St. Louis-based composer Christopher Stark has long been interested in forward-thinking compositions using the language and instrumentation of European classical music.
But when Stark, 43, received a commission from Chamber Music America to write a piece for innovative cello-percussion duo New Morse Code, he sought an expanded musical vocabulary.
“With cello and percussion, there's almost no history or tradition. So we're kind of starting from scratch, or ground zero, and building that repertoire right now,” said Stark, 40, who also teaches music composition at Washington University.
Stark and collaborators wished to create a piece that celebrated the natural world while warning of the catastrophes that come with global climate change.
For the 21-minute “The Language of Landscapes,” they augmented Hannah Collins’ cello, Michael Compitello’s percussion and Stark’s electronics with sound wrung from discarded items like plastic bags, plus field recordings of wind and water they made outdoors in New Hampshire, Montana and New York.
The result is a carefully composed sound collage that is occasionally bucolic but often ominous. Beethoven’s pastoral symphony, this is not.
The piece, first performed in 2015, is now the centerpiece and title track of an album that includes remixes by Mvstermind, Adult Fur, CNDSD and Chris P. Thompson.
St. Louis Public Radio’s Jeremy Goodwin asked Stark to pull back the curtain on how he achieved some of the unexpected sounds woven into “The Language of Landscapes.”
Jeremy D. Goodwin: How did you get started conceiving of this?
Christopher Stark: We were trying to create a piece that responded to climate change more broadly but also resourcefulness and wastefulness. We were together at a residency, and we decided to start collecting some of the trash that people were making and turn these trash objects into instruments.
And so there are plastic grocery bags. There are discarded pieces of wood, discarded pieces of metal, Styrofoam, to try to make sounds that sound kind of like nature. We were trying to dialogue with some of the noisy sounds in nature, like wind sounds and water sounds.
Goodwin: As a listener it’s often hard to tell exactly what we’re hearing in this piece. There’s one very rhythmic section that I thought might feature a marimba. What’s actually making those sounds?
Stark: Those are Styrofoam crafting bowls from a Michaels store, and they just happen to be tuned that way, so they sound harmonic. We happened to discover they were tuned to D major. We mounted them like a percussionist might mount a symbol or a bongo, and he’s hitting them with the stick end of a marimba mallet.
When we mount the bowls onstage, it sort of looks like a snowman. So we kind of laugh that that's our snowman. But it actually sounds, surprisingly, really nice.
Goodwin: What’s an example of a field recording from nature making it into the piece?
Stark: When we were in upstate New York on Lake Geneva, where the cellist is from, we were sitting at the shore of the lake and listening to the way that this water lapped against the shore, this gentle sound. It actually had this very strong melodic quality. Through some computer processing and listening to it more closely, we thought, OK, we're learning a kind of a melody from water on this lake.
And then we're going to do some very traditional classical ideas. We're going to put the water melody in canon with the cello and the percussion and do something that Bach would do with an organ and a violin.
Goodwin: That section starts very gently, but it leads to what I think is the most unsettling part of the piece.
Stark: The final scene is a recording of water that we slowly pull out the melody from, and put in canon with the cello and percussion until it becomes disintegrated. It's distorted by basically removing digital information from the sound. So as it progresses, I'm sort of taking 1s and 0s and removing them from the audio until the computer can no longer accurately represent the sound.
I was thinking about removing that information as a way of destroying a natural resource – or a metaphor for, possibly, the sound drying up.
It turns into a really intense and kind of messed-up chorale where the cellist — who is playing distorted digital audio that sounds like a synthesizer — and the percussionist are trying desperately to sort of make something beautiful by playing this traditional classical cadence back and forth, but with these really distorted and messed-up sounds.
Goodwin: In my notes I called it “the most disturbing foghorn in the world.”
Stark: This is also part of a longer tradition of thinking about whether we're actually capable of representing nature with art. I wanted to show the digital side of the computer here, sort of reveal it and say the computer actually can't do this.
If we degrade the audio quality, almost like a pixelated .jpeg image, it shows how much resolution you might need in order to get close to nature. But it never quite gets there.
