c e l l o d r e a m s
river icarus: rusted bridge / deep water (2010 solo cello)
thanks!
this project is underwritten by the
american composers forum with funds provided by the jerome foundation .
kathy is a fiscal year 2010 recipient of an artist support grant from the
arrowhead regional arts council (www.aracouncil.org)
which is made possible through an appropriation from the mcknight foundation.
the funds from this grant were used to purchase the equipment used to record, mix, and master this work
listen to individual tracks ...
listen to the whole album ....
notes ....
The narrative arc centers around a transgendered young person's experience in the urban / river landscape around the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis. It is about a brush with death. I wanted to express the disintegration/disorientation felt by a tender-hearted, raptured icarus and the fragility of flight.
In creating this soundscape I used both chance and mindful intention, an expansive textural palette (using strings, bow, wood and echo) and the tonal "infinite between" of a fretless instrument. I employed an "alone/together" type polyphony intertwining sound beings that also stand alone. Each track is described below.
- night crow no time: The character "night crow / no time" provided a third person "once upon a time" approach to the story. I translated the prose concept of the "unreliable narrator" into a musical frame. This concept helped me create a more ambiguous, disoriented narrative journey. The sound is meant to be raw, like a crow's raspy voice, claw and beak.
- washington avenue bridge: A sound glimpse of the bridge.
- blue iron: This is distilled version of a more drunken series of "bridge songs" meant to begin a slide into the disoriented mind of icarus, the slow shift to first person.
- graffiti angel: In exploring polyphony a bit more for this project. I started down a path of what I called my "post-punk 2-part harmony" studies. What wasn't discarded from this journey was compiled into the album, "graffiti / 2 hands". This led to the character graffiti angel in "river icarus". Two independent cello lines are panned left and right.
- ghost wind 1: A shifting wind or harbinger, this sound texture comes from the place on the cello below the bridge.
- s/he: The voice of icarus is heard for the first time. A cello line is duplicated out of phase. An out-of-synch duet, a tender, two-spirited voice.
- river talking sky: Icarus hears voices, the river ghosts. This song is frayed - the sound of incoherence and disintegration, the world slipping.
- dream song: This song is composed of two lines separated in the stereo field, one left, one right. The first thread is the voice of icarus heard in "s/he". The second is a more disoriented call, a subtle siren, perhaps the ghost of John Berryman. This song is named after his book of poetry. John Berryman jumped to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge in 1972.
- ghost wind 2: Again, a brief call from below the bridge.
- icarus: This came out of the blue at the very end of this recording project. It is like a hymn. This piece has a very simple harmonic structure, a vulnerability, the gentleness of icarus
- flight: Icarus is a character from Greek mythology. In the story, his father, Daedalus creates two pairs of wings out of wax and feathers for himself and Icarus. Daedalus warns his son not to fly too close to the sun. Feeling the joy of flight, Icarus soars towards the sun over the blue, blue sea...
- i was sky / i was water: Two distinct lines that were composed independently and placed together through the gods of chance.
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