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RECORDED LIVE at Helzberg Hall, The Kauffman Center in Kansas City.
Northwestern University Symphonic Wind Ensemble—Mallory Thompson, conducting.
Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?
That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the
current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the
past nor the shadow of the future?
– Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
This quotation serves as the inspiration and soul of Joel Puckett’s that secret from the river, which approaches the idea of the river from the abstraction of sound. The composer says of his creative process:
I have a very odd relationship with the past. I am constantly forced to confront past choices I've made in the form of the music I've written which I then experience in the present. When I hear music I've written,
I am almost always overwhelmed by the feeling that I'm not actually the person who wrote it. And in a very real sense, I'm not; at least, not anymore. But when I hear it, I feel compelled to be grateful that the
person who did write that music left the very best of himself in those notes and I go about my life trying to live up to them.
In a sense, the metaphor of Hesse’s river is applied to the life of any person. Can any of us exist outside of the perspective of the absolute present, and are we still the same person as we were in the past or will be in the future?
With art, the common predilection is to observe the creator’s oeuvre through a synchronic lens, assuming all works are created by the same person fixed in time rather than to take into account the evolution not just of the artists’ craft, but also of the artists themselves. In that secret from the river, Puckett deals with this concept in a personally meaningful way through a lengthy study in motivic reference and thick, seemingly mystical harmonies.
The work as a whole is cast in two large sections: first, an exploration of pure harmonies that are made distorted and hazy through glissandi into sound masses, and second, a series of variants on a familiar harmonic motive. For much of the later portions of the piece, sections of the Hesse quotation are printed to accompany the score in a quasi-
programmatic fashion. These fragments, positioned out of order, further lend to the concept of universal existence outside of time presented by the quotation itself.
That secret from the river was commissioned by Northwestern University in celebration of the completion of the Patrick
G. and Shirley W. Ryan Center for the Musical Arts and is dedicated to Mallory Thompson and the members, past and
present, of the Symphonic Wind Ensemble.
- Genre
- Classical