Nevada’s co-state tree, the bristlecone pine, inspired—and even helped compose—a piece of classical music.
“The Sacrifice of Prometheus,” a classical-music epic by 2023 Great Basin National Park artist-in-residence Marko Bajzer, will make its world debut at the Reno Philharmonic’s performances on Saturday and Sunday, March 22 and 23. The piece is a musical exploration of Great Basin National Park’s species and sights, which inspired melodies, tempos and key changes. A large portion of the piece is dedicated to the bristlecone pine—and some of the bristlecones even created melodies.
During a recent phone interview with Bajzer, he talked about how he fell in love with national parks.
“I grew up in Minnesota, and my parents were from Croatia, so we only did the whole ‘road trip to the national park’ type of thing once in my childhood, because we spent a lot of time, energy and money going back to Croatia to visit family,” Bajzer said. “I was always really involved in music, went to music school, and ended up in San Francisco. In 2017, I was bequeathed my mom’s old car—which is this 2006 Toyota Matrix that I still have—but in order to get it, I had to do this convoluted exchange where I flew to Omaha, Neb.; picked up my brother-in-law’s parents’ old car; drove that to Washington, D.C.; swapped that out for my mom’s old car; and drove that all the way back to San Francisco. I was like, ‘Let’s make a trip out of it.’
“I stopped at several national parks, and just the sense of space, and nature, and being alone in the outdoors was really eye-opening, and just set my life on a very different course. It made me think of and realize three things that most people don’t often experience much of these days: silence, darkness and solitude. When you’re on your own for two weeks driving across the country, you get a lot of that. … It really was impactful. As soon as I got back to California, I was looking up to see what national parks were nearby, and I have been obsessed with national parks ever since.”
Some parks feature artists-in-residence programs, typically a two-to-four-week experience during which a creative is able to explore a park, and artistically express the ways in which nature inspires them. Artists and national parks have a long and fascinating history.
“In those first surveying expeditions in the West, in northwest Wyoming, the Hayden Expedition in 1871, in addition to all the cooks and hunters and biologists and geologists, they also had a painter and a photographer,” Bajzer said. “Congress bought one of these paintings for $10,000 in 1871, of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, which was in the halls of Congress until the ’50s, and now it’s in a museum somewhere. It was really these paintings and these photographs that inspired the congressmen to establish the world’s first national park.”
Bajzer said he’s always felt moved by musical pieces inspired by the beauty of the outdoors.
“Listening to pieces of music that were written about specific geographic terrains have been some of the most cathartic and emotional and fulfilling experiences of my life,” he said. “Listening to a piece that is literally written about a sunrise, while watching a sunrise, is a really different experience than listening to it just in a concert hall, or at home.”
Bajzer set out to craft a nature-inspired musical opus—a “large symphonic suite where each movement, or each little piece, is inspired by a different national park,” he said. “An orchestra could play one of them, or put two or three together, or play the whole thing, which I’m hoping will be eight to 10 in total. It would be a celebration of, not only nature in America, but also American values. … The idea of the national park was a product of Americans’ experiences, so it really is a celebration of all of those things.”
Bajzer has been an artist-in-residence at Lassen Volcanic, Great Basin, Joshua Tree, and Voyageurs national parks. He explained that the process, although rewarding, is time-consuming.
“From my initial conceptions to the piece—applying for the residency, to getting the residency, to doing the residency, to making contact with an orchestra, to convincing them to plan it on their program, and then for them to actually perform it and get a recording—that all is a four-year process,” he said. “That process … is in different stages for each of these parks. It’s certainly an exercise in delayed gratification, and I’m very excited to be getting to hear what this piece sounds like.”
The piece is named after Prometheus, a nearly 5,000-year-old bristlecone pine that was cut down in 1964.
