GREENSBORO – “Music of Place and Planet” was an intriguing concert last Friday night at the Highland Center for the Arts in Greensboro, which featured recent works by four Vermont composers concerned with our swiftly-changing climate. They were supported by musicians of the Turnmusic Ensemble, consisting of Mary Rowell and Jane Kittridge on violins, Elizabeth Reid on viola, John Dunlop on cello, Nicholas Brown on bass, Randal Pierce on piano, Jane Boxall on percussion and Anne Decker conducting.
The first piece on the program was “Flow” by Matt LaRocca, written this year for this concert. It started with the splashing sounds of Caspian Lake water being poured back and forth with containers, then joined by the resonance of a trapped ringing bowl and the piano on one repeated note, followed by the entrance of the strings with some chordal interest and the saxophone for added texture, ending where it began with the mystical sound of the bowl fading away. The composer felt the spiritual element of water and its peaceful freedom.
The second offering was “Trillium” by Elizabeth Reid, also written in the last few months, scored for solo B-Flat clarinet, played skillfully by Dan Liptak. This instrument has a unique rich sound with strong projection. About halfway through the work an electronic echoing background was added to the performance. Reid found inspiration for the music in the flow and ancient geology of the Niagara Escarpment between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, an area where she grew up.
The next composition, “The Kingsbury Suite” by Colin McCaffrey, was also composed this year. All the strings joined in this performance, conducted by Anne Decker. It had four sections evocative of local landscapes, namely Greenwood Lake, Buck Luck, the Kingsbury branch of the Winooski River and the Pekin Brook, and the music flowed like water, unbroken through the four parts. As he wrote in the program notes, “Similar to the sound of the viola, there is a dark, mysterious and primal feeling to the whole valley for me.” The tempo was kept slow and the various strings blended harmoniously.
“The Lamentation” by Tom Cate from 2025 was written for viola and guitar and had a moody ambience, with Elizabeth Reid on the former and the composer on the latter. There was some conversation between the instruments and the suggestion of a tune. The title leads into the last work on the program, also by Cate, “Seven Parables on the Sixth Extinction” of 2018. He writes of “The very serious existential situations we are facing. The fact of the extinction of species, the loss of habitat, the degradation of air and water, are speaking to us, but we can not seem to hear.”
He narrated the texts, which gave voice to the African Elephant, the Channel Catfish, the Golden Eagle, the Saltwater Crocidile, the Honeycomb Moth, The Quinine Bark Tree and Gaia the Earth itself. The whole Turnmusic Ensemble joined in the work. There have been five extinctions of seventy to ninety percent of life on this planet of several hundred of millions of years, caused by collisions with large meteors. But the present extinction is the result of the over-population of our own species, eight-billion and counting. At the conclusion of this performance the composers and musicians got a standing ovation from the audience.
This concert was repeated in Burlington March 29 and in Montpelier before that, March 23. For information on future Turnmusic projects, go online to [email protected].
David K. Rodgers
David K. Rodgers is a writer, mason and card carrying dilettante, who dabbles and babbles in art. He has lived in East Craftsbury for the past 40 years.
