Cathedral

Program Notes

Cathedral, commissioned by an incredible line-up of harpists, was sparked by listening to a talk by the American photographer, Jeff Curto, about the history of landscape photography. Beyond simply describing the technical demands placed on those early photographers (i.e. how they literally had to bring a dark room set-up with them on their backwoods trips,) he tossed out a thought that stuck with me: the idea that, for early American photographers, the newness of the landscape meant that their church, their place of divinity, was nature. Historically, this lines up with the actual Transcendentalist movement, populated by nature-loving American idealists like Thoreau and Emerson, each believing that people are genuinely good and ultimately want the best for one another, but only when divorced from the corrupting influence of society.

This struck me in how closely it mirrored my own experiences, especially my time living in Marquette, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I sometimes took for granted the fact that the forest—big, dense, legitimate forest—was always within a short jog, and when things piled up, I could always go there, and it never failed to decompress whatever was worrying me. It was always an act of healing. It made me appreciate Kurto’s assertion: that a place of divinity doesn’t need four walls—that it can be wherever we can feel the divine. Cathedral is about that: the spaces and experiences that we rely on when we need something beyond ourselves.