Pines Long Slept in Sunshine

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.
— John Muir, Flood-Storm in the Sierra, 1875

Natural beauty is the trace of the nonidentical in things under the spell of universal identity.
— Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

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.

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
JB Smith, Arizona State University
Third Coast Percussion, Chicago, Illinois
Eric Willie, Tennessee Tech University

The project was led by James Campbell and Kyle Forsthoff, D.M.A. candidate at the University of Kentucky.

8.5×11 PDF score and parts set
$35

All scores are published by 

 (ASCAP) and © Christopher Adler (ASCAP)