Through the Green Forest
For Solo Flute and "Unfixed" Sound Environment (2021) poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Through the Green Forest is a setting of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay for solo flute and "unfixed" sound environment. It was written for Alex Sopp.
The Performer is the Poet who walks the forest. They respond to the environment. They become a Listener.
The sonic environment that the Performer finds themselves in is an 'unfixed' (indeterminate) system of sound samples recorded in the woods around Millay's estate in Austerlitz, NY. The duration of the piece and the way the sounds unfold are variable, making of each performance a slightly new environment to discover. A recording of the spoken poem is part of the unfixed media, and, like the field recordings, occurs at different intervals at each performance.
Through the Green Forest was made possible with residencies at Millay Arts (Austerlitz, NY) and Rockland Woods (Bremerton, WA).
Through the green forest, softly without a sound,
Wrapped in a still mood
As in a cloak and hood
I went, and cast no shadow in the shadow of the wood.
- –
There grew beeches taller than a ship's mast
That rocks from wave to wave
On the great seas of the world.
I looked into their tops ;
Their tops were in another world ;
Tossed in a sunny air as far from me
As the foam on waves that follow each other fast,
All day, unseen by man, over the sunny sea.
- –
Naked birches, whiter than a God's thigh,
I saw, and stared, between the stems of the black pines ;
Boulders whiter than a dream remembered by day
Stood in the brook's way,
Damp with mosses greener than an emerald's eye.
And ferns where the water sloped from stone to stone in the
clear dark
Without ripple or speech
Curved motionless, rooted in rotted bark
And leaves laid together and the rifled husks of the beech.
