I wrote this piece at the end of 2021 as a part of Dr. Leslie Hogan’s “Landscape Music” class at UC Santa Barbara. The piece deals with humans and the ways in we interact with the natural environments around us. The piece’s three movements try to reflect these different relationships via the ways the music is notated as well as the tone and content of the music itself. The first two movements are written in an aleatoric, cell notation style such that the players have a great deal of expressive liberty and room to improvise, while the last movement is written in a traditional, fully notated manner. The flow from large amounts of freedom to strict control reflects the way that we can choose not to disrupt environments, to live in a symbiotic nature with them, or to dominate them.

            The fixed media backing track that accompanies the live players are samples and manipulations of field recordings taken at the Sedgwick Reserve in Santa Barbara County’s Santa Ynez Valley. The gradual increase of processing and synthetic elements mirrors the aforementioned motion from a kind of natural freedom to extreme human involvement.