A celebration of the American Wilderness in a McLean Mix concert of five compositions, performed from 1985 -1990.

     Barton and Priscilla McLean: “The point of writing music involving wilderness sounds is not to create a ‘pretty’ piece that one can lie back and let the picture-postcard ambience of ‘nature’ ride over one while safely behind glass, but to experience the true essence of nature in all its terror, inconvenience, startling beauty, and un-expectedness— to reclaim our lost true connection with the wilderness and with our deepest selves.  The   music of nature is the primal source of folksong, our deepest heritage, and the wellspring from which classical   music has risen.  We as Americans have preserved wilderness as one of our proudest achievements.”
 
        Commissioned by Bowling Green, OH State University in 1985 for their Fifth Annual New Music Festival

Barton and Priscilla McLean, performers, with university choral groups and audience as singers, plus recorded sounds


     ON WINGS OF SONG by Priscilla McLean (1986)

     Performers:  Priscilla McLean, live voice.  Barton McLean, amplified bicycle wheel spokes with digital delay and reverb, recorded
     mosquito, honeybee, and P. McLean’s reverbed voice.  Text is from Stewart Edward White’s book “The Forest” (Doubleday, Page and Co. 1911), chapter “On Flies”.  This humorous song pays tribute to one of the most vital, important, and hated wilderness creatures, the omnipotent mosquito.


        

 

 

INVOCATION by Priscilla McLean (1985)

     Performers:  Priscilla McLean, leading voice, clariflute, large hanging pots, pans, and ad hoc drum.  Barton McLean, bongo drums, pot, clariflute, and digital delay.  Recorded by P. McLean: American turkey,  Australian black swans, king pigeons recorded at the Berkshire Bird Paradise, Grafton, NY; wolves (CBS Records, 1971), Alaskan huskie owned by neighbor. Record of Jimmy Killigivuk from Point Barrow, Alaska singing “Shaman’s hunting song” ( U. of Washington Press: “Alaskan Eskimo Songs & Stories”).  Bowling Green University freshman chorus, conducted by Marilyn Shrude, and audience singing by the Syracuse, NY Chorale, conducted by Eileen Hollenbeck. Audience and P. McLean singing Eskimo words that translate to  “Let me sing a song of thanks”, chant composed by McLean. The clariflute, an invented (by McLeans) hybrid of clarinet mouthpiece and wooden recorder body is designed to blend and become one with the recorded black swans.  The style of this music, incorporating all sounds— human and animal— as being equally important, is of a dense polyphony and sound-mass technique, along with the Eskimo and composed tunes.


     VOICES OF THE WATER by Barton McLean (1985)

     Performers:  Priscilla McLean, live voice.  Barton McLean, amplified, bowed and struck bicycle wheel (spokes) processed through digital delays, pitch shifts, and reverberation, including Ms. McLean’s voice.  Recorded natural (unprocessed) stream sounds are from the McLeans’ home locations in Austin, TX and Petersburgh NY.  Sung and spoken text is from Stewart Edward White’s book “The Forest”:  “One will hear what the Voyageurs call the ‘Voices of the Rapids’.  They speak very soft, low, and distinct beneath the steady roar and dashing, beneath even the lesser tinkelings and gurglings.  The voices disappear quickly when you concentrate on them, and reappear so magically when your consciousness wanes.  In the stillness of your hazy half-consciousness, the Voices of the Rapids speak.  When you bend your attention to listen they are gone, and only the tumults and the tinkelings remain.”  The bicycle wheel is at its most virtuosic here, and was created especially for this piece, using a wheel found in the attic of the McLeans’ 1790 NY farmhouse.  All images are from the McLeans’ many later backpacking and hiking adventures in the western American and Canadian mountains, plus the last one, from the cloud forest of Machu Picchu, Peru.


     O BEAUTIFUL SUBURBIA! by Priscilla McLean (1985)

     Performers:  Priscilla McLean, lead singer with strummed autoharp (audience singing not included in this recording), with back-up chorus from Bowling Green State University, Marilyn Shrude conducting.  Barton McLean, narration, amplified struck bicycle wheel (spokes).  Recorded bug zapper in Petersburgh, NY, barking dogs (Austin, TX neighbors and the Austin Humane Society compound), chain saw, wolves (CBS Records), television commercials, north wind sounds recorded in the 200-year-old barn at the McLeans’ home in Petersburgh.  Images are from the McLeans’ numerous backpacking and hiking trips.

     The myth of “America the Beautiful” is calculatedly shaken by the inexorable buildup of familiar odious suburban sounds.  Both an example of black humor and poignant beauty, after the chaos earlier, the piece ends with spoken text by Henry David Thoreau from his essay on “The Wild” (from which the title of the concert was taken), and by text from the book “Wolf Country” (E.P. Dutton & Co. NY, 1975) by Ewan Clarkson.

    
     PASSAGES OF THE NIGHT by Barton McLean (1985)

          Performers:  Barton McLean, narrator, voice modified through digital harmonization.  Recorded sounds:  owls, parrots, sparrow hawks and other birds (BBC sound samples), frogs, oboes— all sampled and composed on the Fairlight Computer Music Instrument at the University of Texas Electronic Music Center, Austin.  Texts:  “It was a lovely moon” by John Freeman (“A Book of Nature Poems, Viking Press, 1969), John Muir’s “The Mountains of California” (The Century Co.,1907), Stewart Edward White’s “The Forest”, William Wordsworth: “Tintern Abbey”, Ewan Clarkson’s “Wolf Country: A Wilderness Experience”.

     This last work is a metaphor not only of night in the wild, but of the whole spiritual wilderness experience and of its powerful elemental beauty, expressed in a style symphonic in its complexity and surreal in its abstractions.




    
    

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