One of the traps I fear falling into, writing this blog, is redundancy. The lure of particular landscapes with their migration and settlement histories tend to have parallels, particularly during the middle to late 19th century. Yet, the individual stories and resulting culture of each...
Read MoreTitle: Composing in the Wilderness Location: Denali National Park / Fairbanks Alaska Link out: Click here Description: For centuries, composers have looked to nature for inspiration. With adventurer-composer Stephen Lias and National Park Service soundscape scientist Davyd Betchkal, I'll spend four days exploring the stunning beauty of Denali’s...
Read MoreTitle: Artist in Residence Location: Homestead National Monument Link out: Click here Description: As a composer in residence I will interpret the park’s many cultural and natural resources through sound, focusing on the natural environment, westward expansion and the impact of social change. Start Date: 2012-05-07 End Date: 2012-05-26...
Read MoreOn my journey through the south, I stopped for a few days in Alabama - the epicenter of Civil Rights - in an effort to understand its history, progress and current culture. One thing I’ve learned in doing these blogs is that a person living...
Read MoreAsheville North Carolina lies only 85 miles northeast of the Folk Pottery Museum in Sautee, Georgia, so I detoured for a couple of days to further explore if the landscape, shaped the culture of Southeastern Appalachians similarly or differently than the mountains of West Virginia...
Read More“Georgia” conjures up a diverse array of images: the languid coast, southern charm, the Civil War, a bustling city with a vibrant arts scene, and the Appalachians. Rare are the places whose cultural threads are unbroken and retied by history’s revisionists. Georgia’s culture seems, in...
Read MoreSometimes the landscape doesn’t appear to have shaped its culture in any way whatsoever. Durham North Carolina is known as the anchor of the Research Triangle – an area twice the size of Rhode Island and renowned for innovative excellence in medicine, new technologies, education,...
Read MoreThe history of coastal North Carolina has been “shaped by the push and pull of the sea”.[*] Native Americans have occupied the Carolinas for roughly 12,000 years. Abundance brought them here and about 2500 years ago, they developed permanent settlements morphing into an agrarian society...
Read MoreIt is late fall, and the opportunity to explore the Carolinas presents itself. I’d visited the South Carolina coast before, but I wanted to see it with new eyes. Landscape is “a complex repository of society and archive of tangible evidence about our character and...
Read MoreIn my blog, 50@50, I explore how the landscape creates and/or contributes to the culture of Place. Certainly, examples can be shown that people have manipulated the land and altered its appearance and ecosystem, emptied its cavities – all to satisfy hunger, fulfill dreams, and...
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