horizon
(like Homer painted, 1880,
from Ten Pound Island:

Not just seascapes, maritimes,
but moments of
choosing, yearning, knowing.)

High tide, and
A salt and kelp wind rises
with the morning.

I have slept through the night
and light now
fissures the sky.

This small, safe harbor seems
vivid and fresh today,
with silver waters arriving.

And beyond the breakwater
those fast sails filling
ah, my heart’s desire


-Kevin Macneil Brown

Morning Calligraphs

(March 12,2; March 12,1- Calligraphs by Kevin Macneil Brown, 2009)

I recently came across a few sheets of paper left over from a pad I'd found not to my liking for watercolor painting. Early one March morning, I used them to make a few simple calligraphs, taking an approach that falls somewhere between painting and printmaking.

I made six images very quickly-- including the two above-- using the papers, black paint and water, wadded newspaper, and a piece of cardboard. This way of working offers me a satisfying surrender to chance, hidden intent, and simple celebration of materials at hand.

(The inspiration for this comes to me from techniques used by Thomas Merton, as documented in Roger Lipsey's wonderful book ANGELIC MISTAKES: THE ART OF THOMAS MERTON (New Seeds, 2006))

First Light On Dark Waters

Winter Hymn number 1, Water and Sky,
painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, acrylic on canvas, 2009



I've been working for the past three months on a new project. It's a series of compositions for lap steel guitar in various altered tunings, mostly recorded in one take, with the ambient textures and spatial processing occurring in real time. As with much of my music, this work is intended to invoke and transfer moods and feelings at the confluence of inner and outer landscapes.

Psalm for Journeys

LAKE LIGHT (Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor on paper, February 2009)

PSALM FOR JOURNEYS

Walk, up
and over mountains
(so many mountains)

Follow thin and falling waters
to find wide river
passage

Reach
the place where blue lake shimmers
huge beneath the sky

Hold
this in the heart

-Kevin Macneil Brown

Notes for ACROSS BLUE MOUNTAINS

(Red Sky, Blue Mountains- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor on paper, 2008)

Here are some notes and comments about the tracks on ACROSS BLUE MOUNTAINS- SONGS AND SOUNDWORKS 2006-2008:


National, Harvest
This piece began as an exploratory improvisation on a borrowed vintage National New Yorker steel guitar. I fell in love immediately with the rough growl of the middle range, and I kept going back for those notes, that sound.
National New Yorker, Fender Blues Junior; mic-ed with a Radio Shack dynamic mic hung over the grille.

Never Run Dry
A simple song for voice and acoustic guitar. Dedicated with love to anybody who is hurting deep inside.
Vocal, Epiphone guitar; mic-ed with MXL-V63M

Eagle Dreams of Open Water
I imagined this piece as a gamelan composition for acoustic steel guitars in layers; but a gamelan sped up: like a bird's metabolism maybe, or spring run-off from mountains.
Epiphone guitar, Silvertone lap steel (John Goss modified); mic-ed with Studio Projects C3. (Thank you, Glenn Howland.)

The Women at Three Mile Bridge Road
My mystery novel HIGHWAY IN THE BLOOD tells the story of a steel player named Buck Hawkins who leaves behind some trouble in Texas only to find more trouble back home in Vermont. In the book, he composes a Dobro tune dedicated to some people and a place at the heart of the story. I thought it would be fun to actually write and record the piece in character as Buck.
1977 Dobro, 1974 Estrada guitar; mic-ed with Studio Projects C3.

Texas Double Eagle Railroad Blues
A strange little rockabilly blues with a touch of Zen, this came to me one fall day as maple leaves fell. In recording and mixing this version, I tried to keep to a 1950s small-studio /southern AM radio /late night vibe: lots of echo and a hot, sticky mix. (You can hear the full band version on the CD RUSTY ROMANCE- ROOTS N" ROLL.)
Vocal, 1974 Estrada , 1990s Mexican Telecaster, Fender Blues Junior; mic-ed with MXL V63M, Radio Shack dynamic.

Red Sky Prayer Across Blue Mountains
I made this piece on a cold, stark, and beautiful November afternoon. It’s made from the collage and reassembly of some pieces from alternate versions of previous compositions— Including “National, Harvest” and “November Path –for Dennis Darrah”.
National New Yorker, Silvertone lap steel, Lexicon jam man; processed with Acid software.

Colors of Dusk, Colors of Dawn- for Thomas Merton
Reading Thomas Merton’s words in the silent mornings and evenings has often been an inspiration to me, as has the experience of changing light and color in the unfolding dawn and dusk.
I spent most of the late winter and early spring of 2008 on this piece. It was my intent to express in sound those liminal colors, moods, and textures. The process began with a long, direct-recorded improvisation on steel guitar (I remember it as being my Melobar SL-6, but my tracking notes say it was the Silvertone.)
The extensive reshaping and sound painting was done in Acid and Cool Edit Pro.

Across Blue Mountains: New CD

(View From Isle La Motte- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
acrylic on canvas, 2007)

I'm pleased to report that I've just about finished my new solo CD, ACROSS BLUE MOUNTAINS: SONGS AND SOUNDWORKS. It features lots of atmospheric steel guitar and some intimate vocals. I think it's my most personal collection yet; a journey into inner and outer landscapes. You can listen to some of it here:

http://www.jukeboxalive.com/music_listen_1959081.html

I'm also excited to announce that we've just finishing mixing the new Rusty Romance album. It's being mastered as I write this. More to follow soon.

October Sunset, Lake Champlain

October Sunset, Lake Champlain

(painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper, 2008)

Migration

Migration (Monoprint by Kevin Macneil Brown, papers and black paint, 2007)

Sparrow and Fog

Poised at the edge of
seasons changing
or two weather systems
crashing together,
the white-throated sparrow,
in migration, begins to move now
south-east through heavy fog.

