Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble: Dawn Chorus
Innova

The concept that inspired Dawn Chorus goes a long way towards distinguishing it from other new music recordings. Helmed by Director Bill Ryan, the New Music Ensemble at Grand Valley State University (Allendale, Michigan) initiated a project six years ago whereby commissioned composers respond to U.S. national parks in musical form, after which the ensemble travels to the settings that inspired the material to perform it at amphitheaters, visitor centres, lodges, and even in the wilderness. The group's fifth album compiles eleven of those works, their diversity unified by their common theme and the ensemble's playing.

To create the material, Phil Kline, Molly Joyce, Patrick Harlin, Paula Matthusen, Rob Deemer, and others visited the likes of Arches, Capitol Reef, Grand Teton, Wind Cave, Badlands, and Yellowstone National Parks. While location is more alluded to in most works, it's overtly referenced in David Biedenbender's Red Vesper where site-specific sounds recorded by the group appear at specified times alongside instrument timbres.

Ryan teaches composition at Grand Valley State University and directs its New Music Ensemble, which he founded in 2006 and whose members are drawn from the student body. The level of musicianship is of professional calibre, as shown by the recognition it's received for recordings of Steve Reich's Music For 18 Musicians and Terry Riley's In C plus the number of works it's commissioned, more than seventy-five to date. In addition to Ryan, those credited as ensemble personnel on the release are Hannah Donnelly (flutes), Denise Finnegan (clarinets), Karsten Wimbush (saxophones), Wade Selkirk (percussion), Reese Rehkopf (piano), Sarah Dowell (violin), Kevin Flynn (cello), and Niko Schroeder (sound engineer).

The nature theme asserts itself immediately when bird chirps introduce Biedenbender's contribution (wolf howls and cicadas appear thereafter), the musical elements softly arising like an awakening morning. There's a hush to the piece that's wholly in keeping with the title, vesper being an evening prayer and the colour choice a reference to both the glow of the evening sun and the red of the rock formations in the Capitol Reef National Park, though the music eventually builds to a radiant climax suggestive of rapturous experience. In stark contrast, an undercurrent of anxiety informs Joyce's Bite the Dust, what with its insistent piano pulsing and quasi-dissonant melodic figures. The tone's deliberate, Joyce here wishing to draw attention to ongoing erosion within Badlands National Park; the musical design's as deliberate, the composer structuring the piece to emphasize transitions that see geologic formations eroding before one's ears.

A pastoral quality informs some of the pieces, due to the project theme and the largely acoustic sound of the ensemble. One example is Deemer's reverie Firehold Mists, wherein flute, strings, clarinet, saxophone and piano effectively conjure the impression of the mist-enshrouded Firehole River in Yellowstone National Park. Another is Kline's aptly titled Dawn Chorus, where intertwining clarinet, flute, and glockenspiel expressions evoke birdsong during an early spring morning at Badlands National Park. In Messiaen-like manner, Kline based one motive on the Western Meadowlark's song and otherwise evokes the din generated by sparrows, warblers, thrushes, and thrashers. A similar affection and appreciation for the splendours parks provide comes through in Harlin's Wind Cave, inspired by the experience of visiting Wind Cave National Park.

In his Heat curls up from the dust, Jeff Herriott captures the humble awe engendered by gazing upon the majestic mountains of Grand Teton National Park, whereas Matthusen draws from the resonances and ambient noises that emerge from the chambers at Wind Cave National Park in her dramatic electro-acoustic-styled piece on the anological understandings of space. In Night Sketches by former GVSU New Music Ensemble member Ashley Stanley, a mellotron-like assemblage of flutes morphs into a cyclical torrent, the treatment designed to evoke the image of stars glittering in the night sky at Arches National Park. Interlocking mallet patterns lend Alexandra Gardner's Vixen a driving propulsion in keeping with geyser eruptions at Yellowstone National Park. On a lighter tip, Niko Schroeder drew for his joyful Canvas the Bear from the moment he and his grandfather encountered a hulking bear at Yellowstone National Park.

Dawn Chorus is hardly the first time an artist has drawn for inspiration from nature, as works by Thoreau, Whitman, and Beethoven attest. But the idea of compiling parks-inspired works by eleven composers into a single volume helps set the seventy-minute release apart. That dimension helps it resonate more powerfully, yet even if the listener were ignorant of the theme the musical material would remain compelling on purely musical grounds, thanks to the quality of the composers' creations and the renderings given them by the ensemble.

April 2020