Alaska
Composing in the Wilderness 2019
with the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival
“It’s a program where you hike during the day in Denali National Park in Alaska, then after a few days of outdoor observation, you are thrown into a cabin to write some music, then you get a performance. Pretty cool, right?”
Composing in the Wilderness is a program run by Stephen Lias and the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival. Nine composers from all over the world were led by Christina Rusnak and guides from the National Park Service and Alaska Geographic into Denali National Park, where we hiked, learned, explored, and became friends for life. We then relocated to Twin Bears Camp, where we had three days to compose a piece about our experiences in the park. With our music written, we returned to Fairbanks for rehearsals with resident ensemble Corvus, before attending performances at Denali Visitor Center and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Stage 1 - Teklanika Campground, Denali National Park
Stage 2 - Twin Bears Camp
Stage 3 - Fairbanks
We arrived in Alaska during the summer 2019 wildfires. The beautiful landscapes we had been promised were obscured by thick smoke. The air tasted peculiar.
After a whole day of travelling I stepped out of the airport into a daylight midnight, hazy and orange. I could well have stepped onto another planet.
With smoke filling the air, we turned our attention to the ground instead. Our guide Davyd Betchkal showed us insects, animal tracks, shrubs, trees, rocks, rivers - the mountains may have been big, but we quickly learned that the world at our feet was just as expansive.
We had a few guides during our time in Denali National Park, like Susan Adams, Eric Johnson, Rose Keller and Mara Scallon. Each brought their own field of expertise to our expedition; by the time we left the Murie Science and Learning Center we had explored Denali through several lenses, building up a more complete picture of the park than if we had just wandered around taking pictures.
From polar bears in Svalbard to brown bears in Alaska.
We watched a mother and two cubs play near us for half an hour on our way to Eielson Visitor Center.
Luckily, we were in the van.
Denali National Park is home to hundreds of bears, so we were careful to avoid them while hiking. We announced our presence regularly as we walked, giving any bears in the vicinity plenty of warning that we were coming.
Just as important as the national park we were in were the people we were with.
You take ten composers of all ages from all over the world, each with different experiences and interests and philosophies about music, and you put them together for four days in a field camp with no internet (or electricity, or heating, or real toilets, and just one tap). We felt like old friends by the time we left for our second campsite. We also realised early on that we were surrounded by a vast wealth of knowledge and interesting conversations to be had, and each of us had something valuable to contribute, whatever our background.
“I came for solitude, but instead I found family.”
Friends at the start of our Denali adventure.
Three lakes to chronicle our adventure:
Lake no. 1 - in Denali National Park. We stopped here for an hour to observe the insects living on the edge of the water.
Lake no. 2 - at Twin Bears Camp. After four days hiking in the wilderness we came here to write our music. One day we decided to get our feet wet; it was lovely until we noticed our feet were covered in tiny orange leeches.
Lake no. 3 - at Tonglen Lake Lodge. We came here to rehearse with Corvus. No leeches this time - we had learned our lesson.
Writing music to an impossible deadline is liberating.
Celebrating the first performance of our music at Denali Visitor Center.
Limitations are the key to creating art; without limitations there are so many options at every step that it’s easy to wind up frozen in place, scared to commit to any one idea over another, afraid to choose for fear of making the wrong choice. Naturally, we want our art to be as good as we can make it.
The Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival does not run indefinitely, however, and there were only so many days after returning from Denali National Park before resident ensemble Corvus wanted to begin rehearsals, so we were up against the clock to write our pieces. To ensure we wrote about our direct experience and not any preconceived ideas, we were only given our instrumentation at the end of our stay in the park. This left us with just three full days at Twin Bears Camp to compose a musical response.
With three days to write, we didn’t have time to second guess our decisions. We had to make choices quickly and instinctively, and by the time we returned to Fairbanks we had each composed an honest and authentic response to our time together in Denali National Park.
Composing in the Wilderness was an experience I will never forget. Sitting on the side of a mountain looking out over miles and miles of an untouched natural world, discussing art and music and culture with old friends I had just met, discovering all the ways the park’s complex systems worked together, I learned about the importance of space, and of reflection, and of intention.
I learned that if you can’t see the mountains, you can still look at the lichen.