(Or perhaps that poise,
that pause, this fog, that waiting,
those seasons, those systems,
that moving, those directions

are only for us
are only pale
August perceptions…)

There are some questions,
I have found,
For which the best answers might be:

Call notes of birds;
Thick white silence.

-Kevin Macneil Brown

August, 2008

Still Point

Still Point;
Light Across Water

(Paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown, acyrlic on board, spring 2008)

Bright orange glow
(5:15) at

the point of soon-to-rise sun

Within that, blue cloud striations
and, just above: darker, almost black.

Further from this center, to the
north of east, a muted
peach-colored gleam; soft, and
brightening into that orange as
the eye follows

Toward the point of rising light;

The Virgin Point (Merton’s term)
and I feel a yearning toward—no, an attainment of
such a place, a feeling

By this, I mean
the moment, the locus
of new beginning

Where all that is not
necessary falls away into
an open, loving void

(as though swallowed
complete, by
bigger ocean!)

Wave upon wave
love returns to itself,
its strength-- already
considerable--gathering,
felt and
known

that magnificent
blue-green roar!

-kmb, May 08

--------------------------------------

I'm excited to announce the publication in one volume of my two poem cycles NORTH COAST DREAMING and LUMINIST DIARY. Here's more information, and a way to order a copy:

http://www.lulu.com/content/2152993

It's also available at Bear Pond Books, in Montpelier, Vermont.

And more news: I'll be showing some of my paintings as part of the Montpelier Art Walk this June. Here's more information:

http://www.lazypear.com/art_gallery/art_walk/montpelier_art_walk.html

Eagle Dreams of Open Waters

Rock, Water, Sky
Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown
(Acrylic on canvas, March 2008)


-------------------


Breathing hard beneath
first spring sun

running, wide-striding
along mud of the river path


after the long winter, from inside I can only
make rough outline
of the joy of
all of
this.


Better, then, to describe
up there, the eagle:

high in clear blue sky.
lifted by warming
earth through cool winds,

he's been dreaming
for a while now.


But today it's real
to see and sense:

the fast-moving truth of open water.


-kmb, April 08


------------------------------


Sun today, and clean fresh winds. But last week it snowed, and I was feeling under the weather. Thanks to Rusty Romance's stellar soundman, Glenn Howland--aka Mr. Coffee, aka Treeline Stringband-- I was able to record my way out of the blues. Glenn loaned me a fine mic and pre-amp particularly suited for acoustic music and I spent a day recording some pieces I've been working on for a few months. (How did Glenn know they were finished? Hmmm...)

One of the compositions I recorded was this piece for acoustic guitar-- a small-bodied Epiphone-- and acoustic steel-- the cool little 5 dollar Silvertone that John Goss made into a lap steel and gave to me.
I just finished mixing the piece today, using compression and echo to add texture, space, and motion around the notes. It's sort of an impressionistic acoustic slide guitar gamelan thing, maybe:
http://www.jukeboxalive.com/player/player.php?sid=1959093&method=play

New Harbor, Maine: Three Morning Views, Three Shoreline Transformations

(Paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown- acrylic on canvas, summer 2007)

It is becoming more and more clear to me that making all of this-- words, music, images--is simply a way to hold on for a long moment to the things that matter to me, before they pass through my hands, my apprehensions.

And now, a re-posted link to some contemplative water music:

http://buckyb.jukeboxalive.com/music_listen_1638551.html

Winter Light: Image and Sound

January Dusk

Kevin Macneil Brown, winter 2008, acrylic on canvas

And, in the same spirit, here is a long ambient/liminal piece I began in January and just completed yesterday:

http://buckyb.jukeboxalive.com/music_listen_1716973.html

Thank you for looking and listening.

You Are My Horizon

You Are My Horizon 1, You Are My Horizon 2

Kevin Macneil Brown, summer 2007

acrylic on canvas

December Outpost

Blue Sky
Broken clouds

Dark wing shadow
above
shimmer

(Crossing the
lake in September,
inner silence)


Scumbled blessings
Contrast of
Light and shadow


Reflected back,
the True World of

Love, that silence:

Blue water breathing.

-Kevin Macneil Brown
(from the ferry VALCOUR, Sept. 2007)


-----------------------------------------------------

Here are my thoughts about music in 2007, from DUSTED MAGAZINE:

http://www.dustedmagazine.com/features/686



And here is a small gathering of material that might be part of my next album:

http://buckyb.jukeboxalive.com/music_listen_1689137.html

Blessings and peace to all. I'll be back to this journal late in January.

Words for November

This piece of mine ran originally in ULTRARUNNING and most recently in the BARRE-MONTPELIER TIMES ARGUS and RUTLAND HERALD :


Running with the Wind Eagle

By KEVIN MACNEIL BROWN Correspondent

It wasn't supposed to be a vision quest, just a simple run up my favorite Vermont mountain trail: up the old carriage road to the bare rock summit of Mount Hunger, then down the other side and across the wooded ridge to the open, sun-baked ledges of White Rock Mountain. It was not an epic journey, just a couple of hours of moderately-challenging trail running.

Thomas Merton, the monk and writer, once wrote something to the effect that to begin each day by describing the same mountain is to be in the grip of delusion. One way I've found to escape that grip is to simply take myself physically right into — and onto — that mountain, the one I see almost every morning.

Above all, it was the amazing clarity of the morning air that pulled me out to run that autumn day. I'd been up on those trails a few times that season, on longer approaches. But today I was greedy for one more gulp of that mountain air, hungry for another look at that long, all-encompassing view from the peak.

