To write his new orchestral piece, Evan Chambers took a walk in the woods.
Commissioned by the City of Dexter last year to write a composition celebrating the bicentennial of its founding, Chambers, a U-M professor of music, decided to focus on the alchemy that arises from the integration of a town with the natural world surrounding it.
“I’m really committed to writing music that’s rooted in place,” says Chambers. “I’m especially committed to local communities—and not just communities of humans, but communities of life.” He was particularly struck by the way Dexter embraces, rather than pushes away, its natural environment: Mill Creek is a sacred place to [residents],” he says. He appreciates “the way the Huron River integrates into the city, and the fact that they’ve taken such beautiful care of the wetland. A particular kind of human culture arises from that.”
Inspired by this harmonious intermingling, Chambers visited many nature areas around Dexter last fall. Allowing the living world to be his guide, he took a sort of musical dictation from the environment: He captured bird calls, the croaking of tree frogs, and the sounds of acorns falling. At the wetlands on the Sloan Preserve, he listened to insects, frogs, birds, and the sound of the water. “Water has many songs in it, too,” notes Chambers. In the oak-hickory forest at the Miller-Smith Preserve, he marveled at how the shagbark hickory peeled in arcs reminiscent of a thumb piano, and wondered if plucking at it would make a pitch.
The result is a one-movement orchestral piece titled from the woods to the waters and home. About twelve minutes in duration, it’s made up of shorter sections based on places in and around the city of Dexter, and will be performed by the Dexter Community Orchestra.
Chambers found a variety of ways to bring natural sounds in the finished piece. The composition incorporates unorthodox instruments, with orchestra members shaking oak branches and plucking spruce cones. Some sections are more experimental; for a section titled “Branching,” Chambers gathered some smaller branches, laid them on musical staff paper, then used the imprints of the leaves as a guide to trace music onto the sheet. The giant oaks of the Miller-Smith Preserve, which reflect centuries of pre-settlement Native American agroforestry, inspired the section “Song of the Grandmother Oak.”
from the woods to the waters and home concludes with an original hymn. Lyric sheets will be passed out and the piece will end with communal singing. Chambers hopes that attendees will feel less like an audience and more a congregation: full participants in the music, rather than spectators.
Dexter, like all cities, is a dynamic organism made up of human beings who contribute as much to its character as do the architec- ture and the natural environment. Chambers hopes that the piece will inspire a variety of positive feelings, but most of all a sense of community. “There is joy and there is hope and there is a peacefulness,” he says. “But also an enthusiasm, in that we can claim our belonging to a place, and to each other.”
from the woods to the waters and home will have its debut as part of Dexter’s bicentennial celebration at 4 p.m. on Sunday, May 5, at the Center for the Performing Arts at Dexter High School.
