The Evergreen (2020)

Caroline Shaw writes:

One day in January 2020, I took a walk in an evergreen forest on Swiikw (Galiano Island), off the west coast of Canada. This piece, The Evergreen, is my offering to one particular tree in that forest. I started writing music years ago as gifts for people (whether they knew it or not), or as companions to a piece of art or food or idea. It was a way of having someone hold my hand through the writing process, a kind of invisible friend to guide me through. This tree is towering, craggy, warped and knotted wrapped in soft green, standing silently in a small clearing where the shadows are more generous to the narrow streams of sunlight that try to speak up in late morning.

Moss

What does softness sound like? Moss is a complex system of very delicate micro versions of leaves that can only be a single cell’s width, growing so densely that the thousands of stems feel like a soft, unified, velvet surface. I began to think of the bow that draws the sound from string instruments. The surface of the horse hair appears smooth to the naked eye, but in fact is covered with tiny ridges. When the player draws the bow along the string, pivoting the bow to allow more or less hair to make contact, they are in fact producing hundreds of thousands of incredibly small nudges and pricks of the string. To our ears, this registers as a single surface, a single line. One secret ingredient to this process is rosin, a solidified form of resin, or sap, that comes from coniferous trees like pines, firs, and cedars. When combined with the microridges on the surface of the horse hair, the rosin strengthens the grip of the hair along the string, feeding the resonance of the violin’s top plate, which was carved from the wood of a spruce tree. The evergreen’s very body and vital fluid are a part of every note.

Stem

One violinist holds a single note. Joined, one by one, by the others. They lean away slowly, splitting the pitch, undermining the singularity for a few moments, smearing the paint, then they lean back toward the shared tone. Like the uneven surface of the stem of the tree as it reaches up, imperfectly.

Water

When I was walking, and not walking, in this forest, everything was wet. The snow had almost fully melted when I came through the woods that morning, so the sound of water dripping was all around. There’s a strange sense of depth, optically, when you’re in the woods in the morning. Aurally I experienced the same thing. The clarity of water droplets’ tones in the foreground and the ghostliness of those further away.

Root

What inflects the unfurling stem of one’s life as it draws time up from our roots through our twisted, articulated limbs and sprouts and blooms and leaves and surfaces and planes and points and chords and lines and tunes and angles and tangents and folds and peaks and valleys and accents and cadences and timbres and knots and burls and skin and grain and dust and breath and vapor and the memories of those who came before?

Reclamation is a work about reclaiming and reckoning with past trauma and ongoing disability. An evergreen tree persists through unrelenting winters; a deciduous tree fully sheds and regrows. Both lose parts of themselves to different degrees of transformation. Both stay alive and continue to grow through the changes. Both processes are simultaneously miraculous and predictable. – Wendy Richman

I was researching the Portland Japanese Garden online, looking at photos and also at their tweets. It is already beautiful just seeing those, and I found I was yet again to focus on nature for my inspiration.

“Perpetual Spring” is organic, the clarinet melts into the string quartet, and the strings extend their "stems" to wrap around the clarinet wherever it moves….As is the amazing thing about nature: the roots and stems of trees, they wrap around anything, breaking through the asphalt roads, concrete walls…

Every time I see these aspects of the power of nature, I feel that we should never under estimate the power of "quiet" nature. This piece is about “framing nature”.

Dai Fujikura (Edited by Alison Phillips)

'Evening Prayer' is an introspective and tranquil meditation for a choir of 4 cellos. This piece can be a prayer for anything; a wish for better times, tranquil thoughts and peace. It isn't specifically religious or spiritual, but it can be used in that context (like for a church service).