So I ran — first through groves of hardwood, then, as I climbed higher, through dark, cool pines. The mountain was mine alone, it seemed.

I reached the summit after a short and exhilarating rock scramble. Stopping to catch my breath and drink in the view, I noticed the odd way the clear morning light seemed to lengthen the far Adirondack peaks to the West: an optical illusion that created dark spires and towers that I knew weren't really there.

Turning eastward, I took in a long line of high, thin, mackerel-flecked clouds that stretched like an ocean, breaking like silver-gray surf just above the Presidential Range of New Hampshire's White Mountains.

For a while I watched in awe as four falcons, streamlined for motion in a way that I never would be, circled in a warm updraft current that rose, an invisible spiral, from the ridgeline below. The fast flight of the falcons made me restless, made me want to run again. So I found the trail down into the col between the two mountains. There, with blue sky high above me, I leaped from rock to rock in the shadowed, wet and mossy woods.

Then my breath caught for an instant when something dark passed behind and above me. In my imagination I saw clearly the crook of a giant black wing. It was huge beyond comprehension, some kind of spirit, I thought, darker even than these dark woods. The crisp air around me seemed to grow suddenly cold. I shivered, feeling something between fear and awe as a mysterious breeze passed over my sweating skin.

Minutes later, I came out into the open, warm and sunny ledges of White Rock, then followed the rocky, steep and rooted trail down.

It was a few days later that I came across the story, told by the Abenaki natives of Vermont — and retold wonderfully by the writer Joseph Bruchac — of the Wind Eagle in the high mountains. In this story, the primal being who was the Transformer, the Changer — known to some as Gluskabi, to others as Odzihozo — was tired of the way the winds had so often ruined his canoe voyages and impeded his travel.

He decided to leave his lakeside home and climb to the highest peak, the abode of the massive, fierce bird that created and controlled the winds. Through trickery, he got this creature — the Wind Eagle — wedged into a rock-cleft. Trapped there, the dark and massive raptor could no longer make the winds blow.

Satisfied with his work, the Transformer descended. It was only later, when the lakeside land grew still and breezeless and unbearably hot, that the Transformer realized his mistake. He knew now that he'd have to return to the mountain and free the Wind Eagle. He did so, and the cooling breezes returned at last, along, of course, with the fiercer winds.

It might have been a bird, or a cloud, even a plane, that made the dark shadow I felt pass across the sky and forest that morning. Or it might have been a figment of my imagination, an anomaly of heartbeat and respiration.

It really doesn't matter, though, because now I know about the Wind Eagle. And I know that when I run in the mountains — when I move my lungs, my muscles, my legs — something else moves too. It is something big and powerful and beyond my control and intention, yet somehow transformed by my own perception and attention.

It is transformed by my willingness, through motion and surrender, to set something like spirit free.

October Report: Shoreline Transformations

After having spent some time during the past couple of weeks mixing and mastering, I am pleased to announce that my new CD,
LIMINAL MUSIC 4: THREE SHORELINE TRANSFORMATIONS/THE FIRST LAST OUTPOST, is finished. I'll be releasing it in a limited edition, each copy with a hand-painted shorescape insert and an actual NOAA marine weather forecast print-out included.
The two long pieces are very slow-moving, with subtle, shifting spacial dimensions and a liminal harmonic and melodic haze - my attempt at conjuring in sound the deeper structures and fog-bound, tidal, breaking-wave mysteries of eternal shorelines.
If you would like to order a copy, please contact me at:
Bucky@rustyromance.com

You can listen to the music here:

http://buckyb.jukeboxalive.com/music_listen_1638551.html


As for the band, Rusty Romance, we are taking some time off from gigs this fall to spend time learning new songs that Rusty and I have written for the band, working towards a new 2008 album.
We'll be back on stage at First Night Montpelier, on New Year's Eve.

Back To Liminal

It’s been a busy summer with Rusty Romance-- a few road trips, Including a show at the Moxie Festival in Lisbon, Maine. But the band schedule is settling down for a while, so I’m at last finding time to catch up on this journal.
An earlier trip to Maine with the band-- staying in New Harbor, a beautiful, tiny Maine lobstering port-- filled me with inspiring images. I spent some downtime sketching the rocks, water, and boats. Now, back home in Vermont, I’ve been painting from those inspirations a few mornings a week. The other mornings I’ve been working away at my latest novel, about which I’m not ready to say much.
One exciting thing about painting is the way it has reinforced my ideas and approaches to musical composition. Back in May and June I created two long pieces that will likely make up my next CD, tentatively titled THE FIRST LAST OUTPOST. Both pieces begin with the same “drawing”: a performance on lap steel and looping device recorded in real time. But then each piece is worked into a “painting” with what I call transformations and sound-smears: like sonic brush-strokes; manipulations of light, shadow, texture.

As these works formed, I found myself returning to the ethos of my earlier concept of Liminal Music. To explain that concept a little better, here’s something I wrote in a 2005 retrospective:

Thoughts on Composition, Spring Equinox 2005

I’m sure that I share with many other composers the desire --the deep yearning-- to make sonic structures that I want to hear, that I want to exist in the world.
This imagining and this yearning most often lead me to the making of sound assemblages--evocations of place and landscape, inner and outer; narrative songs set within and woven with reference points of musical style and memory-- that while not always exactly, in the end, what I might have imagined them to be, turn out to be exactly what they need to be, even with all their mistakes and imperfections.
In the composing, improvisation, recording, and production processes--most often solitary--I have used the spacial considerations of effecting, panning, and mixing to leave an empty space for myself, and, by extension, for the listener.
In one sense, this is the ultimate creative self-centeredness: putting myself at the center of the sonic world. Of course, the inherent paradox is that this presence reveals itself as an absence: A silent space, in the midst of other spaces both silent and sounding.

