Rising – Vasks, Plainscapes

Pēteris Vasks – Plainscapes

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Sunrise, Monday May 18

We are back, with more birds. 
They are truly a gift of our burden of isolation.
Now, a pair of grackles is building a nest under our soffit. 
They like the New Quiet.

Morning, mid-May, sunrise, and birds.
Welcome to the world of Pēteris Vasks. 
He has observed that each piece he writes is about his homeland, Latvia – as here, in Plainscapes. We like to think of it as a landscape – a leisurely survey of a landscape. A journey across fields and hills and, well, plains. A journey through seasons and years, told through the interplay of Tommy’s cello and Shannon’s violin with our voices. We are at times a hazy horizon and at others the spectacular rays of a Sun. While the strings play out their own stories, we intersect, we diverge, we listen. 

Always driven by listening.

The journey of Plainscapes is one of waiting. 
One of patience. 
We do not realize what we have been waiting for, until they are upon us.
Until they emerge from deep within the piece:

Birds.
The joyful singing of birds...
Telling us the sun is up.

To be honest, wordless works are often not that fun to sing. They tend to place singers in instrumental roles that don’t fit all that well. Voices – at least, those of humans – seem to long for words. Words demand rhetoric. That feels natural. 

But, Plainscapes is different.
We love to sing it because it feels completely natural, without words. 
Like we’re making it up.
Like we’re singing into the wind. 
Like we’re rolling slowly down a long, grassy slope. 

And, we love to sing it because we know ‘that moment’ is coming. 
The one with the birds. 

We no longer number the weeks. They are too numerous. 

We celebrate the morning. 
Our grackle. 
And its song.

–The Whole Team @ The Crossing

Side note: the bird songs in Plainscapes are all produced by us.

Plainscapes

music by Pēteris Vasks

wordless

recorded live in concert April 11, 2015 at Longwood Gardens

audio by Paul Vazquez of Digital Mission Audio Services

with Thomas Mesa, cello and Shannon Lee, violin

video art by Beth Haidle

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