Song for a Glacial Boulder

for soprano or tenor voice and saxophone quartet
2002
10 minutes

Naturalist, mountaineer, scientist, writer and activist John Muir (1838-1914) first came to California in 1868 and began to explore the Sierra Nevada. This mountain range and its central jewel, the Yosemite Valley, captivated him and became the focus of decades of exploration and attention. He was the first to propose the theory that glaciation was responsible for carving the topography of the Sierra Nevada, contrary to the belief of the scientific establishment, and the first to confirm the presence of active glaciers in the high country. His passion led him to lobby Congress to declare Yosemite a National Park in 1890, and subsequently to found the Sierra Club.

My First Summer in the Sierra, compiled from his daily journals and published in 1911, recounts his first encounter with the range while working as a shepherd in 1869. Already during this first season of exploration the role of glaciers in the formation of the landscape was to him inescapable. Song for a Glacial Boulder is really a song for discovery, and a song for John Muir.

This work was commissioned by the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music.

8.5×11 PDF score and parts set
$15

All scores are published by

Text:

…only a few hundred yards below our camp the ground is bare grey granite strewn with boulders, large spaces being without a single tree or only a small one here and there anchored in narrow seams and cracks. The boulders, many of them very large, are not in piles or scattered like rubbish among loose crumbling debris as if weathered out of the solid as boulders of disintegration; they mostly occur singly, and are lying on a clean pavement on which the sunshine falls in a glare that contrasts with the shimmer of light and shade we have been accustomed to in the leafy woods. And, strange to say, these boulders lying so still and deserted, with no moving force near them, no boulder carrier anywhere in sight, were nevertheless brought from a distance, as difference in color and composition shows, quarried and carried and laid down here each in its place; nor have they stirred, most of them, through calm and storm since they first arrived. They look lonely here, strangers in a strange land, — huge blocks, angular mountain chips, the largest twenty or thirty feet in diameter, the chips that Nature has made in modeling her landscapes, fashioning the forms of her mountains and valleys. And with what tool were they quarried and carried? On the pavement we find its marks. The most resisting unweathered portion of the surface is scored and striated in a rigidly parallel way, indicating that the region has been overswept by a glacier from the northeastward, grinding down the general mass of the mountains, scoring and polishing, producing a strange, raw, wiped appearance, and dropping whatever boulders it chanced to be carrying at the time it was melted at the close of the Glacial Period. A fine discovery, this.