When I began composing music that tended toward the-- for lack of a better word-- abstract, I realized that I was making works that, while stemming from the ambient tradition, did not work very well as background music. These were pieces that asked for focused attention, that needed the listener to share in the intended evocation of inner and outer landscapes, both experienced and conjured.
In looking for a name to describe these works, I came to see that the music was about places both real and imagined, about states of in-between: between sleeping and wakefulness; between land and water, between darkness and light at dusk or dawn. Thus the name: Liminal Music.

Would You Like to Listen?

The link below will take you to a sampling of my music, including some pieces I've written about in this weblog.

http://www.jukeboxalive.com/albums.php?profile=1027587

I plan on updating the jukebox site every couple of months. The next time will probably be in early September.

Thanks for listening!

Spring Light

The onset of spring in northern New England brings changes in the light: the softening of hues; the lengthening of duration and shadow. This March the snow is still deep-- more than a foot in my backyard. But every day the snow-pack shrinks a little more, and even another big storm could only temporarily change the tide of spring's arrival.

In the past few weeks I've stayed with the themes and concerns of my composition THE INEFFABLE FREEDOM OF CAPTURED LIGHT. I've been painting on canvas in the mornings, answering a call that the exploration of changing light has offered. And I've spun off new musical pieces from various juxtapositions and confluences of the sonic elements of INEFFABLE FREEDOM, using them as sonic background to the act of painting. Over the weeks this work has cohered into a whole that I would like to someday present as an installation piece. (Right now the installation exists only in my studio.)

Given these concerns and interests it's perhaps no surprise that I'd be pulled into the sound world of a composer deeply influenced by the energies of visual art. As winter became spring, I found myself listening in the afternoons to a lot of Morton Feldman, including his six-hour-long STRING QUARTET NO. 2, which, I'll admit, I experienced as If I were reading a novel-- settling into it over the course of a few days, each time taking up where I'd left off before. There are sections of luminous and mystical beauty in this work; mysteries of tone and harmony that sometimes touched a longing in me and truly hurt my heart.

Also a musical companion some afternoons has been Susan Alcorn's remarkable AND I AWAIT (THE RESURRECTION OF THE PEDAL STEEL GUITAR). Susan Alcorn commits to and inhabits each note she plays; It's an all too rare quality in a musician, and for the listener, it can open up worlds. The long title piece offers surprises each time I hear it. And Susan's version of the Italian tune "Volare" is a pure joy: dreamy, alluringly textured, melodic; conjuring with an orchestra of multi -tracked pedal steel guitar something that suggests to me what Les Paul and Mary Ford might have come up with if they'd been hanging out with Sun Ra.

And now this morning the sky is blue. The snow has melted down an inch since yesterday. Time to go out for a run.

A Composition Journal, Part 4

January 21

AM
Made a few changes to "The Freedom of Captured Light" this morning. Returning to the
third-- and the first finished-- version, made some EQ changes to tame the hiss and rumble, making sure to keep the overall tonal coloration.
Next, I added complexity by doubling--then tripling-- the whole piece in separate tracks, panning and time-shifting (not by much) each track to create a sense of spaciousness and transparency.
And now this piece has come newly alive.

PM
Committing to a name: THE INEFFABLE FREEDOM OF CAPTURED LIGHT.

JANUARY 25

Morning reading : Cold Mountain Poet. A force of nature; humanity almost, but not quite, subsumed in rock, mountains, rivers, pines. (winds and waters.)
These poems, in David Hinton's deep and powerful translations (MOUNTAIN HOME: THE WILDERNESS POETRY OF ANCIENT CHINA) are having an effect on my musical composition. Or am I just riding a wave of synchronicity in my inner winter life right now?

Coffee, work on editing yesterday's two reviews for DUSTED. A quiet house for a while, so I took advantage and vacuumed floors.

Settled into some late-morning work on CAPTURED LIGHT: recorded glass bowls , struck with sticks. The sound made me think of bare rock beneath my feet. I treated the recordings with rolled-off old-time radio EQ, made a few various cuts and copies , then placed them within the mix of the most recent , composite, version of the entire piece. The bowls have a close-up sound that reminds me of a footpath, and perhaps that up-close-ness adds some welcome human scale/perspective as it wanders, unfolds within the big-sky, wide- horizon of sound that is predominant in the composition.


JANUARY 28
Afternoon
Hot bath, a beer. Reading in Holbrook's 1939 biography of Ethan Allen. An entertaining and engaging read, written in a sly and energetic "Yankee" voice.
Later, watching the sky change, the light move, I listen again to "The Ineffable Freedom of Captured Light ." I hear now that perhaps there should be some steel guitar early in the piece--a glimpse of blue as distant allure-- sliding in with major 7th blossoming, entering, reverb-ed for sense of distance, on the left--far left..

Now the sky has gone from blue to striations of violet--then a last blush of rose captured in high windows of high towers at Vermont College. The evergreens are almost black: spruces straight and tall; white pines caught stilled in what looks like mid-motion-- splay, sway, wave...
Dusk falling. I slipped off for a short winter's day nap.

Rising. Up and at 'em. Started a white bean stew.
Some work tonight on "captured light..", adding steel entrances as early hints of blue.
Also some EQ, scooping out bass mud accrued by multi-tracking.

JANUARY 29
Up at 6:30. Sub-zero again. Listening to latest version of "light", I think it's as good as I can make it. That is, it is what it is.
This piece really does go well with watching sunrise or sunset play out against the winter sky. The composition is 20 minutes and 50 seconds long. Maybe I should offer the listener instructions to begin playing the piece 20:50 before sunrise or sunset, and to look out a window while he or she listens.

