Lake of muses

short PROGRAM NOTE.

When speaking with the fine folks of Akropolis about what this piece should be about, we were torn between wanting to do something Detroit inspired and something Chicago inspired. And the more I thought about what connected these two places and the many spaces between, the more I realized how the Great Lakes inspire and control so, so many aspects of the lives of the folks who life on and around their shores. These lakes are the real muses. So I decided I'd write about them.

One of my earliest memories is going on a family trip to the upper peninsula of Michigan and playing in the deep, tall blankets of snow that were courtesy of Lake Superior. One of my favorite memories from childhood is camping with my 6th grade class along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, being woken up by our teacher at the darkest point of night so that we could leave our tents and go to the shore to see the wide sky and its glowing stars. I spent several summers teaching at a music camp just off the shore of Lake Ontario, and much of my life has played out close to these and the other Great Lakes as I’ve made memories with friends and in communities along their shores.

My undergraduate studies took place literally in the Auditorium Building on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, watching the sunrise over Lake Michigan every morning during 8 am music theory classes, and I spent a great deal of time—especially during those four autumns and springs—in the garden of the Art Institute just basking in the aura of the stunning water fountain, the “Spirit of the Great Lakes Fountain” by Lorado Taft, created between 1907 and 1913. The fountain depicts the five lakes as goddess figures, posed in a way that shows their relative elevations and the flow of water from Lake Superior all the way to Lake Ontario.

Our piece is constructed in a similar manner: in doing my research for this work I was struck at how differently the lakes and the water contained in them behave (Lake Superior’s water retention time is 191 years while Lake Ontario’s is water retention time is 6 years, for example), and how at this point in time, the water becomes drastically more polluted as it flows from west to east as lake flows into lake.

These movements touch on the bits I found most fascinating about these bodies of water, from Lake Superior’s cold depths being so clear due to a lack of organic material in the water/being “oligotrophic”, aka nutrient poor; to all the beauty Lake Michigan has been the canvas and the paint for in my life so far; to Lake Huron’s thousands of thousands of islands and its underwater petrified forest; to Lake Erie’s rust belt communities and fruit belt orchards and vineyards before it crashes through the Niagara Falls into Lake Ontario, whose human-created harmful algal blooms can be seen from space.

I wrote this piece hoping that it could be a fitting portrait work celebrating Akropolis's decade so far of emphatic, heart-felt story-telling and high-speed reeding, from Detroit across the mid-west and beyond. I also hope that it may serve as a connector between the bodies and minds of the people who hear it and these bodies of water whose influence and livelihoods are so connected to our own.

long PROGRAM NOTE.

When I was a teenager growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I started having fairly intense musical hallucinations, and decided to see if I could get that phenomena to “show up on film”. I got myself into a chronic pain MRI study at the University of Michigan during my senior year of high school and though I couldn’t get my mind to do its weird thing for me when I was in the MRI itself (it’s very loud!), I was called up the next day by the lead doctor telling me they had found an anomaly on my scan in the arachoid region (according to wikipedia in 2009, musical hallucinations were a symptom of issues in this region) and that I needed to come back ASAP for a more detailed MRI!

Long story long, it turns out that I was born with a huge void/ “hole” in my brain where you’re supposed to have activity regarding communication, and I finally was able to see a picture of this part of my brain shortly before the commission for this piece came into my life. And it’s just this huge, huge dark blob on the scan. This space is supposed to be filled with one of the three “mountain ranges” in the upper left quadrant of the brain, called the “Broca’s Area”, and mine just isn’t there. But because of this void, my auditory cortex—located on the “shore” of this void—was apparently able to grow three sizes too big. So between the weird auditory hallucinations and a very concrete case of synesthesia, I’ve been calling that void my “lake of muses” for a while now: it looks like I owe a huge swath of my creativity to the consequences of that “lake” in my brain.

And we know that the majority of our body constitution is water: our brains are 75% water, and our heart and blood and muscles and liver and kidneys which are all an even a higher percentage, so while I’m not saying that we’re all lakes when you think about it…. we’re all lakes when you think about it.

When speaking with the fine folks at Akropolis about what this piece should be about, we were torn between wanting to do something Detroit-inspired and something Chicago inspired. And the more I thought about what connected these two places and the many spaces between, the more I realized how the Great Lakes inspire and control so, so many aspects of the lives of the folks who life on and around their shores. These lakes are the real muses. So I decided I'd write about them.

One of my earliest memories is going on a family trip to the upper peninsula of Michigan and playing in the deep, tall blankets of snow that were courtesy of Lake Superior. One of my favorite memories from childhood is camping with my 6th grade class along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, being woken up by our teacher at the darkest point of night so that we could leave our tents and go to the shore to see the wide sky and its glowing stars.

I spent several summers teaching at a music camp just off the shore of Lake Ontario, and much of my life has played out close to these and the other Great Lakes as I’ve made memories with friends and in communities along their shores.

My undergraduate studies took place literally in the Auditorium Building on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, watching the sunrise over Lake Michigan every morning during 8 am music theory classes, and I spent a great deal of time—especially during those four autumns and springs—in the garden of the Art Institute just basking in the aura of the stunning water fountain, the “Spirit of the Great Lakes Fountain” by Lorado Taft, created between 1907 and 1913. The fountain depicts the five lakes as goddess figures, posed in a way that shows their relative elevations and the flow of water from Lake Superior all the way to Lake Ontario.

Our piece is a bit similar. In doing my research for this work I was struck at how differently the lakes and the water contained in them behave (Lake Superior’s water retention time is 191 years while Lake Ontario’s is water retention time is 6 years), and how at this point in time, the water becomes drastically more polluted as it flows from west to east as lake flows into lake. Up-to-date facts and figures and small actions you can take to help out will be on the page for this piece on my website.

These movements touch on the bits I found most fascinating about these bodies of water, from Lake Superior’s cold depths being so clear due to a lack of organic material in the water/being “oligotrophic”, aka nutrient poor; to all the beauty Lake Michigan has been the canvas and the paint for in my life so far; to Lake Huron’s thousands of thousands of islands and its underwater petrified forest; to Lake Erie’s rust belt communities and fruit belt orchards and vineyards before it crashes through the Niagara Falls into Lake Ontario, whose human-created harmful algal blooms can be seen from space.

It’s especially beautiful and full-circle for me that one of the pieces that convinced Akropolis to commission me was a recording of a piano quintet of mine that was an enlargement/dressing up of a song written by my grandmother when she was my age called Flight to the Moon. See, those hallucinations when I was a kid didn’t scare me because I’d grown up being taught music by my grandmother who had these hallucinations herself, ten times louder than my own. A Michigander for the majority of her life, she was thrilled about this project for the Detroit-based Akropolis, and this was the last piece I began during her lifetime; she passed away during my final weeks of working on this piece.

I wrote this piece hoping that it could be a fitting portrait work for Akropolis's decade so far of emphatic, heart-felt story-telling and high-speed reeding, from Detroit across the mid-west and beyond. I also hope that it may serve as a connector between the bodies and minds of the people who hear it and these bodies of water whose influence and livelihoods are so connected to our own.