SSAATTBB choir, a cappella
text by John Muir
14 minutes
The text of the work is excerpted from A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916), John Muir’s account of his 1880s journey throughout America. The book ends with Muir’s arrival at Twenty Hill Hollow in Merced County, California. Muir considers the interconnectedness of the natural world; the final line reading:
You bathe in these spirit-beams, turning round and round, as if warming at a camp-fire. Presently you lose consciousness of your own separate existence: you blend with the landscape, and become part and parcel of nature.
– John Muir
part and parcel attempts to mimic this organic connectedness by deliberate timbral development based on sounds exclusively found in the above text. In the spirit of Muir’s sentiment of our inextricably ties to the natural world, the work begins and ends with variations on the word “nature.” I used the International Phonetic Alphabet in this text setting to facilitate the deconstruction of words into their sonic components. My consideration of the fundamental components of the text led me to focus on particular moments for an extended period of time and then advance more quickly through the text until another moment of focus arrives.