You can listen here:

http://buckyb.jukeboxalive.com/music_listen_1638143.html

A Composition Journal, Part 3

January 14 - afternoon

All this microscopic listening makes me edgy, grumpy. So, out for an hour's run in the snow.
My reward: Gray-green river, high and fast-moving under gray, snowing sky. The calm, monastery-like beauty of pine woods at Redstone park: snow-covered wooden benches, the stream and falls full, as they've been all winter.

Clear-headed, grounded, aerated, I listen yet again. I hear a few places that need work. I add more white (metallophone shimmer, pitch-shifted, reverbed), a bit of distant blue (steel guitar again; cut, looped, reverbed). I hear also a need for some translucent haze in the white (bells).

But for now, I need another break. I tend to get obsessive, working, pushing on until I'm satisfied--and/or exhausted. I'm going to try to do this piece a little differently.

January 15

Morning; a few more brushstrokes added. Listened on walkperson while I shoveled wet snow. Listened again while I walked to work. Almost done.


January 17

Crystal clear and cold-- sub-zero -- this morning. Some work on "Captured Light." An attempt at fine-tuning, but not quite getting it. Our heating system being fixed today, so it's COLD in the house. Bright sun, dazzling white snow-- shadows of tree branches on shiny surface crust.
I abandon music for the day, go out for a run. Back at home, I make a slow- simmering tomato sauce with peppers and hot Italian sausage-- an attempt to warm the house. Successful.


PM- Another attempt at EQ tweaking: cutting highs, boosting lower mids. Much better results: the piece has a thickness and warmth it didn't have before.

January 20

Listened to and compared, while editing some writing projects, both versions--original and re-EQd-- today. The first sounded better: more spacious and and airy; more shimmer.
I think the second version was satisfying at first from a sense of safety: it made the piece sound more like my previous work-- dark, murky, almost black and white.
But today I can trust the NEW direction behind the making of this piece. It seems the first mix is the one to go with.
(That said, there is still a need for some hiss reduction, maybe a slight taming of lows...)

A Composition Journal, Part 2

January 12. 2007

Woke up late after 9 hours (!!) of sleep. Gray morning. Coffee, read a few poems by Tu Fu.... Read them again.
To work on "Captured Light." My mission today is to paint in sound the color field I see as Gold/bright green. This entails taking a section of yesterday's work, cutting it, then re-harmonizing it in the program Acid. (I have tuned it 21 half-steps up.) Then cutting again to size and proportion, laying it in so that it fills the right time/space within the piece. I'm quite sure I've never worked so visually before; but it seems appropriate, given the inspiration for the piece. Like stepping back from a canvas, I listen. Make changes. Step back. listen again.


January 13

This morning's work: simply listening.
Gray, warm-ish but raw outside. Like April again.

January 14

Deep sleep. Up at 7. Snow falling; big, pretty flakes in gray dark morning.
Coffee, reading in Tu Fu. Sadness in these words; an autumnal chill of aging, regret.
Work on "Freedom of Captured Light." Recorded a shimmering pulse of metallophone for the color-field White-gold; after that, a steel guitar melody arcing to a Major 7th as its highest tone: A yearning, sweeping arc of bright blue (from mountain tops to sky.)
Next, hours of layering, moving, removing, mixing.
Snow falling.

A Composition Journal, Part 1

For the past few weeks I've been working on a long composition, one that was, it seems, presaged by the arrival of the poem in my previous entry. For a while I'll devote this weblog to my journals about the creation of this work. I've never before kept a detailed daily journal of progress--from inspiration to implementation-- on a particular piece of music, so I'm finding this interesting.

January 9, 2007
Up at 6:30, reading the knife-sharp poems of Li Po-- David Hinton's remarkable translations in MOUNTAIN HOME: THE WILDERNESS POEMS OF ANCIENT CHINA ( New Directions).
Sun rise on snow-white mountains flamed with reddish gold; I watched, drank coffee.
A short run with the dog; cold, crisp morning with an April-like wind out of SE. Amazing striations/layers of color and shadow in the view across to the Worcester Range.


January 10
Up in the dark. Li Po resonance of words again: rich in peaceful shock of image, sound.
Thnking this morning, deeply, about color-field, landscape ... (that, really, landscape/shape alone is not what intrigues me, but rather the way light and sound act to shape it-- how paint and words and composition can be analog to that exchange -- and beyond that: how that exchange is a sign of Spirit's true existence.)
So, once again: sky, Luminism; Fitz Hugh Lane.
I'm imagining a long piece of music --1 hour?--of tone-fields as color, shape. (see the mountain drawing in yesterday's journal) Layers of tone (table organ, lap steel, bells) in reverberant space. Stacking, shifting, shadowing...to create a sonic view. Such a piece perhaps best made over a long period of time-- weeks? months?....
Title:
THE FREEDOM OF CAPTURED LIGHT.

January 11
Dark gives way to violet, within that, a perfect half moon. Coffee, and reading Tu Fu. These poems are structured, striated, with a more complex diction than the earlier wilderness poets, perhaps.

Last night I had set up microphone, table organ, yamaha reverb, Lexicon jam man. Now, this morning, with view of mountains flaming from salmon to violet pink then cooling to violet and, finally, snow white, I record a quiet piece: letting notes from the table organ rise and fall and layer within the reverb and delay. This will be the first stratum of the sonic view I intend to work on this winter.
Ths morning's work, relating back to the drawing-- which has become, it seems, the score for this piece-- is the gray, dark pine-colored "ground": the lower part of the canvas, of the view.
(Minor triad tonality (D # minor) with pentatonic scale tones rising and falling: shadow patterns.)

Envoi

Prepare the bell for
sounding: Cast the metal
(bronze? for belief...)

Its very nature is
the truth of its
voice.

