Pines Long Slept in Sunshine (2009)
for percussion ensemble
by Christopher Adler

Performed by Nief-Norf:
Andy Bliss, Erin Walker Bliss, Omar Carmenates, Kerry O'Brien, and Mike Truesdell

"The pines had long slept in sunshine; they were now awake, and with one accord waved time to the beatings of the storm. The winds swept along the music curves of many a hill and dale, streaming through the pines, cascading over rocks, and blending all their tones and chords in one grand harmony. …

"The longer I gazed out into the storm, the more visible it became. The numerous trains and heaps of cloud-detritus gave it a kind of visible body, which explained many perplexing phenomena and published its motions in plain terms. This cloud-body was rounded out and rendered more visible and complete by the texture of the falling rain-mass. Rain-drops differ in shape and size; therefore, they fall at different velocities, and overtake and clash against one another, producing white mist and spray. They, of course, yield unequal compliance to the force of the wind, which gives rise to a still greater degree of interference and clashing; strong passionate gusts also sweep off clouds of spray from the groves like that torn from wave-tops in a gale. And all these factors of irregularity in the density, color, and general texture of the rain-mass, tend to make the visible body of the storm with all its motions more complete and telling. It is then seen definitely as a river, rushing over bank and brae, bending the pines like weeds, curving this way and that, whirling in immense eddies in hollows and dells, while the main body pours grandly over all like an ocean current above the landscapes that lie hidden at the bottom of the sea."
-- John Muir, Flood-Storm in the Sierra, 1875

This piece is not about the imitation of the sounds of the natural world, but about the capacity of mathematically-inspired constructions to evoke the complexity and richness of forms in the natural world. The piece begins with an almost didactic demonstration of this principle, as the random excitations of wind chimes are played simultaneously with a gentle peal of gongs rigorously derived from the polyphonic application of the cyclic decomposition of a single permutation to multiple musical parameters.

Everything in this piece is either generated by, or subjected to transformation by, one of a family of permutations of the two-octave (24-note) scale. Complex structures emerge as the result of the interference of multiple simultaneous applications of this action of generation or transformation. In the latter half of the piece, large-scale structures are derived from the logarithmic spiral (underlying the geometry of the conch shell and pine cone, for example) and the Fibonacci series.
-- Christopher Adler

Pines Long Slept in Sunshine was commissioned by:
James Campbell, University of Kentucky
Robin Engelman, Toronto, Canada
Scott Herring, University of South Carolina
Eric Hollenbeck, Colorado State University
Aiyun Huang, McGill University
Frank Kumor, Kutztown University
Morris Palter, University of Alaska Fairbanks
J. B. Smith, Arizona State University
Third Coast Percussion, Chicago, Illinois
Eric Willie, Tennessee Tech University