This is an introduction to the first movement of a new StarCYCLE Project I’m excited about, for two drumkits. There are a few things that are unusual about it that I might mention here: first, I originally did the recording as a coda to a fieldnote report on water, snowpack, & climate crisis. [ALSO on Soundcloud, so you can listen to the whole report, if you’d like, at your convenience, at https://soundcloud.com/cliff-crego/fieldnotes-water-wav
So, I am recording out of doors in the dead of winter, and a half meter of snow. The second thing I might mention here is the obvious connection between nature and music that, In my view, in present western culture has not only been forgotten, but actually suppressed. So we are ignorant by design, you might say. This means that I’m speaking to two audiences that naturally should be one. On the one hand, I’m speaking to naturalist who in my experience are not just a literate musically but as young people say nowadays, clueless. They couldn’t really tell the difference between a sinus wave in the round bell curve of disappearing snowpack.
On the other hand: I’m speaking to young performers of New Music who, being based out of necessity in large, congested urban areas, are equally ignorant of nature as well as the nature of living sound. In other words, they haven’t quite discovered yet that healthy forests & Spruce trees are a precondition for the magnificent resonant sound of violins like those of the time of Stradivari.
So, in the spirit of my CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE performance project www.cs-music.com, we are always talking, thinking, brainstorming, imagining, dialoguing in terms of two great nested circles:
Mother nature & the Earth herself 🌏
and the smaller, more dependent circles
of music, poetry, & the performing arts.
What could be more exciting than that!
