Ouaricon Songs Vol. 1

Ouaricon Songs, vol 1, for baritone and string quartet, explores American folk music through historical recordings from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Before I began writing this piece, I listened through many of these folk recordings from the early 20th century in search of oddities and unusual characteristics in the singing. After selecting several pieces of audio from the archives, I made detailed transcriptions, taking note of the precise tuning and timbral qualities found therein. Indeed, I discovered that often the singing was “out of tune” according to what is considered standard tuning today. The idea of using historical folk materials stems from an interest in alternate histories and imagined traditions. The title of this work refers to a French map from 1859 showing the river of Ouaricon leading to a large geographic area in what is today the Western United States. This word may have been the origin of the Oregon, although this is not for certain. The familiar folk music sources have been made strange in this piece by the way I altered, embellished, and mixed them together, exposing a new and unusual angle that may evoke what music may have been like in an imaginary land of Ouaricon.