Scott Ordway

PREMIERE

Commissioned by the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival

Premiere: August 2016 at the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival

MEDIA

NOTE

Townland is the second installment of Mare Vitalis, a three-part cycle of independent solo and chamber works, each inspired in a different way by the profound physical, cultural, and spiritual lives of the sea.

Scored for piano quintet, Townland was inspired by an August 2015 visit to the seaside town of Newburyport, Massachussets. At the suggestion of David Yang, Artistic Director of the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival, I visited eight locations in the town and surrounding area at carefully specified times of day, including a particularly memorable sunrise at the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge on Plum Island. These points of both civic interest and natural beauty, taken together, gave a highly specific impression of a human place, its relationship to the world, and its situation by the sea.

It was from this impression, and a feeling of connection that emerged for me between this New England town, my coastal childhood home of Santa Cruz, California, and, indeed, all small towns by the sea, that I was able to create Townland.

As in the other works of the cycle, the predominant affect of Townland is one of simplicity and ease. The sustained meditation upon a series of related places—at specific times of day and a specific time of year—could only bring me into closer contact with the elusive ideal that we can all find for ourselves a home in the world.

The work, which unfolds in the course of approximately 15 minutes, is not developmental in the traditional sense. Instead, an unadorned phrase in the lower strings gently expands and contracts, harmonized by slowly rising tones in the violins and punctuated by occasional interjections from the piano that are inspired by the sound—for me, a nostalgic one—of wind chimes. These minimal materials fill more sonic space as the work unfolds, but ultimately come to rest in the place where they began.

Inspired by the impactfullness of place, and the beauty of a place, Townland is a quiet celebration of the peaceful stillness of being somewhere.