The Wick of the Land

Program Notes

Whither the rural?  Or should we now ask wither the rural?  Either way, it is a vital question to put to our collective rural genius, challenging it to contend with the demand for sustainability of the rural and of the genius itself.  I put that double question here, interrogating through music the rural spirit of sustainability and the sustainability of the rural spirit.

It is a double question of wick, a word with many doubles of its own, doubles we often neglect. 

There is, of course, wick in the most directly visual sense for us today, as in the wick of a candle.  It seems apt to me to consider this visual wick as a metaphor for the sustainability of the land.  Sustainability is a relationship that we must keep burning, a candle wick alight in the darkness of the universe.  But we must do so without consuming the source of the flame—a double task that we must learn to not make a contradiction.

Although we generally do not recall it, wick also means the aliveness of spirit.  This understanding of wick comes down to us today most commonly with negative significance, as in wicked and witch, a sense that there is something to be feared in the aliveness of spirit.  We have mostly forgotten that the wick is the quick, although Dickon tried to remind Mary, and us, of this when he told her that The Secret Garden had become “as wick as you or me.”  Wick, then, is ghost not given up.  Surely this is a meaning we should not fear.  And perhaps we vaguely acknowledge the centrality of ghosts to aliveness when we admire the dancing flames of a candle’s wick, the live spirit of the candle which constitutes the warming vitality of its light.

To sustain the live spirit of the rural candle is also to sustain another largely forgotten meaning of wick: wick as home and habitation, as abode and dwelling place.  We still hear this connotation in the place names of some towns and cities in England, or in place names derived from England, such as Norwich, Wickham, Hampton Wick, and just plain Wick.  And I hear in it a cognate to the Greek oikos, meaning home, and from which we gain today the word ecology, the study of home.

So by the name The Wick of the Land  for this piece, I intone many meanings: wick as sustainability, wick as spirit, and wick as an understanding of both of these together—that is as the sustaining hearth of place and spirit, our ecological home.

I gathered these thoughts in response to the art show Wisconsin’s People on the Land, on exhibit in the James Watrous Gallery at the Overture Center for the Arts, in Madison, Wisconsin, in April and May of 2007.  That show itself gathered in response to a statewide discussion on The Future of Farming and Rural Life in Wisconsin, convened by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters.  The work of the artists in the show—David Lenz, Tom Jones, and John Shimon and Julie Lindemann—seemed to me to give shape and profile to three broad takes on the rural:  The idyll of the rural as it was as we hoped it would still be.  The counter-idyll of the loss of that rural, both as it was and as we perhaps now fear it never was.  The reconstructed, and ever-reconstructing, idyll of rural openness, intentionality, and renewal.  The first two takes are finalizations of the rural, the one positive and the other negative, while the third represents a determined embrace of the undetermined and the unfinalizable.

I give resonance to these three rural themes through a movement exploring each.  In the first movement, Kindling, I describe an ideal rural past of harmony between people and the land, and between rural peoples themselves.  I begin by echoing a Native American water drum, joyful and inviting, and then introduce three themes based on the musical ideas of the moccasin game, a gambling game traditionally accompanied by drumming and singing and once widely popular among Native peoples, including the Ho-Chunk and Iroquois tribes of Wisconsin.  These three themes then morph into a recounting of the European settlement of the Wisconsin landscape, first by gravitating into a jig, a dance popular with the Voyageurs and with the Irish, and then finally into a waltz, a dance popular with Wisconsin’s German and Scandinavian settlers. Aside from a contestation here and there, the music represents the parts of the rural past as largely in tune one with the other.

The second movement, Dwindling, recounts the story of rural loss much in evidence in the exhibition and in much rural talk today.  Here the music sings a sad, almost funereal song several times over.  Interspersed between these singings, we hear a dialogue of laments between sounds I derive from Norwegian hardanger fiddle, with its double stops and drones, and sounds I derive from a Ho-Chunk love lament for flute.  My inspiration here comes from the playing of Wisconsin folk musicians—Otto Rindlisbacher on hardanger fiddler and John Bear Skin on Ho-Chunk flute—recorded by University of Wisconsin faculty member Helene Stratman-Thomas in the 1940s, and now preserved (and on-line) in the University of Wisconsin’s Wisconsin Folksong Collection.  (My inspiration for the first movement comes in part from the moccasin game tunes played and sung by the Ho-Chunk chief Albert Yellow Thunder, also recorded by Helene Statman-Thomas, and from the jigs and waltzes she recorded.)  The movement ends quietly, dying away.

The third movement, Rekindling, begins with questioning music, and then yields to the optimism of a new water drum rhythm that sets the pace for a vigorous theme with a contemporary harmonic sound, although not without roots in folk idioms (in this case eastern European).  This theme sets the frame for the possibility of new rural conversations and a plural, unfinalized sense of what the rural can be and can sustain.  There can be no full representation of that plural sense of the rural and its reconstruction, and from the possibilities already in evidence in rural Wisconsin I chose to give musical presence to the Hmong.  In dialogue with the contemporary theme, I offer what I hope is an uplifting theme that reverberates with the musical sensibilities of a Hmong New Year’s melody, Qeej Kawm Ntawv.  But this present future of the rural should be in dialogue with the rural past and our ideals for it.  So I develop my version of a Hmong New Year’s song into a double canon with one of the moccasin game melodies of the first movement (a melody that is also heard in the jig and as a counterpoint to the waltz in the first movement).  The movement, and the piece, ends with a final singing of this tune for a rural new year.

Through all these kindlings, though, runs a single thought and hope: That we can and may discover a way to keep the candle of rural life always alight and always waxing.

(Full program as a PDF)

Performance Notes

The piece calls for a water drum, if available, to be played by the flutist in the first movement and by the violinist (while also doing left-hand pizzicato) in the third movement.  But likely a water drum will not be available to the performers.  A low wood block will do nicely as a substitute. 

Instrumentation: Alto flute/flute, Violin, Violoncelo, Piano, with water drum or low wood block

Performance length: about 20 minutes

Actual Notes

Live Performance by the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society

Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Overture Center for the Arts, Madison, Wisconsin, May 13, 2007

Movement I : Kindling MP3

Performance length: about 5 minutes

Movement II : Dwindling MP3

Performance length: about 7 minutes

Movement III : Rekindling MP3

Performance length: about 8 minutes

Parts and Score

Contact the composer.

 

All content copyright © 2007 Michael Mayerfeld Bell. All rights reserved.

Page last updated September 30, 2008