Descriptions of Places

Mozart's music is deeply felt, but he always seems to maintain plausible deniability. His style is such that in case any patron accused him, "Herr Mozart, are you using my commission for fun party music to make Serious Art?" he could respond, "My job is only to entertain, sir, and this work I did for you serves only that purpose." That defense could apply to most passages in most of his works (of course there are exceptions), even some of his absolute best. Sometimes he uses that duality in a conscious way for artistic tension, or so it seems to me. The theme and variations at the finale of the clarinet quintet uses this duality for some subtle but very satisfying moments of music. It works on the entertainment level of some relaxing good times to finish out the piece, and also on a more existential level. What you hear in it depends on what kind of experience you had listening to the three preceding movements. The second movement could be considered calm and be...

Located in the Nantahala Mountains of western North Carolina, Standing Indian Mountain is a high point along the Eastern Continental Divide. Directly below it to the northeast, the very upper reaches of the Nantahala River, a cold, clear trout stream, flow north to join the Tennessee River on its much-impounded route to the Mississippi. To the southwest, visible from the viewpoint on the mountaintop, are the headwaters of the Tallulah River, which flows south into Georgia, and eventually into the Savannah River and the Atlantic Ocean. The western face of the mountain is a sizable bare bedrock ledge that quickly descends a few hundred feet, above a nearly 3000 foot descent to the valley bottom.The view from the mountain is about 180 degrees centered on the west, as the other side is densely forested. The Great Smoky Mountains, the Nantahala Mountains, and the Tusquitee Mountains dominate the scenery. An overwhelming network of ridges, pointed but gentle mountaintops, and steep valleys, ...

 The Saura Mountains are located northwest of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, near the Virginia border, by the Dan river. They are characterized by tall, sheer-sided outcrops of white quartzite dropping off directly from flat ridge tops. Some interesting rock formations can be seen and climbed on. Monadnocks surrounded on all sides by the vast rolling Piedmont, they are landmarks even though they are not especially tall, maxing out around 2500 feet. Hanging Rock State Park is a good place to walk through them. The view northwest looks across miles of Piedmont to the constant wall of the Blue Ridge of Virginia and NC. Higher summits peek out behind it here and there. The major peaks of the Southern Appalachians are too far away to the west and south to be visible, except perhaps for an extraordinarily clear day. The opposite, southeastern view is less interesting but in a way more impressive. Low, gently rolling terrain, more forested than cultivated, stretches off to the nearly flat...

The Catskill Escarpment rises behind the historic stone buildings and hotels of the Hudson Valley. Looking west from the Howard Johnson outside of Saugerties Many of the places I hiked during my youth have come to seem small to me. The Catskill Escarpment on the other hand still provides a challenge, and a thrill, in its slightly depressing Upstate New York way. I first glimpsed it from across the Hudson as a child, riding along the Taconic Parkway, at dusk. A fading glow in the western sky behind it accented the ridge line, a massive landform that dwarfed the scattered human-made lights in the valley in front of it.  The sense of unqualified awe that I felt has diminished some since I've had the privilege of comparing the Catskills with the Rocky Mountains and the Andes, but the escarpment still has the capacity for adult-sized adventure. Running down its edge on a steep trail, the Hudson Valley directly below you, and watching the low horizon across the river rise rapidly in your...

Composing music has given me one of the greatest pleasures I’ve known. Not the writing itself, but the listening to people playing it, or more specifically knowing that something I wrote has affected the listeners, I’ve found to be an intense and almost unseemly feeling of aggrandizement. Many people have had the fun moment of telling a joke to a room full of people and having them laugh heartily. Hearing one’s own music performed is like this but moreso. A composer can really put a lot of themselves into a piece of music, and ideally can tap into some realm of abstract beauty, and to have those depths dredged up from one’s own self to be recognized by others is a more serious thrill than any joke or funny story I can think of. There are many different ways musicians like myself enjoy making music, and the the joy that I find in all of them seems related, but only distantly so. To play live, improvisational or quasi-improvizational music and watch people dance to it is great, but in so...

 Much of eastern North America consists of landforms characterized by steep sides and flat or rolling tops. The Allegheny Plateau is a particualrly large-scale example: a whole ocean's worth of seafloor sediments uplifted, but still mostly flat, and now dissected by streams. Even in our biggest Eastern mountains from Blue Ridge to the White Mountains, the steepest and most mountainous terrain is on the sides, more recent erosional surfaces, while closer to the top becomes broader and flatter. A hiker can climb steeply past cliffs and waterfalls only to reach hotels and campgrounds at the higher elevations. A huge but subtle instance is the Piedmont. Hardly mountainous at all, it is underlain by metamorphic rock formed during mountain building at an earlier era of the earth's history. Although worn down, the bedrock is still erosion-resistant. The border between the coastal plain and the Piedmont is marked by the "fall-line" of industrial water power fame. Looking at a...

The Highlands region of New Jersey and New York becomes sharply defined along its northwestern boundary, where slopes descend to the the sedimentary basin that supports the cities of Newburgh and Beacon, apple orchards, and sprawl. Glacially scoured, bare bedrocks hilltops along the Highlands' northwestern edge have great views of the Hudson Valley, the Shawangunk Mountains and the Catskills beyond. Public hiking access to such spots includes the Appalachian Trail through Dutchess County, Hudson Highlands State Park, Storm King State Park and Black Rock Forest. This view as I've seen it at different points in my life has had many meanings for me. Starting to explore the Highlands region as a kid with my dad, from our home well to the south in the Piedmont of NJ, it was a look beyond the limits of the world we could reach -- the radius of an hour or two of driving. For many years in my 20s as I've tried to set out on my own, these mountains were the objects of my desire for ...