Thrice Burned Forest
The new portrait album from Deena T. Grossman, featuring three world premiere recordings, masterful and timely additions to the repertoire. Touching on themes of cyclical connection, deep time, death and renewal, intergenerational sharing, and sense of place, Grossman showcases her signature balance of cultural and natural references to resplendent effect.
“Brilliant, haunting, and beautiful.”
LISTEN
Thrice Burned Forest
Davening
The Circular Bridge
Composer Notes
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Thrice Burned Forest
Immense wildfires have burned around Mount Adams in Gifford Pinchot National Forest in southwestern Washington, between 2001 and 2015. One summer, a friend and I hiked through an area that has burned three times since 2008 (the 2008 Cold Springs fire, the 2012 Cascade Creek fire and the 2015 Cougar Creek fire).
Walking along the path which winds up towards Mt. Adams' peak, we heard mysterious sounds like women’s voices singing high, sighing, close harmonies, first from one distant side then from another. Interspersed with these breathy, sorrowful voices there were wooden, percussive rattling sounds at unpredictable intervals. The charred trunks of burnt trees were quaking with the wind coming off the mountain.
Were these sounds the spirits of the forest, the mountain, the lost lives of plants and animals which perished in the fires? Or is it the earth herself, keening, holding, consoling and finally healing over generations, centuries, millennia of time this scarred yet beauteous landscape?
I have no answers, only an intuitive understanding that we, all beings and our planet itself, are interconnected and entirely dependent on each other. Our health and the health of the smallest lichen, frog, butterfly or of the largest forests, oceans and rivers is one and the same.
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Davening
Davening is inspired by memories of visiting my mother’s parents, Nana and Papa, when I was four years old. My parents, younger sister and I then lived in a garden court apartment about a block away from Nana and Papa’s high-rise apartment in San Francisco.
On occasion my sister and I would get to spend the night with them. Dad and Mom dropped us off and we would have dinner together. Afterwards we watched TV with Nana, who enjoyed Lawrence Welk and Jackie Gleason.
Sleeping on the living room couch, I was awakened early in the morning with Papa’s davening at the window. Wearing his black yarmulke, white and blue striped tallis and holding his prayer book, he would chant, sing and sway while reciting the traditional Jewish prayers greeting the day.
The Talmud teaches us that music and prayer are virtually synonymous–where there is song there is prayer. This composition is a loving, musical recollection of that time.
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The Circular Bridge
This set of five sonic meditations for six flutes is an extended, structured improvisation. From pure gestures in silence to progressively free and complex forms, each movement is based on one of two series of six pitches which can be played forwards or backwards. The performers may choose a subset of the melody or the complete set of six tones and experiment with dynamics, articulations, trills, flutter-tongueing and sliding pitches.
The essential task for the group is to listen deeply to what they are creating and allow space for each voice to be heard. Is this not our task in any
community; to create beauty with all of our individual voices combined?
To cherish, conserve, consider and create.
“With three pieces totaling over an hour, the album is great meditative-close-listening music, afternoon-in-the-backyard music, or cooking-a-fancy-dinner music… Davening had the audience captivated and in a trance-like mood. It felt transportative… Thrice Burned Forest was more expansive, with great contrasts in instrumental color throughout its single long movement nearing twenty minutes. The semi-improvised sections served as a lead-in for each solo, creating a cloudy texture before fading away into the distance. The whole work ends with a lilting arrangement of “Hashivenu” in D minor. The melody easefully climbs up and down, building in density from the lone bass flute and ending on a sorrowful piccolo note in its sweet middle-low register… It is astounding in The Circular Bridge what Grossman and the sextet are able to do with a mere six notes. From the first to the last track, the music grows and expands from the barest long tones to a vast melange of mock-bird calls, pentatonic motives, trills and extended techniques. ”
— Oregon ArtsWatch