And then there is
the winter sky:
Ah, I can't describe it.

But it calls
and dark birds take
flight, desiring

that brightness. The
sounding distance
arrives, wings mended new

by that far, fresh
falling:
Bells.

-Kevin Macneil Brown



This poem turns out to be preamble to some music I'm at work on now.

Year's End Path

On a gray Sunday morning in November, I found myself reading in Halsey Stevens' THE LIFE AND MUSIC OF BELA BARTOK. Bartok spent a summer in a house in Berlin, Vermont, a few miles from where I live, and many times I've run along the same road he walked.
On this particular gloomy morning I felt suddenly inspired to make a piece of music; I kept coming back to the image of Bartok walking along a wooded country road in Vermont. I quickly assembled a signal path, patching together delay devices, mixer, EQ, and gated reverb: building a sonic space for the music to happen within.
I've long been taken with Bartok's unfinished deathbed piece, the VIOLA CONCERTO, commissioned and first performed by William Primrose, completed and orchestrated by Tibor Serly. (In particular, the transparent elegance of the "Adagio Religioso" section has haunted me.) At first it disturbed me to read Stevens' statement that Bartok left of the piece only its "torso"; but then I reminded myself: that is, after all, where the heart is.
I began with a technique I seldom use, that of using samples from recordings-- in this case a scratchy old record of Primrose playing the VIOLA CONCERTO. As I placed the short sections within the sonic landscape made by the signal path, I manipulated them, organizing the loops and the spaces between them, until they offered what seemed a strange and dreamlike perspective on Bartok's work, evoking in me the feeling of a wordless pilgrimage along a path: with Bartok himself; with the Viola master Primrose; with my friend composer Dennis Darrah (who has used this technique of collaging loops to great effect in his own work, RECOMBINANT THEORY.)
As the piece unfolded and played back, I pulled out my John Goss-modified Silvertone lap steel guitar, and added an improvisation, the whole thing going in real-time to my hard drive as a take. Listening back later that day, I named the piece NOVEMBER PATH-FOR DENNIS DARRAH.
Here it is:

http://www.jukeboxalive.com/reports.php?album=1667407


Now, in mid-December, I've been listening in the dark mornings to two profound works of music. The first is another late Bartok work, the SONATA FOR SOLO VIOLIN. It's a stark and thorny piece, but one rich with twists and turns, with deep resonances that are awe-inspiring, coming as they do from a small instrument that can produce only limited harmonic material. Bartok begins with JS Bach's great solo violin partitas and sonatas as a springboard, and also works with his own deep understanding of Hungarian music; but, as in all of Bartok's late works,there is something complex and entirely personal to be found in the structures and developments of the material.
The other piece, Olivier Messiaen's VINGT REGARDS SUR L'ENFANT JESUS, for solo piano, might seem at first glance-- and listening-- to be of an entirely different species. Lush with Messaien's post-Debussy harmonic coloration, and with themes and ideas of Christian iconography-- the Star, the Cross, The Virgin, The Infant Christ-- woven from birdsong and modal/rhythmic motifs, it builds an entire world, where Bartok's SONATA seeks only to build deep forms within sound.
But the similarities between these pieces lie in their elemental starkness. Both were composed in 1944, within the darkness of a world war that would soon end. And both seem to offer the experience of music as light in that darkness. Messiaen crafts his light from deep faith, and the assembly and juxtaposition of forms, building a cathedral or tabernacle with tones. Bartok's light, carried by the spareness of a solo violin, is a different kind of miracle in sound: the unfolding of forms, organic and ever-changing; like something alive that sprouts in sun-warmed earth.

And now I put away this weblog for the year 2006. I hope to return in mid-January. Thank you for reading.

Ending August

Contrary to appearances, I have not abandoned this journal. Back in July, however, the thing on the horizon arrived: I began work on a new novel. That's where most of my writing time has gone. I've been working in the mornings, outside at a picnic table beneath maple-leaf dappled sun, scrawling in pen in a spiral notebook. (I'm not really looking forward to having to transcribe my scratches into a type-script!)
At some later time I will likely post parts of my writing journal here; for now, though, the process of writing is a bit too fresh and raw to be exposed to scrutiny, I think.

I had begun, back in June, a trio of short essays about revisiting works that were important to my creative development. I got as far as Messiaen and Ives. Next up, I had planned a piece about revisiting Charles Olson's first few MAXIMUS POEMS. But the arrival of the novel that had been stewing for nearly a year inside me took precedence, so I surrendered and changed my plan.
As for music, It's been a busy summer of gigs with Rusty Romance, and some guest spots with Mark Legrand's Lovesick Bandits. I've managed to record a few short solo pieces, too-- some new songs here and there. The cover art for my solo projects HORIZON IS A SONG and BETWEEN WATERS is just about finished, and I expect to have both CDs available by mid-September. It crosses my mind that finishing these two projects will bring to a completion the original intent behind this journal.
What comes next for this blog? I don't quite know yet. But I hope you'll come back and see.

Summer Report

Today, hazy blue skies, after, of course, some rain. It's summer for sure now, and both projects --HORIZON IS A SONG and BETWEEN WATERS-- are finished; sequenced, edited, mastered ( the latter as well as possible,anyway, within available resources) and ready to be heard. I've even begun work on the cover art. I do feel a certain emptiness upon finishing these projects. But it's a welcome emptiness, one that brings with it a sense of space, of new possibilities.
Finishing BETWEEN WATERS entailed some new composition, along with some editing of sections, mostly to fine-tune the proportions of each within the whole. I also made radical EQ changes to a few pieces/movements, especially "Lone Rock Point" and "Searching For Ferris Rock ", seeking to cast just a bit more light and clarity on the decidedly dark and murky original mixes.
Listening back to the finished work, It dawned on me that I had composed my own strange version of a symphony: A single work in sections--movements-- for orchestra (in this case an orchestra created mostly from sound-smeared steel guitar improvs) , the whole structure built by the exploration and recasting of a fairly limited amount of generative thematic material.
BETWEEN WATERS is a sonic object now, and I am confident that it contains and transfers the energies-- of water and rock; of geomorphic and human history and my own perceptions of those things-- that originally inspired it.

