Part 3: Final leg of Acadia National Park Residency!
Brown Mountain Gatehouse was built as a deterrent — to keep people from driving their cars on Acadia’s Carriage Roads. It’s also where I got to stay these last few days: in a huge space, which meant that the quiet was immense. I got used to hiking with poles and stabil-icers on my boots, despite the fact that I was mostly choosing very flat paths. It was thrilling at times to be out there despite the cold. Plus, in the gatehouse, it was toasty warm— kept that way to make sure the bones of the historic house stay in tact.
I worked on a slew of new fiddle tunes, a new song, and a new string quartet. Inspiration for a couple of the fiddle tunes came from hearing about Acadia’s first superintendent George Dorr’s winter swims, and also from seeing what looked like a completely frozen waterfall but was making so much noise that you could hear how much was bubbling underneath.
I experienced bits of Acadia and the surrounding towns in ways I hadn’t seen them before: snow and ice-covered beaches and ponds, roads and ticket-taking booths closed off, Carriage Roads groomed by volunteers for cross-country skiers. Compared to the summer time, it seems at first glance that all the businesses are closed, but there are a surprising number of determined coffeeshop and restaurant owners serving the locals, plus events that really draw crowds at the libraries and museums.
On Thursday night, I gave a workshop at the beautiful Jesup Library in Bar Harbor. Joined by pianist Christina Spurling, I performed many of the new tunes, and then we moved into the more interactive portion of the evening.
Attendees used two colors to draw a favorite Acadia spot or winter walk, and those two colors became the instructions for piano and violin to follow. After we played through each of these graphic scores, I ended the night with a solo version of “Follow the Invented Constellation.” This was a piece I created for Thread Ensemble after last September’s visit to Acadia’s Night Sky Festival. Audience members control the music in real-time by turning on and off different colored flashlights in a darkened space. It was a delightful way to finish my artist residency time here.
Workshop photos by Jay Elhard.
Huge thanks to Jay and everyone at NPS who determinedly made this residency and workshop happen, despite all the uncertainty and delays created by the shutdown.
