The piece about Great Basin is part of a symphonic suite Bajzer is building. It is an ordered set of connected parts, each one telling the story of an American national park. Bajzer has already written the suite’s first movement, or part, focused on the volcanic violence and bubbling mudpots of Northern California’s otherworldly Lassen Volcanic National Park.
California’s North State Symphony premiered the 12-minute Lassen movement in May.
“After the concert and at intermission, people kept coming up to me and telling me about their experience in Lassen Volcanic National Park and all the times they’ve had and how much they enjoy hearing a musical interpretation of the park,” Bajzer said. “So, that’s something that’s really special about this project.”
Bajzer started this project after a road trip that took him from Omaha to Washington, D.C. to San Francisco. It was the first time he got to visit many of the national parks. On those visits, he listened to some of the great classical music inspired by nature, like Richard Strauss’ An Alpine Symphony. For him, that was a much richer listening experience than simply hearing it in a concert hall. It also got him thinking about writing symphonic pieces about America’s natural places.
Many national parks have artist-in-residence programs in which an artist lives in the park for an extended period of time in pursuit of a project. The program carries on the early tradition of artists, like Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, promoting and painting new and future American parks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Bajzer has been the artist-in-residence at Lassen and Great Basin. Starting in March, he’ll be the artist-in-residence at Joshua Tree National Park. In total, he wants to have eight to 10 movements about different parks.
The goal for each movement is to capture the unique soundscapes of the park. In Lassen, it was about the hissing volcanic features. For Great Basin, Bajzer is focusing on the planet’s oldest non-clonal trees: the Great Basin bristlecone pines.
Not only will the instruments of the orchestra evoke the story of the trees, listeners will actually be able to hear from the trees themselves. While in the park this summer, Bajzer attached electrodes to some of the pines to track changes in the electrical conductivity of the organisms as they moved water through their trunks and branches. He is then able to use software to map those changes onto a sound wave.
“What I’m getting from the bristlecone pines is the pitches and the rhythms and I can kind of assign that to any instrument,” he said. “So, that one was just one of the defaults in the program. That instrument was called mindfulness.”
Bajzer believes that, when the Great Basin movement is performed, it will be the first time this technology is used in a piece with a full orchestra.
The eerie, creepy sound is central to the story of the movement. In what is now Great Basin National Park, there once lived a bristlecone pine named Prometheus. In the summer of 1964, a geographer went to take core samples of the pines in the area to date them as well as the glacial features on which they stood. The geographer and U.S. Forest Service personnel cut down Prometheus. At the time, Prometheus was the world’s oldest-known living non-clonal organism.
“This tree has been on this mountain in Nevada for 5,000 years, older than even the concept of the alphabet. And within a couple hundred years of European Americans being in the area, like, we managed to chop it down,” Bajzer said. “It’s a bit of a depressing story and speaks to our not-so-great caretakership of the planet.”
However, the death of Prometheus did help scientists access climate data and contribute to carbon dating.
So, Bajzer’s piece is called the Sacrifice of Prometheus. It is a story in which the ghost of Prometheus beckons a traveler into a grove of bristlecone pines lit by pale moonlight and asks, “What have you done to me?” The bizarre, inscrutable tone of the bass oboe carries the voice of Prometheus. Bajzer said, once performed, this piece will be the first in American history to be written for a solo bass oboe and orchestra.
The composition is scheduled to be performed by the Reno Philharmonic in March of 2025 in Reno.
Jose Davila IV is a corps member for Report for America, an initiative of the GroundTruth Project.
