COURTESY BRIDGET BYRNE The Pine Mountain Music Festival shared its 2023 "Thrilling Adventures" series at the Rock Harbor Auditorium on June 9, 2023. The Superior String Alliance Chamber Players performed four pieces that belatedly celebrated the 80th anniversary of Isle Royale National Park in 2020. Two original string quartets were commissioned for that celebration by past Artists-In-Residence Libby Meyer and Katherine Bergman. Those quartets were premiered alongside a premiere of a quartet composed by the widely accoladed Elena Ruehr, highlighting her own experiences of growing up on the Keweenaw Peninsula. "The Sound of Water" by Libby MeyerOpening Performance Remarks and Commentary About "The Sound of Water" Performance remarks are slightly abridged and edited for clarity from those offered verbally on the night of the event.
This is a great honor for us to host the first Pine Mountain Music Festival performance on Isle Royale. The program tonight is featuring pieces that were commissioned to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Isle Royale becoming a park in 2020. As you know, events like a pandemic intervened in 2020, and we weren't able to have a performance then. We're glad to be able to do it now, marking 83 years as Isle Royale National Park. Really that 83 years is just a tiny little fraction of the amount of time that people actually have been coming to Isle Royale, enjoying it, and treasuring this place. Before we start this beautiful performance, I want to leave you with a quote about Isle Royale. It's definitely a place that inspires me. I think it probably inspires a lot of you. And it brings us back time and again. So this quote is from Albert Stoll. He wrote a lot about Isle Royale, endlessly promoting Isle Royale to become a national park. There is nothing like this island. The full meaning of it will never be understood until you have journeyed to its wave-washed shores. Isle Royale is different. It is bold, rugged and magnificent. I hope you enjoy the performance. We are the Superior String Alliance Chamber Players. So what that means is that we all are from the U.P. and or we have spent a lot of time in the U.P. One of the main things that Superior String Alliance does is run a string camp; something like a sleepaway camp for string students. So we are definitely in our element here. We've been staying on Mott Island all week. It's been a dream come true. Libby Meyer wrote the first piece. She is also the Co-Executive Director of Pine Mountain Music with me. She won an award and she had to go to Prague to go get it. So we're playing her piece first and Lauren is going to talk about it. This first piece is called “The Sound of Water.” And we've certainly been hearing a lot of that around here. It's been so extra special to play these pieces in this place. We've just been so immersed in it. This first piece is really special for us. Libby is a friend of the quartet. We've played a lot of her music. We've worked with her very closely, in a lot of projects. So it's really special for us to play her music here, especially because she was the artist-in-residence here a while back too. She has a very deep connection to this place. This piece is fun for us because we not only get to play our instruments, but we get to stomp. We get to talk. You hear us sing the haiku that's on your program. So hopefully we'll articulate and you can hear that. I hope you all enjoy “The Sound of Water.”
"Submechanophobia" by Eric McIntyreCommentary About "Submechanophobia"I'm going to talk about the next quartet, which Eric McIntyre composed. He’s not here with us either. But there is a very interesting program note. Eric was an artist-in-residence at Isle Royale a few years back. He was taken by boat to see the shipwreck of the S.S. America. All of a sudden, when he was asked to look into the water, he was terrified by seeing this ginormous shipwreck under the water. There's a specific word for it, and that word is 'submechanophobia,' which is the name of this piece. All of these quartets are an extremely different style. But I personally really, really adore this piece because it's very creepy sounding. He evokes the ghostly underwater kind of effect. But he also uses an incredible number of colors and textures. We're surrounded by visual art, and I think this is the type of music that has a tactile ability to it. It changes a lot, very rapidly. It has moments that are really kind of crunchy and hard to listen to. But it has moments that are really astoundingly beautiful and open. There’s a lot of things going on, and it's been really, really fun to play. There's a whole section where we have to deliberately not play with each other. Yeah, you'll hear a huge variety of sounds out of this piece, so I hope you enjoy it. Eric McIntyre is the composer of “Submechanophobia.”
