Moonrise in Hernandez
Possible lyrics:
According to Adams, the original capture was on Halloween 1941.
How it looks in daylight 2021:
The video:
The original idea for the song came to me on a weekend outing to the Saganashkee Slough on June 6, 2021. The slough is a small lake in the Palos Forest Preserves southwest of Chicago. "We're goin' to the Saganashkee Slough" was the riff, and when I got home I notated it. It turned out much different, although this version with the meter changes is cool too. Also interesting--given that this ultimately became the "score" for the Ansel Adams photo, there are two dates on it: 11/1/1941 and 6/6/2021.
Thoughts and ideas can sometimes encode the place in which they arose. If you create something from those initial impressions, the location gets encoded in memory, and replays every time you encounter the piece. In the final piece, I’m not recalling New Mexico when I play it, but the much less remarkable Saganashkee. That’s the place that’s recorded in memory because that's where the melody and rhythm idea first came to me. A composer can write an opera set in Rome, and the only encoded memory would be a windowless room in New York, or a street corner where the idea emerged.
The interesting thing about imagination in music is that it displaces the places that you were in. In this case, Hernandez New Mexico displaces (or better, replaces) Palos. Also, I'm doing a kind of "sensory substitution" by adding sound to a photograph.
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