As far the song collection HORIZON IS A SONG, well, I had figured it was finished more than a month ago.
But one morning in late May ,I woke up with a melody and lyrics playing in my head, straight into the world from a dream I'd been having:
"Black-eyed Susan's on the highway..."
I got up, made coffee, wrote the song over the course of the day, fine-tuning it in my head during a long, sun-baked run beside Berlin Pond and up into the trails on Irish Hill.
It was only after two weeks of living with the song-- making subtle structural changes, etc.-- that I at last recorded it. In the morning I got a good version in two takes (voice and two acoustic guitars, lap steel solo section, harmony vocal.)
I then spent some time on a weird, spasmodic kick-and-snare drum part for the bridge. (I'd been reading Merton again--I was thinking of this part as my "Zen wake-up call.") All went well, though it took maybe ten tries to catch the drum thing just right.
Then the recording program crashed. Too much heat and humidity. Try as I might, I could not bring the tracks back up. I was angry. But I was also inspired and determined. I started all over again, recording, track by track, another good version of the song. The new version had a very different feel, but I mixed it down, kept it.
After a break, shut down, and reboot, lo and behold, the original version of the song returned! I listened. Definitely the one I wanted. Working into the evening, I added some church yard sale harmonium, made a few mixes. Feeling energized, I remixed the second version, too, this time going crazy with slap-back echo and compression. (I named this the Salty Delta Mix, since it sounded swampy and weird to me, the opposite of the warm and intimate 'master' take and mixes.)
A few weeks later, after I'd picked my favorite mix of the original, I added some tremoloed baritone guitar for texture. By then the song had found its place in the running order of HORIZON IS A SONG.
So that's it for now. I'm going to take a little vacation, maybe get out on the waters. Rest. Relax. Re-charge. Chip away at some small ideas and projects; keep my eyes on that big one way, way, off on the horizon--one I suspect I'll be writing about here later.

Sources and Re-explorations, Part Two: Olivier Messiaen

Of all Olivier Messian's works, CHRONOCHROMIE (1959-1960 ) is the one I seem to return to over and over. It might be that its scale-- just under a half-hour long-- suits me perfectly; Certainly, the piece appeals because of the way it addresses and illustrates, in one place, most of its composers concerns: bird song, rhythmic transformation, orchestral texture as color and vision.
I listened to CHRONOCHROMIE again a few weeks ago, on a rainy morning when I'd risen to strong coffee and the sounds of a very lush dawn chorus. Concepts of time and color--Chrono and Chromie-- are at the heart of the work, and Messiaen uses complex rhythmic transformation of melodic materials-- bird song, mostly-- to build a majestic sonic analogue to a pre-human world: a mountain, a stream falling through rock and stone.
The rhythmic transformations are, of course, the time-field of the work. The color-field arises when melodic materials are voiced and stacked vertically in strata: gliding strings, breathing woodwinds , chattering melodic percussion, dark-toned low horns. The piece is structured in what Messiaen called strophes: cells of musical events that at first seem to push and pull against each other. But as one listens to the unfolding music, the events begin to take on a sense of flow, that sense increasing until Messiaen has created for the listener the sight and presence of a massive mountain, of rippling, tumbling waters down that mountain's steep sides. It's nothing less than a monolithic construction in sound.
All falls away, though, for the infamous Epode: a thicket of transcribed bird song played only by the strings. Having just heard a real early- summer dawn chorus, I was prepared to be disappointed by Messiaen's transcription of nature. But I was surprised at how powerfully the composer captured-- even using only the relatively dry timbres of the strings-- the liquid chaos of the real thing.
The power of CHRONOCHROMIE lies for me in its sense of transformations, even trans-substantiations: bird song as light and color, vibration as stone and water. And above all there's the mystery of music vibrating its way into all the senses and tools of perceptions, becoming something of substance and mass in the world.

(A note: Messiaen's book, MUSIC AND COLOR (Conversations with Claude Samuel) is an invaluable guide to the composer's fascinating methods and ideas. )

Sources and Re-explorations, Part One: Charles Ives

This week I've decided to go back and revisit some works of music and writing that have been crucial to my perceptions, and thus my own expression. I've chosen three to re-explore and write about. I'll begin with the American composer Charles Ives's orchestral work, THREE PLACES IN NEW ENGLAND(composed between 1903-1914.)


