Sound & Place Oakland: Mountain View Cemetery
Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland is a landmark project by Frederick Law Olmsted (1863), his first solo project after designing New York's Central Park.
Abstract
Composer and sound artist Hugh Livingston has designed sound installations across the 200 acres of Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery, as well as a series of permanently available binaurally recorded soundwalks which can be downloaded to guide visitors through the history and natural history of the site, with original composed musical and naturescape backdrops.
This project as an exploration of the dramatic 200-acre rolling hills of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Mountain View Cemetery, designed in 1863. The intent is to explore the site with sound, as a commentary on the landscape design, the flora, the natural history, and its place in the history of the Bay Area. Olmsted was a Transcendentalist, a follower of Emerson and Thoreau, who believed in the responsibility of civic leaders to establish good works for the benefit of all citizens. He convened the trustees of Mountain View Cemetery to arrange for the establishment of this public park, and it has served as a focal point of man and nature in Oakland ever since.
The musical composition explores a number of themes present in the landscape, including the relationship of the near focus to the distant haze in Olmsted’s arrangement of natural features, the interest in Orientalism and Transcendentalism, and the history of the cemetery studied in conjunction with docents from the friends of Mountain View Cemetery, including its role as a Civil War cemetery. Next, the composition explores ideas about the history of outdoor musicmaking, and the installation events will combine live performers spread across the landscape, each assigned to a large tree, and 10-channel immersive environments installed in the trees which will provide a real-time commentary on the live music. The audience will be drawn across the landscape by the distant sound of each musician, ensuring total exploration of the site, and be rewarded with the close-up experience of the individualized surround environments.
The sounds will be an exploration of natural environments re-envisioned as musical content. I have a particular interest in assembling musical gestures from different cultures and across the span of musical history that represent nature sounds. I am considering the derivation of many Japanese and Chinese folksongs from the experience of nature. To the Tang Dynasty poets, nature was constantly referenced, just as in Japanese haiku. The many settings of these poems to music throughout the centuries provide a wealth of so-called ‘text painting’, the literal depiction of a poetic idea in musical gestures. The Chinese gu qin, instrument of poets and philosophers, takes its sound model and playing techniques directly from nature. An old saying contends that with the sound of the wind blowing through the pines, it is not even necessary to play gu qin.
I propose to combine these culturally important signifiers from multiple parts of the world, using Oakland musicians to record and perform live. Several large trees will each be the site of a live improvising musician, who interacts with the recorded soundscape and with the ebb and flow of the live audience.
I am interested in links between musicmaking and nature, such as the appropriate time of day for a given composition to be heard. This idea is most fundamental to North Indian raga, where the selection is made based on certain moods for midnight, for moonrise, for early morning. I have worked on nighttime installations before, so I have collected Nocturnes from the French late Romantic piano tradition (Chopin, Faure, Satie), Gregorian Chant from the evening services (Compline and Vespers) and also Raga. The idea for an installation would be to connect this music to the natural rhythm of the animal sounds heard in a given biome, from the birds that are most active just before dawn to the varying mid-day calls to the dusk excitement which gives way to the telltale crickets and frogs of evening.
My intent is to place music in an unusual context, connecting it to its origins in nature and the human experience which is often far removed (when in the concert hall) from relevance to its roots.
The Mountain View Site
Designed by renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of Central Park, Stanford and Yosemite, Mountain View expresses a harmony between humans and the natural setting. The park cemetery embodied the naturally wild elements of 19th Century philosophy in contrast to nearby urban rigor. Olmsted also drew on Transcendentalism, adapting an Asian philosophy that all of nature flows from the same spring: trees, water and mankind are equally part of nature.
The performance events will be offered as a portrait of the site throughout the seasons, as the seasonal vegetation changes affect the vistas and the transmission of sound. The performers will be scattered across the site, and reflecting Olmsted’s interest in the near focus and the distant haze in his landscape assemblages, the music will similarly drift across to suggested listening areas that will be marked on a map for visitors. Drawn across the landscape by instruments and voices chosen for their relationship to the outdoors, audience members can then hear a commentary soundscape, with 8 speakers installed in the outer branches of each selected tree. The performer lineup includes a variety of outdoor musical traditions, most of them reimagined for this particular site with music I will compose. They include Northern Plains Indian, African drumming, yodeling, Chinese gu qin, Japanese shakuhachi, oboe and a medieval ensemble that specializes in seasonally appropriate music.