“The state of Nevada is a blip in its existence,” Bajzer said. “Unfortunately, it was inadvertently cut down in the 1960s, and that is what greatly accelerated efforts to turn the Snake Range into a national park. When I’m thinking about which parks I want to use for this project, I’m thinking about which parks I can tell a story with, especially using sounds from the park.”
Great Basin’s endless night skies are another inspiration for the piece.
“It has some of the darkest night skies in the country, because it is in the middle of nowhere,” Bajzer said. “It has the National Park Service’s only research-grade telescope, which is this really cool little building, and it is really neat. They have a big astronomy festival every September, and astronomy talks several nights a week.”
Bajzer walked me through the narrative of the musical movement.
“Visitors are camping and awakened in the middle of the night, and pop out of their tent to see this amazing night sky, with all these stars in the Milky Way, and meteors and satellites and the kind of wonders of the night sky,” he said. “Then there’s this internal voice in the wind that whispers, beckoning them into the forest. They’re exploring the forest until they get into this grove of ancient bristlecone pines—and if you’ve ever been to a bristlecone grove, they’re these otherworldly places. … Our unnamed protagonist eventually comes across the stump of Prometheus, which is still there. … Once our protagonist gets to this spot, there’s this overwhelming emotion, and then the voice says to them, ‘What have you done to me?’ This voice in the wind was the ghost of Prometheus, so it’s a reflection on conservation.”
“The Sacrifice of Prometheus” explores the ways in which losing one of the oldest known organisms impacted the environment.
“We did learn a lot about the world’s climate through studying Prometheus,” Bajzer said. “… This national park is a product of the sacrifice of Prometheus, which will enable all of the other bristlecone pines to hopefully live even longer than that, assuming climate change doesn’t kill everybody and everything before then. It asks a lot of tough questions, because there are some good things that came from that—but is solving a crisis that we ourselves created something to celebrate? Do we need to destroy part of an environment in order to save it? There are these tough questions that we’re going to keep bumping into as we continue living on this Earth.”
Baizer selected the bass oboe for the voice of Prometheus’ ghost.
“It’s not a very common instrument,” said Bajzer. “… As far as I can tell, this will be the first piece to be performed in the United States that is for solo bass oboe and full orchestra. It has this bizarre and esoteric and inscrutable tone quality that was just perfect for being the ghost of a 5,000-year-old tree.”
Bristlecone pine trees deserve some composition credit, as Bajzer used electrodes to craft melodies from the trees’ currents.
“You can hook up electrodes to plants, and as the plant is photosynthesizing and growing and moving water and nutrients around, the degree to which it’s a conductor of electricity is changing,” he said. “… You can take those changes and then map that onto a wave and turn that into a sound wave, so that’s what I’ve done with some of the bristlecone pines in Great Basin National Park. It gives me pitches and rhythms, which then I turn into sounds. A lot of the musical motifs in the piece arrived from these recordings. I have several hours of bristlecone pine recordings … and I picked out a dozen or so little excerpts from that, and those are what made it into the piece. That technique of using plants to get music from them, in combination with a full orchestra, is the first time that has been done, as far as I know.”
Bajzer said he hopes “The Sacrifice of Prometheus” will help create connections.
“For people in rural Nevada to hear music about and to see this large work of art about their backyard and their home is really special,” Bajzer said. “A big part of the point of this is to connect orchestras and parks and communities in a way that is a win-win-win for everybody involved.”
“The Sacrifice of Prometheus” will be performed, with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat, op. 73 “Emperor,” and Ottorino Respighi’s “Pines of Rome,” at 7:30 p.m., Saturday, March 22; and 4 p.m., Sunday, March 23, at the Pioneer Center for the Performing Arts, 100 S. Virginia St., in Reno. Tickets start at $43.50, with discounts. For tickets or more information, visit renophil.com.
The post Tune from trees: ‘The Sacrifice of Prometheus,’ was inspired by Great Basin National Park—and partially composed by bristlecone pines appeared first on Reno News & Review.