Sugar

Program Notes

When Dan and Emlyn of Music in the American Wild approached me about writing a Midwest-centric piece for their upcoming tour, I was living in Marquette, Michigan—a remote little city of just under 25,000 people in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, right on the shore of Lake Superior. It was a place that I never saw myself ending up, but that ended up shaping an incredible amount of what I do, especially in its proximity to vast tracts of wild forest and shorelines. It’s hard not to feel small in the presence of all of that—but it’s a productive kind of small, a small that reveals the interconnectedness of all of us, the places around us, and the responsibilities of that relationship. Sugar is a little love note to that part of the world.

The first movement, Tea, celebrates the many, many rivers in the Upper Peninsula. A lot of these rivers—from the Little Garlic River that curls along just north of Marquette to the big, famous Tahquamenon Falls to the east—take on a reddish hue from the tannins leached from fallen leaves, giving them a kind of rusty color that always reminded me a little of tea. The second movement, Sugar, refers to a certain kind of snow: in the coldest bits of winter, when temperatures get down in the single (or negative) digits, snow ceases to stick to itself and instead becomes an active thing, almost an entity. Heavy winds off of the lake pick it up and apply that snow to every angle of every surface of a thing, every inch of every branch, every pine needle, every nook within the jagged shoreline. It gives everything a kind of surreal, meticulous look: as though someone had gone through and applied a thin veneer of sugar to the world.