Hermitage of Thrushes, by Stephen Nachmanovitch

Hermitage of Thrushes

by Stephen Nachmanovitch

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1.	Quintet for Viola & Thrush 03:00	buy track
2.	Attar 03:53	buy track
3.	Assisi 03:34	buy track
4.	Tapage 03:12	buy track
5.	Treebeard 04:01	buy track
6.	Sprig 03:34	buy track
7.	Canopy 06:14	buy track
8.	Flibbertigibbet 03:28	buy track
9.	Grandpa’s Garage 03:29	buy track
10.	Interleaf 05:47	buy track

about

During the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, I’ve been secluded for months at my home in the Virginia woods, going “nowhere” - and finding birdsong everywhere around me. Daily walks on the trail, coming home with recordings in my pocket. Into the computer with them, monkeying with the sounds, adding voices from Violectra, violin, viola d’amore. In early March when the lockdowns started here, I couldn’t have predicted that I’d be joining the legions of composers who’ve benefited from birdsong over the centuries & millennia.

Charles Hartshorne at the end of his book on birdsong: “It is a stupendous fact about nature that the territorial disputes of thousands of species are something like artistic contests – song duels. The struggle is mainly musical (contersinging), not pugilistic. If only human beings could do so well.”

Pieces:

1. Quintet for Viola & Thrush. The whole piece is based on a single wood thrush tweet, played in four independent lines at different speeds and pitches. Hence the title, quintet, and thrush singular.

2. Attar. Named for the Sufi author of Parliament of the Birds. A motif of a fourfold thrush song, at the beginning dropped in pitch and stretched to great slowness.

3. Assisi. Home of a 12th century Christian famous for his skills at interspecies dialog.

4. Tapage. Olivier Messiaen, the greatest bird-inspired composer of all time, told my friend Larry Livingston, “J’aime le tapage” – “I love uproarious noise.”

5. Treebeard. Many of these pieces are named for tree environments (or in this case, Ents), rather than birds. That after all is what I could see when I made the recordings.

6. Sprig. I began the piece combining violin and bird lines not knowing in advance how closely they would match up.

7. Canopy is based on a single long utterance of a mockingbird in a pine tree near a neighbor’s house, and so it gets a single violin line.

8. Flibbertigibbet. You can hear a woodpecker masquerading as a bass drum at the beginning and end.

9. Grandpa’s Garage doesn’t sound anything like my grandpa’s garage, which during my childhood in Los Angeles contained between 40 and 50 finches, canaries, and parrots. No crows. No burbling chthonic bass sounds. A bricklayer by trade, he raised birds and sold them. In his youth in Russia, he raised homing pigeons that would fly 2000 miles across Siberia and back.

10. Interleaf. It may not sound like it, but I was inspired by one of my favorite modern composers, Morton Feldman, when I made this piece. A long drink of cool water at the end.

Instruments: 6-string Violectra, viola d’amore, violin, viola.
Birds: wood thrushes, tanagers, crows, Carolina wrens, robins, blue jays, mockingbirds, woodpeckers, and others that I’m too ignorant to identify.
While there are electronic effects on the violins, there are not effects on the birds other than dropping the pitch and slowing them down.

credits

released November 22, 2020

Thanks: to my beloved wife, Leslie Blackhall, for her wonderful ideas during the composition process (and the title).

Woodblock print by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) courtesy of the Met Museum.

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about

Stephen Nachmanovitch Virginia

Stephen Nachmanovitch performs and teaches internationally as an improvisational violinist, and at the intersections of music, dance, theater and multimedia arts. He is the author of two books on the creative process, THE ART OF IS and FREE PLAY. He has taught widely on creativity and the spiritual underpinnings of art, and has had numerous appearances on media, and at music and theater festivals. ... more

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