Stuart Lake

Stuart Lake was written during the summer and fall of 2008 for Craig Pederson. I spent several summers based in Fort St. James, British Columbia, near Stuart Lake. This work is a metaphor for the lake, which is vast, clean, cold, and is dotted by many small islands. In the music, the islands are represented by short mobile miniatures (their order and timing is decided by the soloist), while the lake is represented by a continuous backdrop of rich harmonic movement, played by the electronics.

This piece attempts to bring together two different ways of listening to music: “active” and “passive.” Active and passive are not analogous to ambient and non-ambient music, but rather concerns a difference that can be generalized by contrasting the music of most European composers with the American experimental music of composers such as La Monte Young. The former asks the audience to actively concentrate on the sound and pay attention to the musical discourse, whereas La Monte Young asks for the listener to become immersed in the music over long stretches of time with only small changes in the sound. These two modes of listening function as opposites in Stuart Lake. The “lake” (harmonic backdrop) encourages passive listening and the “islands” (mobile miniatures) encourage active listening.

While performing Stuart Lake, the soloist improvises along guidelines which range from exact musical notation to completely free improvisation. The structure of Stuart Lake is predetermined, but the particular form of any performance will be newly invented by the soloist.