Banning, Day 4.

Fourth Day here at Banning State Park.

I am now sitting in the Sandstone Public Library after taking a tour of the Audubon Center of the North Woods near Sandstone. The Audubon Center has lots going on including caring for rehabilitated birds including ravens and raptors that have been injured, mostly by being hit by cars believe it or not. On beautiful and quite Grindstone lake, they not only have camp facilities for kids k-12 and meeting and conference centers, they are also an active natural farm and garden, an alternative energy site, and a bird tagging facility in which kids and adults get hands on learning in conservation and other related fields. Kind of a place to go to generally find out how all these things, conservation of forests and habitat as well as energy are all completely connected and our encroachment on animal habitats have real and visible consequences. I saw a few of the animals they cared for and was simultaneously struck at how incredible it was to see a bald eagle up close but how sad also that this bird would not be able to live again in the wild due to its injuries.

I am reading now on the history of Sandstone and the quarry mine that was built here as well as at Banning state park. Banning was an active quarry mine until about 1915 and sandstone until the mid 40's. It is really interesting to see pictures of what the area looked like before and after the quarry both from a geological standpoint and from a social standpoint. Sandstone was once a thriving city which was once predicted to be the largest city between Duluth and Minneapolis. The sandstone that came from the mines built many of the oldest standing buildings in Minneapolis and St. Paul as well as other buildings across Minnesota and the Nation. A vast railroad network exists here and freight trains pass through during the night at quite high frequency. It is interesting that the sound of the freight trains is not so present from the Quarry Loop Trail Itself. It is also interesting that the very material the rails were designed to transport out of here is the reason the quarry loop trail exists in the first place. While I have been designing the song path at the Quarry Loop, the concept of the whole space being half forged by nature (the river), and half forged by man (miners)has been in the back of my mind. I have mostly decided to let the park speak for itself as it seems the most interesting details are those that are subtly revealed when you get really close to them and away from the ever present river. However, it seems to make sense to have a human interaction near the stone cutting building and the powerhouse which are clear symbols of the way in which the whole space was created. But in the end, the trail ends where it begins. With the river, the wind, and the birds. Just like it was before the quarry was mined.

I meet again with my good friend Chris Chelgren this evening to experiment with drums and rocks in the powerhouse and along the banks of the river. More human interaction. Which will be welcome even though I have greatly enjoyed the solitude of the last 4 days. Just what a composer is always looking for.

July 12th 2010. Banning Prep Day 3

After a brief meeting with Randy Gordon and Staff yesterday, I tried and re-tried a few things along the path. There were some concerns over starting the trail near the boat landing as the parking lot tends to get rather full and though I thought I had found the magic spot to start the hike and do the meditation between there and the beginning of the loop, Randy suggested an alternate route which would start the hike near the picnic area a bit farther away from the river. To my surprise, on doing the hike two more times, once from each starting point, I was entirely wrong about the magic spot. In fact, there is no magic spot. I was entranced with a particular mix of bird activity, wind, and river noise. Today, I found that in fact, the birds seem of course do not stay stationary over the course of a day and especially not from day to day so the "sweet spot" in which all sounds will be well balanced enough to guide the audience through listening to all the sounds will change from hike to hike. But in general, I think Randy had the better idea regarding people finding the trail head. Park Ranger 1, composer 0! We will meet again Sir.

I also had a visit from my longest supporters as a composer, that is, my parents, this afternoon and they volunteered to be guinea pigs for the hike. It was great to try the hike with actual live people to get a chance to run through the meditation out loud as well as to practice dealing with chance encounters such as how to stay a reasonable distance from other hikers without seeming rude, and dealing with hikers who are, how to put this........mature in body.....through the park trails. I think I can confidently say that Banning's Quarrty Loop will definitely be a hike that most adults will be able to handle, even in advanced years.

In doing a few hikes, it has become clear that using musicians in any spot but the last part of the loop will be completely unnecessary as the first part of the loop, especially the south west section where the river becomes almost completely inaudible, requires subtle listening rather than any man made stimulation, to create a convincing musical arc. I did discover one surprise spot on the east side of the loop by the river where a clear picture of the river can be heard by bring the group slightly off trail. Between this and the power house/ stone crusher area, I think there will be plentiful opportunities for human interaction. After all, these are the structures where the workers toiled to shape the quarry area into what it is today by cutting out stones one block at a time for decades in the late 1800's which basically made the park what it is today and left us with such unique sonic features. But more on that later. For now, I am pooped and need to take some pictures yet this evening.

