Erratics: Amy Brandon

Tar Swan

In 2015, bookless and on a flight to Ottawa, I decided to read Air Canada’s in-flight magazine to pass the time. In it, I came across a feature on the work of a Canadian poet, David Martin, who had recently won the 2014 CBC Poetry Prize. Along with the feature they had an excerpt of the poem called ‘Tar Swan’, which, since then, has impacted almost all of my vocal writing to date. Reading the poem was an out-of-body moment for me. I had never before encountered a poet that I reacted to in such a visceral sense. David’s work is like a fractal, with each individual word telling a unique story on its own, but also allowing the reader to hover wonderfully above the entire piece and see the crystal-clear narrative tracing its fine lines all the way through. The language is so incredibly rich, it’s breathtaking.

gouging at a forest sea

I knew instantly that I wanted to set this text, and I received the opportunity to do so in 2017, when I was selected for the Soundstreams emerging composer’s workshop in Toronto. At the time I read ‘Tar Swan’, I was in my last year of my Master’s degree in composition at the University of Ottawa, and I was ready to do some direct workshopping with musicians. I sent a tentative email to David’s publisher NeWest Press to request permission to set part of the text of ‘Tar Swan’ for vocal quartet. I fully expected the word ‘NO’ to drop back into my inbox the very next second. Instead, I got a wary but enthusiastic response, as none of David’s work had been set before and I think he was curious about the whole process. I was beyond thrilled to have access to the deep worlds of ‘Tar Swan’ and set about writing ‘gouging at a forest sea’, a work for vocal quartet and electronics.

In the piece’s program note I explain that ‘gouging at a forest sea’ is “a surreal exploration of the horrific beauty of the Alberta tar sands”. In the preface to the poem, David writes “Tar Swan is a multi-voiced reckoning that surveys the mythos of the Alberta oil sands with an approach that is both lyrical and experimental. The poems feature four voices: an oil sands developer, his plant mechanic, an archaeologist excavating the remains of the operation in the present day, and a mythical swan. [The poems] explore the human and environmental cost of drawing too much from the land. As the three humans come into contact with the otherworldly swan, the voices bubble and churn together, and what is distilled is a psychological breakdown paralleling the toll taken on the earth.”

It is this surreal and cyclical storytelling, and the interchangeableness of the microcosm and macrocosm of his work, that I wanted to represent sonically in ‘gouging at a forest sea’. Some of the ways I tried to capture this was to mix many different pastiches of vocal techniques – from the strange sound of inhaled spoken text, to medieval plainchant, to laughter and robotic narrative, and operatic passages. I glued the edges of the piece together with electronics built from the rehearsal recordings, allowing the electronics to merge in and out with the human voices in the same way the character’s voices “bubble and churn together”. In places, I wanted the voices and the electronics to inhabit the same melodic line, with only the timbre shifting from acoustic to electronic and back. After its premiere, the piece went on to win an American composition competition which resulted in a performance by the prestigious vocal ensemble Ekmeles in NYC in March, 2019. I asked David if he happened to have any more poems, and he did.

View fullsize

[score excerpt of Gouging at a Forest Sea]

Erratics

[The Okotoks Erratic, commonly referred to as “Big Rock”, in southern Alberta]

Since that first reading of ‘Tar Swan’, I had been eager to set more David’s work because of the incredibly vivid imagery it conjures, and his ability to draw intertwining lines of narrative when remaining surreal and densely structured. His poem ‘Erratics’, like ‘Tar Swan’, embodies an unusual world. The poem cryptically looks at the movement of glacial erratics, which are rocks or boulders carried by glacial ice, sometimes hundreds of kilometres from where they originated. Extremely large boulders such as Big Rock (pictured) can be commonly found in areas like Alberta, and are usually different from the type of rock native to where they are found. These boulders take their name from ‘errare’, the Latin word for ‘to wander’.

‘Erratics’ was originally commissioned by Vox London Collective in 2018. Due to unfortunate circumstances, the group were not able to premiere the work as intended at Chorus Festival London in 2018, where they had performed my piece ‘Black is the Colour’ the previous year. So, I was delighted when Pro Coro artistic director and conductor Michael Zaugg proposed performing it at Banff in 2019 as part of the Choral Art Workshop, as I was sure it would never be sung, due to its experimental nature. Although I was not able to attend the workshop, I was so excited to be part of this incredible event. And I knew that Michael was just as intrigued as I was by David’s text, as an additional work ‘Moonshot II’ was written by the ensemble and composers during the workshop using the text of ‘Tar Swan’.

View fullsize

With ‘Erratics’, I focused more on the sonic properties of David’s word choices, as well as the cyclical and surreal nature of the storytelling, in particular the way the individual words twist and turn in upon themselves. As with much of David's work, the text is heavily mystical and metaphoric in nature. The text explores themes of migration, travel and abandonment (in keeping with the subject matter of glacially deposited rocks), keeping at its centre a rich but oblique description of the Albertan landscape. The way I set the text also references the themes of travel over vast distances, in particular the use of repetitive inhalation and exhalation breath patterns (which offers contrasting timbres) as a way to apply pulse to the work. To me, these inhalation and exhalation patterns are reminiscent of laboured breathing after running a long distance, with a certain tenseness, anxiety and adrenaline inherent in the sound of this deliberate breathing. Other inhuman vocal sounds are layered over top including an open-mouthed breathing sound and a ‘sss’ whistle through the teeth. With these sounds I also wanted to add tension, but also reference the ‘open plains’ of Alberta, coated with glacial ice, upon which the erratic boulders are carried. I also wanted these ‘cold and icy sounds’ to carry the sung words as if the text were ‘erratics’ themselves, moving the imagery along from one passage to another. As well as the focus on breath sounds, I wanted the traditional vocal writing to have the feeling of ‘surreal movement’ to be in-line with the density and surreality of David’s writing. Offsetting the melodic lines against each other assisted with this, by having different voices enter at different times with the melodic lines weaving a dense and swirling texture. To contrast with all the movement, I added sections where a single high note was held for long periods, effectively rendering the piece motionless, with a latticed effect where snippets of text (even single syllables of individual words) are distributed across voices – offering a kind of static and tense density.

---

Listen Now: Erratics - Amy Brandon

Erratics

I awoke, beached in a field,
tattooed in petroglyphs,
and tended by children
within earshot of calving glaciers.    
 
The sun sets a headstone
behind me on a frayed nap
of fescue. Sparrows mock:
I’ve been shanghaied
by frozen tides. They trick
up skeins from my sopping
dressings, but the moon
can wax my wounds.
 
Drawing back the blackouts,
I rewatch my family fleeing,
their tears melting a retreat
from the moraine’s tide-line
to shrivel in the crevasses.
 
I huddle in a pallid plot,
slabs shorn by wind swords.
A capsized osprey breaks
its back across my brow.
 
When they realize my stone
arrows will end the war,
ice waves will lift my bulk
like a seed and carry me back
to the carcass I was pried from.

-David Martin