I first heard THREE PLACES IN NEW ENGLAND on an LP my dad brought home sometime in the late 60s. He'd bought it for Copland's LINCOLN PORTRAIT, but it was the Ives piece that captured me. I have strong memories of listening to it with one ear to our old Magnavox mono rig; the smell of hot tubes is somehow tied forever in my sensory memory to Ives's orchestral triptych. It's probably been ten years now since I've last heard it, so this morning-- a hazy, humid, summer-like one, as befits the first of June-- I sat down with coffee and listened closely.
The first section honors the famous St. Gaudens Bas-relief sculpture dedicated to Colonel Shaw's black Civil War regiment in the Boston Common. Like most of Ives's music, this composition is spacious and feels "outdoors" to me; there is light and sound and silence, and the sections and voices of the orchestra are arrayed to magnify that sense of spaciousness. The dominant harmonic colors, applied to snatches of hymns and ghostly song fragments, are like a more tart and polytonal take on the chromatic exoticism of Wagner and Debussy; but the overall effect is less heroic and monolithic than Wagner, less nocturnal and dreamlike than Debussy. This is, instead, music for bright light and clean, open air.
Like St. Gauden's fluid and classical approach to representational sculpture, Ives's music here evinces a sense of heroism tempered with compassionate humanity; there's all that open space and landscape, and the hymns provide a sense of history, community, and human continuity. Especially powerful is the way the constantly shifting textures-- the piano and contra-bass provide a particularly questing restlessness-- seem to find occasional fleeting resolution in one repeated, haunting hymnal motif.
The second place Ives visits is another war memorial. In "Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut", the composer returns to childhood memories of outdoor picnics on the site of a Revolutionary War battle. It's a wild and raucous piece, with Ives's usual weave of hymns and marches. But there are quiet moments here and there, too, and these shifts in mood bring, to my ears, a morphing between Ives's childhood memories and the more ancient time-frame of the Revolutionary battle itself; thus this music becomes evocative of time and history in layers, of both history and personal memory. This layering could not be better sonically manifested than it is near the end of the piece, when a martial, elegiac, bugle-like horn melody on the far right horizon is subsumed by the same note played, on the left horizon, by a hollow, ethereal, thrush-like flute-- suggesting, perhaps, the ultimate merging of human history with the natural world.
Personal history and the natural landscape of New England are at the heart of the final movement, "The Housatonic at Stockbridge." Here Ives revisits a memory of a walk with his wife along the river. This is water music at its most evocative; music that flows and eddies and pulses and moves with a lush combination of impressionist harmony and tight, poly-chromatic dissonance. Ives brings the memory of moving river waters to life here, ending the piece abruptly --and emotionally-- with one of his yearning, questing, hymn motifs.
(I should add that the CD I listened to this morning-- Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1970 (DG 463 633) --offers an interpretation and recording that is very satisfying in its spaciousness, clean sonics, and dynamic range.)

I heard in Ives's THREE PLACES IN NEW ENGLAND this morning the same things I heard-- and loved -- when I was ten years old: evocation of place and history, of landscape and nature, of the unique clear and spacious light that suffuses the New England latitudes. And, certainly, I can hear how those things have stayed deep inside me to inspire my own writing and musical composition.

Spring Report

The last two weeks have seen an explosion of green leaves on the trees, and the subsequent disappearance of long views and open woods. For me, this means a subtle change in thought patterns-- and a return to yearning for big waters: lake and ocean shorelines.
Last week, on a rainy- day trip to Boston, I played Robin my new song album HORIZON IS A SONG all the way through. Her comments afterward helped me realize that it is, indeed, finished. She got completely the radio conceit-- the sense of sonic variety, as she said, "just pulled from the air." So now it sits on the shelf while I let my brain churn away at ideas for the cover art.
As for the abstract sound-art project BETWEEN WATERS, its energy has subsided for a while-- you might say the lake level is down. There is one final movement/piece that needs to be composed and realized, but I'm just not hearing it right now, and attempts to force it have not worked. Perhaps some time on the water is in order?

Plenty of gigging with Rusty Romance. A couple of weeks ago we played a Birthday party at the Waterbury Center Grange Hall that has to rank as one of the greatest gigs I've ever been part of. A wonderful, fun-loving-- and discriminating!-- audience drew deep and engaged performances from us all. And the Grange was such a great setting, with its big stage, weird ritual thrones, and walls full of yellowed clippings. (Including the Times-Argus obituary of the great Vermont country-swing fiddler Don Fields of Pony Boys fame.)

I've also sat in a few times recently on steel guitar with Mark Legrand's new rockabilly-honky tonk trio, the Lovesick Bandits , in residency Friday evenings at Langdon Street Cafe in Montpelier. A great trio-- with my Rusty bandmate the majestic Dan Haley on guitar, rock-steady Mr. Noah Hahn on stand-up bass, and Mr. LeGrand himself on acoustic guitar and heartsick lead vocals. Lots of fun!

That's music. As for words, well, a few days ago I was out on a trail run when something happened: There arrived in my consciousness the first sentence of my next novel. I've been carrying around a little bundle of index cards scrawled with snippets of character studies and plot ideas for this book since last September. Now I've a place to begin. But that is, of course, literally another story.

Revisting and Revising

A few days break, followed by another few days of listening to the BETWEEN WATERS project. Overall, I feel that the pieces summon up the energies and emotions I intended them to.
But one piece-- "7 Islands/Odzihozo"-- does not feel quite right. The piece is built upon a repeated seven note motif that is moved in sonic space, inter-woven with treated speech fragments and "distant" guitar arpeggios. But the balance feels wrong; and the piece is too repetitive, too trance-like. I want it to suggest rock and water and depth of time, a tension and acceptance between flow and permanence. (Touchstones and inspirations for this piece are the Abenaki creator deity Odzihozo, who rests now as a huge rock in/on Lake Champlain, and the Abenaki Seven Thunders, whose energies effect change in winds and weathers.)
I try a denser weave and mix-- I call it the "monolithic mix". Listening back over the course of a day, I discover that this has moved the piece even further from where it should be. I try the opposite tack: a more spacious mix, with a wider stereo spectrum--the "panoramic mix". But now the piece seems to have lost its body, its mass, completely.
So I return to the original mix. This time, though, I weave in a new "event": a short chord motif culled, then treated, from the end of my recent steel guitar improv; it's a blooming of harmonics that I've come to call "the arrival." This, too, I repeat at intervals through both space and time throughout the piece, using the number 7 as a guide to structure and spacing.
Now I begin to hear what I've been seeking: something like those moments of surprise and human perception that meet with nature and spirit at the intersections of energy exchange.