To take a closer look at what I am talking about, check out the PDF map of the park here

July 11th 2010 day 2 at Banning

Today I started early with a hike around the Quarry Loop Trail Itself. I began by doing a brief "listening meditation" that I plan on starting the hikes with focusing the ears on particular elements present in the park (wind, water, bird and animal noises). Once I had my ears in the right place, I began the path. I was immediately struck by insistent and repetitive phrasing of the various bird songs and the consistency with which other birds seemed to respond with similar phrases. This kind of stereophonic juxtaposition set the stage for what I heard when focusing on the sound of the wind as often wind seemed to move in two dimensions through the trees above and different speeds of wind wound create different textures in the leaves. I also noticed that even though I was simply standing in one spot, different parts of the river would stick out more at different times also giving the impression of a stereophonic texture and further upstream at times would be more low and bassey sounds and further down was swiftly flowing rapids. Then, when I focused on all elements together, it was like I was listening to a cohesive quadrophonic composition done in a studio but with an infinite number of different recording chambers as each sound I heard seemed to come from a different part of the overall space with different levels of reverb. As I started the hike, I was then able to take this initial picture with me and focus on the sounds I had been hearing and notice how these disparate elements began to change their character slowly as I walked, and especially when I would pass through a very rocky and enclosed space.

Though it was my intention to do a straight walk around the park and time how long it took, I ended up getting distracted by the many side paths that lead away from the main quarry trail and then back again taking you on a detour closer to the sheer rock faces that were cut away over 100 years ago by miners. The empty space that exists there now and allows me to experience that space are mostly now part of many of the old sandstone buildings in Minneapolis and St. Paul and appropriately, the neighboring town where most of these miners lived, is called Sandstone. Now, water slowly trickles down the sides of these rock faces creating pools of water that fill in pits that were created by sandstone being cut out of them and then further shaped by this steady but extremely slow flow of water. Other side paths include several paths on the south east side of the trail which lead to the rivers edge and several that lead to the various abandoned structures that the miners once worked and lived in including the stone cutting facility, the power house, and the stone crushing room. These structures are mostly now just ruined walls but their shape can still be made out and their impact on the sonic environment which they surround is still very present. A quick walk into the powerhouse tells a story and the sound of your boots stomping through the mud and clay reverberate through the entire chamber. Too many idea to count (or possibly do all of them) rushed to my head after spending a few moments in this chamber. Think it will be a challenge to narrow it down into something that will be enlightening for the audience without going overboard and lessening the overall experience of the park, but that is where the technique comes in, right?

Musical Instincts and years of training don't fail me now!

July 10th. Day 1 at Banning

Today was a day of late starts and great surprises. First, a "meeting" on the 9th with some friends went a bit over. That is to say, until 2:00 in the morning. Though 2 is not what we may have referred to as a late night in the old days, 8 am really hurt (those of you reading this who above age 30 will know what I mean). However, After a quick breakfast and gathering a few extra sundries and borrowing a few more things from my brother Mike, I was on the road. Then quite to my surprise, I received a phone call from a friend of mine in Germany (also one I have not really spent much time with since around 2001), Nina Gühlstorff, who announced her intention to come to Chicago next week as the beginning of a three week long vacation starting in Chicago and ending in New Orleans. After lengthy negotiations with the Germans, now their plan is to take a quick detour and fly north to Minnesota where they will join me later this week at Whitewater State Park where I will be doing a preview hike for World Listening Day which will be shot by videographer Jason Schumacher (another German I think?). Nina is an old friend of mine who I met in Krakow, Poland while studying there in 1997 and she is also a theater director who is well established in the German theater. Her husband Hans Gyorg is the dramaturge of the Dresden Opera.

So, that was a nice surprise, as was meeting my friend and fellow composer and violist Chris Chelgren here at Banning upon my arrival. Chris has been very gracious in offering to come out to the parks to help out making noise on some of the days the tour is taking place. Banning is filled with interesting soundscapes and old abandoned mining buildings along the Quarry Loop Trail. It was an active quarry mine until about 1915 and the juxtaposition of the natural sounds of the park and the manipulation of that natural space by man made features provides an incredible variety of sonic spaces as well as really interesting visuals.