"Storm Beneath a Marbled Sky" by Katherine BergmanCommentary About "Storm Beneath a Marbled Sky"I was the artist-in-residence at Isle Royale in 2017, and it's been an absolute pleasure to be back here this week, hiking around the island and reliving some of those experiences from my time here. One of those experiences was today going out on the Stoll Trail to Scoville Point. I'm sure a lot of you did that, or are about to. If you look across the cove at Scoville Point, there's a cabin over there that's the artist cabin. That's where I spent my residency, and the other two composers of the first two pieces also stayed there during theirs. This piece that you're about to hear is called “Storm Beneath a Marbled Sky.” It's about an experience at Scoville Point, watching a storm come in off of Lake Superior. One of the things that's just really cool about that is how far away you can see this storm coming and the sky changing colors, so vividly and rapidly. The waves, continuing to become more and more powerful as the storm comes closer. I hope you enjoy, “Storm Beneath a Marbled Sky.”
"The Keweenaw Quartet" by Elena RuehrCommentary About "The Keweenaw Quartet"I'm Elena, and I grew up in Houghton. So if you came from Houghton, you know where I'm from. I feel like I have to apologize a little bit because the piece that you're about to hear is about four times longer than anything that came before it. It's about 20 minutes long, so you have to have some patience with it. It's all based on the Keweenaw, so it's not so much about Isle Royale, but Keweenaw is just across the way. And it's the same kind of landscape, and a lot of the same stuff is going on there that is here. It's very special to me because I grew up on the Keweenaw, and it's a piece about my childhood. There are five different movements, like pictures. There's two together, and then there's a little break, and then there's one in the middle. Then there's a little break, and then there's two at the end that are together. So you're going to have has two little silences in the middle. The first one is called, “A Thimbleberry Ripens in the Sun.” If you are from around here, you know what a thimbleberry is. There is that very sweet-sour berry that ripens at the end of the August. I imagined this little berry and the sun is maybe first in the cello, just playing a long, slow note, warming the earth. And then we hear the two, the viola and the second violin. They're playing just the air kind of blowing around, and then we hear the first violin playing a melody, and that's the thimbleberry. It's waiting to go poof. Then the cello says, “Poof!” the viola says “Poof!” the violin says “Poof!” And then finally they all say, Poof, I'm a berry!” That takes about three minutes (and it takes about three days really). And then they won't stop. But they'll play some. They'll pluck their strings. And I feel like ten chords that are like chords that they just kind of roll. Then you're going to hear the next movement, which is called, “Blizzard.” Because after those simple berries ripen, it's not too long before a couple of snowflakes fall. Maybe first, they're sort of gentle and fast, but it's not too long before they’re kind of fast and furious. And you got a big blizzard. So you‘ll hear a kind of fast and furious movement. Then we get to the third movement, which is called, “Central.” I don't know how many of you are from around here, but there's a mining town in the Keweenaw called ‘Central,’ which is now a ghost town. I imagine these old copper miners. There's an old hall there that might have been a church. In that place, maybe those ghosts are still hanging around in that fall. Maybe there's four ghosts and they're dancing a slow waltz together. So the different instruments will play the tune at different times, and they'll be playing duets. We get a little break, then we hear Lake Superior at night. If you live around here, you know Lake Superior. You might think if you never were up here that Lake Superior was this nice, really tranquil, little sweet place. It's not. It's dangerous-cold. It's windy, it's lustrous. It's full of all kinds of dangers. So this is a very turbulent little piece, and it doesn't take much to go from turbulence to a deer crossing the road, or a moose crossing the path and a wolf right behind. So in the last movement, without any ado, there's some big chords and you'll hear it start going “do, do, do, do, do, do do…” the wolf chase. That’s how it ends. I really, really hope you enjoy this. It’s very special to me to be here. I grew up in Houghton. I lived there for 20 years, but I’ve never been to Isle Royale before this very moment. I’m so happy to be here, and we spent a lot of time enjoying this space here. I hope you like the piece.
COURTESY BRIDGET BYRNE |
Last updated: December 31, 2024