Curious Music in the Great Outdoors: Robert Morris's Coming Down to Earth in Webster Park

CURIOUS MUSIC IN THE GREAT OUTDOORS: ROBERT MORRIS’S COMING DOWN TO EARTH IN WEBSTER PARK JOSHUA B. MAILMAN HERE’S A NEW WAY TO ENJOY the outdoors in upstate New York.* Composer Robert Morris is showing us the way through his own artistic genre, which amounts to a new form of recreation: park-music. Morris, professor and chair of the Eastman School’s Composition Department, composed for the outdoors before. Eastman’s studentrun New Music ensemble, Ossia, performed his first outdoor work, Playing Outside, in Webster Park in 2001. * This article originally appeared in Rochester City Newspaper, September 29, 2004, now online here: http://www.rochestercitynewspaper.com/rochester/curious-music-inthe -great-outdoors/Content?oid=2129337. The article is reprinted by permission of Rochester City Newspaper and with kind thanks to editor Mary Anna Towler. T Curious Music in the Great Outdoors 87 But you can never get enough of a good thing. So, in a beautiful pine grove near Webster Park’s Cattaraugus cabin, Ossia will perform again. This time it’s the world premiere of Morris’s second outdoor work: Coming Down to Earth. Judging from the attendance, the applause, and the grapevine, the audience and the composer of Playing Outside seemed to agree: Webster Park provides an ideal environment for listening to New Music. In some ways it beats conventional classical music venues. “The performance of Playing Outside,” says Morris, “confirmed that one does not need to put music in a concert hall for it to have resonance and reverberation. Trees provide a beautiful reflective surface and fields carry sound far and wide.” The open air opens minds and ears too. Music, such as Morris’s, that expands the boundaries of convention, often presents a challenge to audiences. Morris finds, however, when that same music moves from the concert stage to the outdoors, audiences tend to enjoy it much more. “I believe this happens,” says Morris, “because when my music is performed in the midst of natural surroundings, it becomes obvious that it is inspired by and reflects my love of natural processes, textures, and sounds.” Sure, nature is fertile ground for the creative impulse, but actually performing a concert in nature opens a whole ecological can of worms: What’s nature’s role? Are the animals part of the audience, or part of the performance? What about the trees and plants, the streams and brooks? Theatrical possibilities abound: “How will the birds and other creatures in the forest respond to this uninvited musical performance in their habitat?” wonders pianist, composer, and co-producer of the event, Marcus Macauley. “Will they interact with the electronic bird calls, or with the high licks in the flute, oboe, and violin, contributing their own unwritten part to the score? . . . Will [the animals] watch in silence, bewildered? Curious? Captivated? Or will they flee the area, frightened out of their wits?” If animals could read music, indeed they might get frightened. The score of Coming Down to Earth looks utterly strange—more like experimental visual art, astrological charts, or imaginary biochemical recipes. One page looks like a pebbly landscape, another looks like a pictorial invitation to the afterworld as inscribed on some prehistoric tomb. Yet the seemingly unnatural look of the score grows naturally out of Morris’s purpose: to harmonize music with nature. “Coming Down to 88 Perspectives of New Music Earth is not concert music per se,” says Morris, “but something like ambient music, where the music blends into and comments musically on the sounds and sights of the natural location in which it is performed.” “There are no melodies, phrases, or chords in the woods, just textures and single sounds, sometimes groups of sounds. So how can my music ‘harmonize’ with the sounds of the woods, rather than drown them out, or impose others? And not to imitate, either.” Part of the answer is to have the musicians improvise, in various ways. In one section, called “Clamor” (Example 1), the musicians improvise somewhat freely. Yet the score guides them, producing a cloud of sound in which just a few pitches shine out like headlights in the fog. In some styles, such as jazz, improvisation also blurs the boundaries...