Today I got settled in to my new surroundings and did a bit of hiking on various trails including the quarry loop as well as doing a little snooping around in the Sandstone and Hinkley areas.

July 8th 2010 A Week of Meetings.

A few meetings this week. One with Craig Carnihan from the American Composers Forum who administer the Mc Knight Foundation Visiting Composer Fellowship, one with Amy Barrett from the Minnesota DNR, and one with fellow composer and head of the Southern Theater's McKnight Program, Mary Ellen Childs. Each of these meetings and some practical motivation but I was pleasantly surprised that each of them yielded some great ideas related to the hike itself including the possibility of posting a recorded hike on the DNR and McKnight foundation Website as well as posting a video taped preview tour that will occur July 18th on the DNR website. I will post it here as well once it is up.

Other meetings were of a more personal nature and included getting back in touch with many old friends from my Minneapolis days, some of whom I had not seen since around 2001. the last 9 years that I have been a Chicago resident have really flown by, I was pleased to find that even though Minneapolis had changed quite a bit since then, the people I knew had not. That is to say, they are still people from whom I have been able to draw a great deal of inspiration. It was nice to see that even though many of our lives have gone in different directions, the sam enthusiasm for music and life in general that sort of drew us together was still there. On a less tangential note, some of these friends have volunteered to come out to the parks and assist with noise making and various other necessities (like keeping me company) during the run of the actual tours in August and September.

Songpath Begin July 4th 2010.

Riding on the Amtrak from Chicago to Minneapolis and already tuning my brain up for some heavy listening as I watch the landscape gradually change as we cross Wisconsin and then head up the Mississippi river to the twin cities. The train I am on happens to be a part of the "Trails and Rails" initiative. A collaboration between Amtrak and the National Parks. A member of the National Parks Interpretive Program talks in the observation car about the geological and social history of the areas around the Mississippi river and the glacial features that created it. Then, around 9:30 at night, fireworks everywhere! The best place to see a fireworks display is from the observation car of an Amtrak going down the Mississippi. You pretty much see all of them as you go by. Thank goodness no air carriers would let me check all my camping equipment!

My first week will be spent in Minneapolis and then I will head up to Banning to begin intensive listening and planning along the Quarry Loop Trail.

Song Path: What is this?????

Hi,

First off, you will notice that this post will be immediately followed by a number of posts that are dated before this posting date. That is because due to a mix of lack of internet access and lack of time in the first few days getting ready for my first trip to Banning state park here in Minnesota, I have neglected to post them even though I have been writing down the posts on paper (I know, paper!) as things transpired. This may indeed happen a bit though I will admit, there is really no place on earth (at least in Minnesota) where you are too far from a Wi-Fi connection these days. I am sitting currently in a grocery store cafe in Sandstone MN which is the small town near Banning State Park.

So, I think I need to go into a bit more background about the project in general. Songpath is a project that has been ruminating in my head for about the last 15 or so years. Though I did not realize specifically at first that I was coming up with a concise project idea until sometime in around 2002, I would say that a series of unrelated experiences in the wilderness, as well as a few experiences I had creating various interactive art pieces, really fed in to the final concept. Mostly, I am an avid fan of the out doors and especially hiking in areas where water has somehow cut into and transformed the landscape. My wife Shannon and I take frequent trips in whatever direction seems best weather wise and go for long hikes. We are both attracted to sound (she being a flute player and teacher and me a composer and sound engineer) an of course, we tend to spend long periods of time stopping and listening. I remember a particular experience hiking around Starved Rock State Park in Illinois where we went from one area to the next in which the path led us through rock formations that seemed to form natural reverberation chambers. I thought it would be nice to put musicians in them and perhaps write site specific compositions that highlighted the sonic features of that space and allow the audience to hike from one space to the next. I thought it would be like a multi-movement composition more than a listening walk but thought that the various sounds in the park could be incorporated into the individual compositions in different ways and it could even be a collaborative piece. A quite different idea from the current concept, but still one that informed what I am doing now. Another experience which comes to mind was a time while living in Poland when I traveled to Wielki Wies for a day with some good friends to grill kielbasa, drink Zywiec, and swim in the river. After much of the prior had been done, I spent some time just sitting on the river bank ( more of a stream) throwing rocks into the water and taking note of the sound that each one made as a sort of meditation. I realized that it was not just the sound of the rocks entering the water that impacted the general shape and timbre of each instance, but the space in which all this sound was taking place. Moving down stream into shallow water yielded a very different result and I realized that the sound environment was nearly as important as the rock and the depth and swiftness of the water. In fact, louder sounds would often stimulate a greater range of sound environments and create different kinds of echo than softer ones. Another experience that has attracted me to this project is the general experience of being a sound engineer as well as a composer of electro-acoustic music which I see as inseparable activities. Learning how various rooms have quite different sound reactions and what specific properties exist that create those reactions and how they can be minimized or accentuated has informed everything about my sound art and composition. In fact, most of my current music plays with the idea of manipulating the sound environment in which a performer plays in real time. When I began to listen more deeply on trails I hiked on across the country, I realized that the many static features of each path (wind, running water, bird calls, etc) were constantly being manipulated in the sense that the sound environment in which I was listening was gradually changing as I walked. Sometimes these environments change quite drastically and at other times, extremely gradually over time, but by choosing certain paths and deciding in the moment how fast to walk, when to stop, and what to focus on, I could essentially create my own "musical composition" in my head. The composition had in fact been pre-composed by the natural and man made elements in the park but would change each time depending on what I decided to focus on in each moment and where I chose to walk.

