Landscape
The cars passed incessantly along the road which ran parallel, down the western slope, to the aqueduct on which we walked. Out of rhythm, they were a rhythm of themselves. So too the helicopters that would pass, the small passenger planes. Unregulated in time, but ever present. Out of balance, but there and without regard for clock or measure. Our footsteps were similarly displaced, and mis-paced. None of us could stop the tops of the trees from rotating irregularly in the irregular breeze of early evening. The stand of trees was steadfast, or suddenly in motion, not because of us, but despite us.
I couldn’t help but notice the consistency of this irregularity, not only outside, but within. A thought of duty would lead to a dream of weightlessness. Laughing at one of our jokes would turn to an inward sullen memory of someone. Each step made us older, but this sense wasn’t about time. It was more about the way my blood was moving through my body. Its own consistent irregularity, which could be felt in frozen moments, in interstitial spaces. Every movement then, and always, feels between something else. The body moves and with it the mind, seeking some capture of the past and the future, and to define them within an ineluctably modal present.
From the start I approached music as a reflection on landscape, but have allowed others to narrowly define this landscape’s boundaries. In fact, my arteries and tendons attract my explorations as much as the banks of the Ausable River, the floor of Lake Champlain. I seek my wife’s eyes that carry each of us inward and outward, to a place of outside: a landscape of shared space. A place between. This place means as much to me — more to me— as the farm on Hallock Hill where I was born and where I station origin but not end. Both of my sons, their utter peace when asleep, their endless exploration, tapping into innocence and primal energy: this is my landscape too. Landscape is place; place can be idea; a geography of self and making ourselves in it.
The musical instrument extends motion, in the arteries, in thought. What comes from it, in space and time, cannot go back inside. It is in the outside. Those sounds are in the other place, the between place. One of consistent irregularity. An aural topography for which there is no map. Cartographers define their own perspectives, based on science or observation or prior source or politics or fiction (often a combination of these). I can’t control what anyone does inside the meadows and valleys and streams of any music — or inside the veins and skeletons and organs of any music either. Nor its soft tissue. Nor its idea. As one ventures in, the out folds open, and venturing out peels back the sheath around what is in. Between again. I want my music to reflect this: inconsistently persistent, out of balance, forever between.
As for the rest, I would say that is private. And by that, I mean, for me, a mystery.
