Ghost Ensemble: Margaret Lancaster, flute; Sky Macklay, oboe; Ben Richter, accordion; Chris Nappi, percussion; Lucia Helen Stavros, harp; Martine Thomas, viola; Tyler J. Borden, violoncello; James Ilgenfritz, contrabass; Kyle Motl, contrabass; Carl Bettendorf, conductor
Rewild is an effort to make visceral the relationship between our own lives and the manifold periodicities of deep time. Inspired by the perspectives and timescales of nonhuman beings and distant orders of magnitude in the universe of life, Rewild seeks new strata in musical parameters, exploring the uncanny zones at which pitch becomes rhythm, harmonic interval becomes beating rate, and timbres morph over time. Like a giant body or ecosystem slowly breathing, Rewild’s constantly transforming sound-world orients temporal perception toward global listening. By offering an aural metaphor for the interacting gradual processes of natural and ecological systems, Rewild aims to auralize the vast and infinitesimal timescales we do not experience in everyday life. -- Ben Richter
Rewild (2022) is not meant to be heard as a literal replication of some idealized arboreal setting, but rather a gathering of discrete yet interconnected elements functioning together in balance for a long, slow span of time, suggesting multiple layered and interacting timescales. Put more simply, the music isn’t meant to sound like a forest, but instead to evoke to a listener the depth, breadth, and interdependence of a wild ecosystem’s very being, as well the amount of time such actions take to evolve—and, perhaps, how fragile and precarious the system actually is.
Just as the natural processes of ecology and evolution that inspired Ben Richter (b. 1986) are too slow, spacious, and complex to command most human attention, so, too, does the resulting music exist in a space that might be imperceptible, unless listeners made a concerted effort to listen deeply and hear differently. As in the natural world, that attention is rewarded with the apprehension of something uncanny and marvelous.
* * *
“This gorgeous longform work ... is concerned with human efforts to make repairs to ecosystems that we ourselves have threatened. But the most arresting thing about Rewild is the way it challenges our perception of time. Richter is inspired by a kind of earthly development that’s impossible for humans to truly comprehend ... but I’ve preferred simply getting lost in the serene, slowly unfolding shapes articulated by the ensemble. Individual lines evoke a rhapsodic instability, lingering, unspooling and evading time while being flush with uncertainty. Richter assembles these elements with meticulous care, the confluence of the various elements alternately between dizzying, hypnotic, and ominous. The performance begins and ends with almost imperceptible rustles, suggesting an eternal process that we’ve just dropped into for 50 minutes.” — Peter Margasak, Bandcamp Daily
