Ryan Chase

While at Mannes, my friends and I watched a lot of Deadwood.  Whether we were at Crissida’s apartment blocks away from the building or farther north at Tom and Ben’s apartment, an episode was often screened as part of the evening’s festivities.  We enjoyed it as the soap opera it was, but we were also tickled by how David Milch would weave contemporary slang into established poetic forms.  The first seeds of Gold Rush were planted during these late nights, but the subject was eventually approached obliquely through a series of musical failures.

The piece was initially intended to be a string quartet.  Two earlier attempts, Split and lost coast, were immediately inspired by summers spent at the California Summer Music Festival in 2005 and 2006.  I was fascinated by the alternative paths and sonic experiments composers were conducting on the west coast and elsewhere in the 20th century.  Their work seemed a breath of fresh air compared to the serialist tradition from world war to cold war that I was presented in courses.

I tried again as a graduate student, but the material seemed to demand a more homogeneous group.  I finally decided to draft a version for five violins because I knew five violinists in Bloomington: Jenny Estrin, Michael Acosta, Sophie Bird, Wil Herzog, and Toma Iliev.  Recalling session gigs for various artists across the greater NYC area, I was thinking about the variety of fiddle traditions in North America.  I was thinking about when I was handed the piano part to Aaron Copland’s Rodeo by Ms. Robertson to play with an orchestra for the first time in high school.   Thanks to Jeffrey Hass and John Gibson’s computer music course, I was also thinking about spatialization and synthesis.  So, I got down to it.

The first movement, frontiers, opens with a “nature music” that owes as much to Louis and Bebe Barron, Wendy Carlos, and Pauline Oliveros as it does to Aaron Copland, Ennio Morricone, and Gustavo Santaolalla. The violins are treated as mimetic sound machines and melodic voices. The second movement approximates the implacable but irregular clamor of a five stamp mill. A broken cantus modeled from the opening statement of Schönberg’s Fourth Quartet is jarred by interjecting, noisy techniques from performance traditions introduced to me by Gabriela Ortiz. In blood in the creek, musical material from the first movement is warped into sound masses and brittle drips. Hoedown is hopefully on the nose and a little ahead of the beat. Copland is in the saloon, as are Bernstein, Carter, Crawford Seeger, Cowell, and Nancarrow. Ives runs the joint.