“The regions around the North Pole – well, yes, the North Pole itself – had attracted me from childhood, and here I was at the South Pole. Can anything more topsy-turvy be imagined?”
Roald Amundsen, The South Pole (1912)
The Ice Museum
Today we visited Monaco Glacier, a stunning slice of several million years of time wrapped around the Liefdefjorden, a fjord that faces the northern expanses of the island of Spitsbergen. Words are hard to put to precise use for this kind of landscape. The fjord is filled with shards of ice that have been forming mini-icebergs that will probably melt within a couple of months, nothing heavy… But the basic idea of being able to look at each iceberg as a snapshot of a process in-formation is a good start for this particular spot for me. I’ve been thinking about how collage and specific patterns of disruption have made a musical landscape out of the Arctic for me. I’ve been a hunter gatherer of experiences and moments, fleeting impressions that leave a trace of a moment, and that moment is what I need to figure out how to translate into compositions.
All of this brings me to the walk I had today through ice fields and over sastrugi, and on glacier fields.
You never see the same iceberg twice. Each one is a unique configuration, a condensation of time and space melded into a water based solid structure that is always changing.
Huge walls of ice march from the landmass into the sea waters facing the island, they stretch out and speak in a language like music, with no words but with undeniable meaning. And like music, the vista is a language we don’t have to learn to be profoundly moved – we who do not use our environment but appreciate, admire, and even worship it. The landscape is a response to Heraclitus’s famous remark about not being able to step in the same stream twice – but moving with geological calm, stretched out over millions of years. I started today listening to Arvo Part, Gorecki’s “Symphony of Sorrowful Things” and stuff like Moondog’s “Bird’s Lament” – not the happiest stuff, but the way things are proceeding in the remote north where we’re located has left an indelible impression of how geologic time is unfolding. We are the dreamers of a planetary dream – human beings somehow have to turn off the nightmare of how we try to organize the planet to flesh out our dreams. Again, and again. The music I’m working on while I’m walking and thinking about landscape is a post-minimal situatuation: how to translate the volume and density of this place, the immense expanses, the way the eye is fooled by the optical qualities of the ice, or the way the ear is fooled by the echoes of our footsteps as we walk through these empty, primordial spaces. I’m still not sure… There’s something about walking up the side of a huge mountain, or looking at the effects of climate warming on a massive structure like a glacier that’s made of literally millions and millions of tons of ice and water, all moving and sculpting the land that it moves over. Something that huge being reduced to rubble and dust by… carbon dioxide… you stand back and watch the earth crack and the permafrost crumble beneath your feet. The main thing is to carry this information back and to translate it into something that people can relate to. Simply put, I’m translating as much of the experience as possible, but there is so much emotional information I feel when I look at these landscapes, that the time to digest the situation will take a lot longer than I expected. Still thinking about it all as I finish this blog post. Above me as I write, the crumbling ice, stretched and covered with “seracs” – the castellated masses of the Monaco Glacier that faces us, wind swirls and eddies in the freezing wind. “Sastrugi” are the swirls and eddies of the snow that the wind sculpts into sculptures that are more beautiful than most of the things that one sees in any museum. The main thing right here, right now is to figure out how to translate it into a composition. Several sketches are ready! More in a bit.
