Orchestra: North Woods

Ensemble: orchestra (full orchestration below)

Duration: 20 minutes

Commissioned by: Ellis-Beauregard Foundation for Bangor Symphony

Premiere: Collins Center for the Arts, Bangor, Maine

Note:

North Woods takes its title from the novel of the same name by Daniel Mason. The book chronicles the (fictional) history of a small cabin in the New England woods over the course of several centuries. Inhabitants of the cabin include a pair of runaway Puritan lovers, an apple farmer and his daughters, a lovesick painter, a cougar, a psychic medium, a pair of mating beetles. As I read, I loved the feeling of time progressing on vastly different scales all at once. Each inhabitant of the cabin is at the center of their own drama—with its own stakes and bloodred consequences—but taken together, each becomes a small link in a long chain.

Thinking about these multiple scales of storytelling, I constructed the piece in three movements, each with a different scope and sense of time. The first movement, “Runaways,” happens on what I imagine to be a human scale: a moto perpetuo that moves like a chase sequence: a pair of runaway lovers, their pursuers, a brief romance, and a violent end that interpolates the melody of an old folk tune about Giles Corey, who was executed along with his wife Martha during the Salem Witch Trials.

The second movement, “Beetles & Blight,” unfolds on a much smaller scale, at first. It imagines a single beetle traversing bodies of decaying material—our lovers from the first movement, perhaps. The microdramas of a bug’s life take center stage for a few minutes before a dizzying zoom outward via a winding, crescendoing fugue that underscores a larger drama at play: historically these tiny creatures have been the unintentional vectors for a blight that has killed millions of trees, one of North America's great ecological disasters.

The third movement, “Elm,” is vast, imagining time from the perspective of a stand of trees. The string harmonies that make up this movement take the squat, beetle-sized musical motifs from the second movement and stretch them into wide, cosmic chords, which gradually give way to an offstage string quartet, playing the remnants of a song drifting in from long ago.

As I was writing this piece, I drew on my own childhood growing up in those same Massachusetts woods, in a house built in the early 1700s, among a family of artists who found both inspiration and a sense of purpose from the various forms of life that surrounded us. I fell in love with the rhythm of the seasons: the irrepressible optimism of a chorus of Spring Peepers, the intoxicating buzz of my mother’s garden in the summer, the frozen quiet of a New England February. But I also saw the sad effects of human activity playing out in real time: blight killed many of the trees in the woods where I used to play; a nearby wetland was turned into a gravel pit, disrupting the water table and drying up the local pond. Many non-native species of plants arrived and forever altered the ecosystem even over the course of a few years. Some of my favorite creatures—the Spotted Turtle, the Northern Leopard Frog—disappeared from those woods while I lived there.
 
This piece is, in a sense, my love letter to New England and the many inhabitants that call it home. But it is also a warning: our human dramas always have unpredictable and long-ranging consequences. We are each of us haunted and influenced by the ghosts who inhabited the same spaces before us. To trace their history is to unearth our own effect on the landscape, and the land’s effect on us. I can only hope that in another hundred years, the old house where I grew up will still be standing, surrounded by the living things that shaped my family and me, even as our own place in that long chain of temporary residents recedes into history.

Full orchestration:

Flute I.II
Flute III/Piccolo
Oboe I
Oboe II/English Horn
Clarinet I.II
Bassoon I.II

Horn I.II
Trumpet I.II
Trombone I.II

Timpani

Violin I
Violin II
Viola
Cello
Bass

Offstage string quartet