MARIE-PIERRE LANGLAMET, HARP SOLO

"It is hard for me to contemplate Das Lied von der Erde today without some reference to the obvious: Mahler initially wanted to call his work Das Lied vom Jammer der Erde, and today’s ‘Jammer der Erde’ has become a primary fact of contemporary life. As a teenager Mahler’s music spoke to me with some special urgency, and it’s shocking to think how much of our destruction has been wrought since then – quickly checking a NOAA CO2 graph, I see that almost two thirds of civilization’s whole increase in CO2 since industrialization’s start has come. Now I understand that urgency, which I still feel, differently. Today I see Mahler’s largest works as personal expressions of Haeckelian Monism, which I see as holding important seeds for the future. Haeckel, who coined the term ecology, also helped to initiate the idea of endosymbiosis, being perhaps the first to notice that chloroplasts (Haeckel also named and was the discoverer of the plastids) seemed like cyanobacteria trapped inside plant cells. Understanding our planet’s self-regulatory mechanisms will be key, and the symbiogenetic basis of evolutionary novelty will likely be shown to be at the core of such mechanisms. In other words, both as metaphor and as guide to action, the Haeckelian thinking Mahler confronted is still entirely contemporary.

Vom Leid der Erde takes three common species I live around (on a horse farm), and introduces their voices into classical music in a sequential order, equating the seasonal passage there from winter to spring. Almost like the French horn’s quality of holding together the sections of an orchestra, the Aeolian harp plays a key role in binding together the components, and in mediating the inherent need for technology to dialogue with Nature in this way. The Aeolian harp is the sole instrument that plays only harmonics, and the complexity of its effects stems from the Karman vortex street effect of the wind. I use just three tunings: 1. what I like to call Mahler’s ‘Nature chord’, eerie, as in the first movement of his 3rd , the minor-major seventh chord, meant to depict the beginnings of life (Mahler wrote to Nathalie Bauer-Lechner, while composing it, that Nature was fundamentally ‘eerie’), 2. the dissonant 9-note chord that climaxes the first movement of the incomplete 10th, and 3. a purely pentatonic collection. Great horned owls were nesting on the farm this past winter, but unfortunately I hadn’t started my piece and didn’t record them, (and so had to use external sources) but the red-wing blackbirds and American toads I recorded as they arrived, both on the farm and the surrounding fields."