Scott Ordway

PREMIERE

Composed for the Rutgers University Vorhees Choir

Premiere: 25 September, 2021 at Rutgers Gardens (New Brunswick, NJ)
Rutgers University Vorhees Choir; Brandon Williams, conductor

MEDIA

NOTE

Every day, we are surrounded by lives very unlike our own: lives that grow in the soil and fly through the air, lives that swim in the water and crawl over the land, some that thrive in darkness and others that crave the light, lives that are playful and those that are timid and many that are neither playful nor timid but simply exist, lives that know something like love, or at least companionship, and many more lives that are brutally indifferent to these things, lives that we can see and lives that we cannot, lives that we bring into our own bodies as we breathe the air and drink the water, lives that are so small we scarcely comprehend them, lives at a scale we can relate to, and, sometimes, lives that are so immense that they frighten us or threaten to crush us or make us feel very weak and insignificant and alone. We are surrounded, too, by the memories of lives that no longer exist, of lives which have gone extinct.

Every day, we are immersed in life.

The diversity and complexity of all this life, though, can exceed our capacity for understanding. When we are presented with too much information, or asked to attend to several things all at once, we begin to lose track of it all. This is the case with the overwhelming number of other lives with which we share our environment. Their quantity overwhelms us. We become indifferent.

Sometimes, an act of translation can reestablish our sensitivity to things we have learned to ignore. With my installation piece Watershed, I have translated some of the plants and animals of the Raritan River region into sound. To do this, I have assigned a specific sequence of musical pitches and rhythms to the name of each species and distributed them among 80 singers, each of whom represents a different living thing. Together, the singers create a sound-mass which corresponds to the rich diversity of living things in the air, in the water, on the land, and under cultivation as an extension of the human village.

The work was designed for an outdoor performance by the Rutgers University Vorhees Choir, directed by Brandon Williams, as part of the “March to Rutgers Gardens” event in September 2021.

As listeners move into and through the sound installation, they are immersed in a sonic representation of the life that is all around them. The sound is gently cacophonous, vibrating with conflicting information, existing in a balance which is occasionally disturbed before coming, once again, to rest.

By translating a fragment of a place’s living presence into the medium of sound, I hope that Watershed can momentarily reawaken our awareness of the countless other lives with which we share the landscape.