Kawthar (Vance Quartet)

This piece was written for the Vance Quartet, a student clarinet quartet at Oberlin in 2002. My wife is one of the 2 bass clarinetists heard on this recording– we’d known each other for a few months at this point. The electronic sound collage that goes with the written score is based on a journey that I made the previous summer:

In the summer of 2001, I took a road trip across the United States with two friends on some grant money from my grad school program. Our mission was to make a multimedia art documentary about people’s relationship to water in different parts of the country. We travelled from Boston to Kentucky to Iowa to Colorado, where we followed the Colorado River from its source to its end. Through Utah and Arizona we followed the river through canyon formations, Glen Canyon Dam and the oddity of Lake Mead. Along the way, we caught word of a Navajo and Hopi meeting about the draining of their aquifer by the Peabody coal company. After finding our way to this meeting in the Navajo Nation, our perspective on Las Vegas’ waterpark fountains, golf courses, and diverting canals in the desert was changed– seeing a power struggle over a sacred element that was being treated without consciousness by too many.