ERIC MOE: Verklaerte Holz (Transfigured Wood) (2015)
The title, a tip of the hat to Arnold Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht, refers to the parallels between natural and artificial/artistic processes of transformation. The wood of the Petrified Forest began as living redwoods, swept away by floods, buried, mineralized, the matrix eroded. A cello begins as maple and spruce which is cut, carved, varnished. Some of these processes are relatively quick—flash floods, cutting. The rest are slow on various time scales: years for seasoning, centuries for growing, eons for mineralization. The three movements are named for events of markedly different duration. The piece is about ten minutes long, an eyeblink for a redwood, an atom of time for a world.
RAVEN CHACON: Invisible Arc (2017)
Invisible Arc is inspired by a traditional Navajo hunting song and reflects the process of waiting for the animal as a prayer for the life of the animal about to be killed.
LAURIE SAN MARTIN: Vast Steppe (2016/2023)
When contemplating a piece about the Petrified Forest, I instantly thought of the gorgeous landscape, the mix of very old and new. In music, I became interested in mixing old and new also. The old in this case is my own references to Gregorian chants (my memory of them, rather than a transcription of any particular chants). The modern sounds include the changed tuning of the cello (B, F#, D, A) and the exploration of sounds and harmonics. My hope is to create a flexible improvisation that looks forward and backwards at similar objects, gestures, and phrases. I tried to leave many choices up to the performer, including repetition of patterns, how many harmonics, and how they are played in certain passages; also, the tempi should feel flexible with much rubato. I used the letters of the Petrified Forest to generate some of the melodic material. (P)-E-T-R-I-F-I-E-D loosely translated to the pitches E-D#-F#-D ("Ri" equals the pitch D. "Fi" equals F#.) My "loose translation" ignores P and T, however.
MISCHA SALKIND-PEARL: Pari (2016)
Pari takes its movement titles from flora native to the park: brome hay and blue grama grasses, mariposa lilies, and the seed fern ginkgo. Delicate and often unremarkable, these plants thrive in the largely dry areas just beyond where a river meets its shore. Pari is written for and dedicated to Rhonda Rider, whose devotion to the links between artifice and the natural is so inspiring.
KURT ROHDE: credo petrified (2016/2018/2020/2023)
credo petrified is a work for amplified solo cello. This is a revised version of a revision of a revision of a revision of the original piece. As a child, my family would go on summer cross-country trips. With five children in my family, these trips began with camping in tents, moving to a pop-up camper, and eventually to a very small, very cramped, very used mini-Winnebago. The Petrified Forest was a favorite location of my mother's. Remembering those trips to that location, with my family, with my mother (long since dead), of trees (that are even longer since dead), makes me consider the unadorned ritual of forgotten deaths, of slow disintegration, of ancient music created for worshiping ("I believe in one...") that is dying its own gradual death at a glacial pace, becoming sonic dust.
JONATHAN HARVEY: Curve with Plateaux (1982)
This work takes as its starting inspiration a model of human personality. At the bottom of the cello register is the “physical”—arms, legs, muscles, etc. Next in the tenor register is the passionate level. Above that lies the level of thought, which becomes even more refined and delicate as it rises to the top of the cello, where the level of transcendence is suggested. The line then curves back to its starting point and finishes with suggestions of mortality.
