Carolyn Yarnell

Yosemite and the Range of Light, Book I

The Gold Country

[13'50"]

"A tribute to the Sierra Nevada where the composer grew up. . .
organic, craggy . . . serenely chaotic"

J. Dalton

 

 

Scored for three flutes, piccolo, three oboes, English horn, three clarinets, two bassoons, contra bassoon, four horns, three trumpets, flugel horn, two tenor trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, three percussionists, piano, harp, celesta (optional), and strings. “The Gold Country” is commissioned by The National Symphony league and Meet the Composer for Albany Symphony Orchestra commemorating their 75th anniversary with the theme “American Memories, American Dreams.”

“The Gold Country” (completed Feb. 14, 2006) is the opening movement in a multi-movement work-in-progress entitled “Yosemite, and the Range of light…”  As part of the Albany Symphony Orchestra’s “American Memories, American Dreams" project, I chose to write about the environment of my childhood, and of an aspect of American heritage extending thousands of years before me.  I’ve had the opportunity to visit magnificent places and natural wonders, have traveled to foreign cities and countries, and even lived there, but still have not found a place more beautiful or amazing than where I was raised, the Sierra Nevada. During the Gold Rush, people came from everywhere in search of their treasure.  John Muir, however, believed that nature was a primary source revealing the character of God and that the Sierra Nevada was sacred ground, as did the early inhabitants.
As a landscape is a place unto itself, so is music an art unto itself, and in general, I prefer to let music speak for itself, however, I would like to quote John Muir, the Scottish-American environmentalist, naturalist, explorer, writer, inventor, engineer, geologist, and founder of the Sierra Club, as he described so eloquently the Gold Country and the Sierra Nevada:

‘Looking eastward from the summit of Pacheco Pass one shining morning, a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still appears as the most beautiful I have ever beheld. At my feet lay the Great Central Valley of California, level and flowery, like a lake of pure sunshine, forty or fifty miles wide, five hundred miles long, one rich furred garden of yellow Compositae. And from the eastern boundary of this vast golden flower-bed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, and so gloriously colored and so radiant, it seemed not clothed with light but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city.... Then it seemed to me that the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems above all others the Range of Light.’

The Mountains of California, John Muir, 1894

In this music’s geography, ‘The Gold Country’ begins at a distance, in the foothills, and gradually makes it’s way through the peaks and valleys. 

 

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