It was this realization that finally caught my interest to focus these disparate ideas into a listen walk called Song Path. I have spent the last several years in and amongst other activities trying to generate interest and support in the idea and finally found my answer here in Minnesota. Thanks to the generous support of the McKnight Foundation and hard work of the staff at the American Composers Forum, I am finally here and I could not have asked for a better and more supportive environment to start the project and cut my teeth as a sound walk artist than in the Minnesota State Parks.

In early 2008, I began inquiring with the parks regarding the idea and was almost immediately referred to Bryce Anderson who was at the time the head of Interpretive Programs for the Minnesota DNR. He almost immediately took to the idea and agreed to write a letter of cooperation that could be used for grant writing purposes. As luck (or destiny?) would have it, I was awarded the McKnight Foundations Visiting Composer Fellowship for 2009-2010 and got straight to work by contacting the regional directors and interpretive directors to narrow down my search for a park to do the project in. I decided to take a trip to Minnesota in mid September of 2009 to hike through a short list of parks (which was about 11 parks long over 4 days!!) and eventually decided on Banning and Whitewater. Banning because of the ease of access and relative ease of walking along the Quarry Loop trail as well as its many extremely interesting sonic features and the very obvious musical arc it created. Whitewater I chose mainly because of the grandiose nature of the Inspiration Point Trail as well as the many natural sonic features the park provides.

The concept of a listening walk is of course, not a new idea. I had heard of composers doing listening walks. I have since starting the project learned that there is an international movement of people interested in what is called Acoustic Ecology who's interest range from using listening to gauge wildlife patters and environmental impacts on various physical and sonic phenomena on wildlife habitats, to strict musical listening exercises. Though my idea did not necessarily stem from having reviewed the history of this movement, it has been enlightening for me to realize there is already an existing history with this activity and that I am not alone in the interest in this type of listening as well as to have a chance to draw on previous work in the field. Especially reading about the work of R Murray Schafer who founded the ISAE and is credited with leading the first sound walks has helped me become more confident in the idea that people will, in fact, follow me into the woods and treat the parks as a musical composition.

The hike itself will begin in a specific trail head in each park and after a short listening meditation, the audience will then follow me around the trail where I will often stop in specific spots to take in particularly interesting juxtapositions and give them an opportunity to re-focus their listening. In both Banning and Whitewater, I will enlist the help of musicians (or a musician depending on the overall need) who will perform very subtly improvisations, often using the rocks, sticks, and water features themselves to accentuate certain features in the park. These musicians are not necessarily there to play mini-concerts as was the intention in earlier ideas, but rather to stimulate the space so the audience can fully hear the hidden features intrinsic to the park.

Wow, that was a long one! Sorry to descend briefly into self indulgent rants, but I thought it was important to share my experience with anyone who will read in hopes that those who come on the hike can compare that experience to their own and perhaps reflect against a history of experience much as I have against the prior experiences of Schafer and others. Both Banning and Whitewater are sure to be ear opening experiences and the few hikes I have already taken around Banning have surprised me in their diversity of results and in just how "musical" a feeling I walk away with after doing each one when in the right frame of mind. I hope that those of you who come will have the same experience.