Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 10, 1994 TAG: 9410140031
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
He's sitting in the empty Roanoke Civic Center auditorium, waiting to go onstage as Victoria Bond conducts the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra in rehearsing her new work, ``Thinking Like a Mountain.''
Cutler, whose day job is executive director of Virginia's Explore Park, will read the words of naturalist Aldo Leopold when the RSO gives the work its world premiere tonight.
The Roanoke ecologist and professional environmentalist once played trombone in the Richmond Symphony, and the thumb-twiddling time in his seat is giving him plenty of opportunity to remember all the things that can go wrong in a performance. Like the time he led the whole bass section into an entrance two bars early in a performance of Handel's ``Messiah.''
"Relax," somebody says, as Bond leads her players into the work's soaring, pounding finale. "You're gonna do fine."
"Thinking Like a Mountain" is, technically speaking, a melodrama - that is, spoken words set to music. Not many composers have tried their hand at this form, and fewer still have achieved popular success with it.
Nearly the only examples known to the general public are Aaron Copland's ``Lincoln Portrait'' and Ralph Vaughan Williams' ``An Oxford Elegy.''
RSO conductor Bond, however, evidently feels more comfortable with setting the spoken word than many composers, possibly because of her experience in producing movie music.
"The technique of writing dialogue cues in film scores came in really handy in doing this piece," said Bond, who has produced two other pieces with narrator and orchestra.
Judging from Saturday's initial hearing, Victoria Bond set out to create her most popular, accessible work yet in this setting of a kind of ecological epiphany. The piece was commissioned by three other orchestras besides the RSO - including the Shanghai Symphony in China - and Blue Ridge Public Television is producing a documentary about the work that's expected to get national exposure.
If it weren't for Rupert Cutler, the piece likely would sound far different. Cutler introduced Bond to Aldo Leopold, whose essay, "Thinking Like a Mountain," gave its title to the musical work.
"Originally I wanted to write a piece based on the writings of Henry David Thoreau, who was always a role model for me when I was very young, and I met Rupert shortly after he came to Roanoke and told him about this project," Bond said.
``He said, `Have you ever considered Aldo Leopold?' I was completely unfamiliar with Leopold's writing, so he gave me an educational sampling of Leopold's work.''
She disliked the naturalist at first. The first writings she saw concerned Leopold's early days as a hunter, and Bond says she has always been ``violently opposed'' to hunting.
``Aldo Leopold's life was an evolution in attitude toward nature. He began with the traditional view that some animals are good and some animals are bad, like wolves,'' said Cutler.
Leopold, according to Cutler, began to realize that if he thought ``like a mountain,'' he would see that wolves were as necessary to the natural economy of the wilderness as deer. After thoughtlessly blasting away at an old mother wolf and her cubs, Leopold experienced a moment of clarity in which his old attitude toward nature died.
In words that Cutler will speak tonight, ``We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes - something known only to her and the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sense that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.''
Cutler was involved intimately with wolves long before he was chosen by Bond to narrate her piece. Explore Park is cooperating with Mill Mountain Zoo in a red wolf restoration effort, with zoo officials raising wolf pups on Explore Park land. There are five wolf pups at Explore; they will be released in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
In "Thinking Like a Mountain," Bond says, she set out to produce a "musical portrait of the mountain. There are many different tempi going on simultaneously: that of the rocks, the trees, the animals and the insects."
The tempo of the rocks is that of unimaginably long geological ages. Trees have cycles of decades and centuries, animals of years and decades and insects of months or even hours. The various rates at which the mountain and its wildlife exist help to unify the work.
The Shanghai Symphony attached some strings to its part of the commission: the piece had to incorporate something identifiably Chinese in its creation. Bond chose a rising four-note motif from a Chinese melody known as ``A Thousand Birds Worshiping the Phoenix.''
In one of those ironies of art, it's this short melodic fragment that sounds utterly and characteristically American, as American as mountains against the Wyoming sky.
After waiting for 52 minutes, Cutler gets the call to go onstage. Over hushed strings, the four-note melodic cell is heard first on the deep alto flute, then moves from section to section in varying tempi.
Cutler gets his cue from Bond and begins: ``There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot ... For us in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech ... ''
``A little slower, a little slower,'' Bond says to Cutler without dropping a beat. At the end of his second section of narration she says, ``That was perfect.''
Cutler's voice booms in the huge, nearly empty room. He seems to relax visibly as the piece continues, the massive, open-air-sounding chords redolent of the American West. He sounds pretty good.
``A little like Earl Hamner in `The Waltons,''' says one listener.
"Thinking Like a Mountain" gets its world premiere tonight at the Roanoke Civic Center in the inaugural concert of Victoria Bond's final season with the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra. Curtain time is 8 p.m. Seats still are available.
by CNB