Wanderings

• Main Author: Christian, Bryan William
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: eScholarship, University of California 2010
• Subjects: Music; emptiness; memory; music composition; north; oriemur; Canada; Churchill
• Online Access: http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/4z94x8qh; http://n2t.net/ark:/13030/m5qz6zqt

Wandering—musical, physical, and psychological—is a vital feature of my creative process as a contemporary composer: it is the common thread which ties my recent compositions together.In writing North , I traveled by train from Winnipeg to Churchill, Manitoba, the northernmost extent of rail which originates from the south in the Canada. I sought to understand how the experience of ‘going North’, and the feeling of arriving there, could be translated into sound. I was particularly fascinated by the psychophysical sensation of ‘coldness’.In writing Yet Somehow Comes Emptiness , I traveled to the Painted Desert in Arizona, where I spent several days hiking and composing in the wilderness. I was deeply inspired by the badlands, especially the counterpoint between the topography and the diverse pigments of layered clay. In my composition, I represented this counterpoint within a virtual multidimensional space, in which each dimension corresponded to a particular parameter of music.In writing Oriemur, we will rise , my search for wandering turned inward. Building on my research on memory and medieval monastic rhetoric, I began to create imaginary architectural spaces through which I could wander. In Oriemur this architectural space became increasingly abstract, allowing the associations and metaphors to drift in and out of focus. As a result, the theme of my most recent work has transcended the earthly wandering of physical landscapes to the wandering within the spiritual, yet abstract, dimensions of human consciousness.