Abstract
Composer and sound artist Hugh Livingston has designed sound installations across the 200 acres of Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery, as well as a series of permanently available binaurally recorded soundwalks which can be downloaded to guide visitors through the history and natural history of the site, with original composed musical and naturescape backdrops.
This project as an exploration of the dramatic 200-acre rolling hills of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Mountain View Cemetery, designed in 1863. The intent is to explore the site with sound, as a commentary on the landscape design, the flora, the natural history, and its place in the history of the Bay Area. Olmsted was a Transcendentalist, a follower of Emerson and Thoreau, who believed in the responsibility of civic leaders to establish good works for the benefit of all citizens. He convened the trustees of Mountain View Cemetery to arrange for the establishment of this public park, and it has served as a focal point of man and nature in Oakland ever since.
The musical composition explores a number of themes present in the landscape, including the relationship of the near focus to the distant haze in Olmsted’s arrangement of natural features, the interest in Orientalism and Transcendentalism, and the history of the cemetery studied in conjunction with docents from the friends of Mountain View Cemetery, including its role as a Civil War cemetery. Next, the composition explores ideas about the history of outdoor musicmaking, and the installation events will combine live performers spread across the landscape, each assigned to a large tree, and 10-channel immersive environments installed in the trees which will provide a real-time commentary on the live music. The audience will be drawn across the landscape by the distant sound of each musician, ensuring total exploration of the site, and be rewarded with the close-up experience of the individualized surround environments.
The sounds will be an exploration of natural environments re-envisioned as musical content. I have a particular interest in assembling musical gestures from different cultures and across the span of musical history that represent nature sounds. I am considering the derivation of many Japanese and Chinese folksongs from the experience of nature. To the Tang Dynasty poets, nature was constantly referenced, just as in Japanese haiku. The many settings of these poems to music throughout the centuries provide a wealth of so-called ‘text painting’, the literal depiction of a poetic idea in musical gestures. The Chinese gu qin, instrument of poets and philosophers, takes its sound model and playing techniques directly from nature. An old saying contends that with the sound of the wind blowing through the pines, it is not even necessary to play gu qin.
I propose to combine these culturally important signifiers from multiple parts of the world, using Oakland musicians to record and perform live. Several large trees will each be the site of a live improvising musician, who interacts with the recorded soundscape and with the ebb and flow of the live audience.
I am interested in links between musicmaking and nature, such as the appropriate time of day for a given composition to be heard. This idea is most fundamental to North Indian raga, where the selection is made based on certain moods for midnight, for moonrise, for early morning. I have worked on nighttime installations before, so I have collected Nocturnes from the French late Romantic piano tradition (Chopin, Faure, Satie), Gregorian Chant from the evening services (Compline and Vespers) and also Raga. The idea for an installation would be to connect this music to the natural rhythm of the animal sounds heard in a given biome, from the birds that are most active just before dawn to the varying mid-day calls to the dusk excitement which gives way to the telltale crickets and frogs of evening.
My intent is to place music in an unusual context, connecting it to its origins in nature and the human experience which is often far removed (when in the concert hall) from relevance to its roots.
The Mountain View Site
Designed by renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of Central Park, Stanford and Yosemite, Mountain View expresses a harmony between humans and the natural setting. The park cemetery embodied the naturally wild elements of 19th Century philosophy in contrast to nearby urban rigor. Olmsted also drew on Transcendentalism, adapting an Asian philosophy that all of nature flows from the same spring: trees, water and mankind are equally part of nature.
The performance events will be offered as a portrait of the site throughout the seasons, as the seasonal vegetation changes affect the vistas and the transmission of sound. The performers will be scattered across the site, and reflecting Olmsted’s interest in the near focus and the distant haze in his landscape assemblages, the music will similarly drift across to suggested listening areas that will be marked on a map for visitors. Drawn across the landscape by instruments and voices chosen for their relationship to the outdoors, audience members can then hear a commentary soundscape, with 8 speakers installed in the outer branches of each selected tree. The performer lineup includes a variety of outdoor musical traditions, most of them reimagined for this particular site with music I will compose. They include Northern Plains Indian, African drumming, yodeling, Chinese gu qin, Japanese shakuhachi, oboe and a medieval ensemble that specializes in seasonally appropriate music.
