A Native Hill
Gavin Bryars (b. 1943)

A Native Hill is a gift of the composer to The Crossing, Donald Nally, and Tony Creamer.

a note from the composer...

Being with The Crossing

Looking back through my correspondence I was surprised to find that it is now seven years since Donald was first in touch with me, following an introduction from Tony Creamer, about working with The Crossing on a new piece. I hadn't realised until I trawled through emails that even in December 2011, the ideas for our first work were very clear in his mind. He already knew he wanted us to work with the saxophone quartet Prism, and it was only a few months later hat he pointed me in the direction of Thomas Traherne for our text. I only wish I had that focus and clarity of purpose...

Over the following weeks and months I listened to recordings of the choir and eventually visited them in Philadelphia. Writing The Fifth Century was a pleasure from beginning to end, and spending time with them during the period of the premiere and recording was a revelation: all the qualities that I had found in the recordings were there in abundance but the impact of being in the same space was very powerful and their combined voices far more beautiful and refined. Last year we were together at the Big Ears Festival in Tennessee, and then later for a week of music making at Big Sky, Montana, where I got to know more of the choir individually, spent time in their company, and our friendships became closer. I even played the harmonium part in my choral piece On Photography and there can't be many composers who have on their CV that they played with The Crossing, the Hilliard Ensemble, and the Latvian Radio Choir...

It was at Big Ears that I mentioned quite casually to Tony Creamer that I had enjoyed working with the choir so much that I'd like to offer the gift of a new piece: not a commission but an expression of friendship and gratitude. Donald contacted me within what seemed like a few minutes... This time I researched the text myself (though speaking regularly with Donald) - and for me this is often the longest part of the compositional process with vocal works. I had come across the work of Wendell Berry in a review of his poetry and I obtained many collections of his writings, both poetry and prose. The reviewer had compared him to Thoreau (I spent last summer reading Thoreau each morning after breakfast). And while there is something of the older writer's understated political and social observation, Berry's themes have a powerful contemporary relevance that go beyond what might be read as pastoral at first sight. I have taken texts for what will eventually be a twelve-part work from an early essay A Native Hill (1968) where detailed descriptions of the minutiae of his rural existence (he has lived and worked on a farm in Kentucky for over 50 years) reveal themselves as profound meditations on how life should be lived. Simple natural events reveal themselves as metaphors for universal truths. Curiously, and without contrivance, his visionary prose contains many of the insights that we find in Traherne, with an equivalently profound metaphysical, social and even political force.

Gavin Bryars
Billesdon, December 2018

I. But the sense of the past

But the sense of the past also gives a deep richness and resonance to nearly everything I see here. It is partly the sense that what I now see, other men that I have known once saw, and partly that this knowledge provides an imaginative access to what I do not know. I think of the country as a kind of palimpsest scrawled over with the coming and goings of people, the erasure of time already in process even as the marks of passage are put down. There are the ritual marks of neighbourhood - roads, paths between houses. There are the domestic paths from house to barns and outbuildings and gardens, farm roads through the pasture gates. There are the wanderings of hunters and searchers after lost stock, and the speculative or meditative or inquisitive 'walking around' of farmers on wet days and Sundays. There is the spiralling geometry of the round of implements in fields and the passing and returning, scratches of ploughs across croplands. Often these have filled an interval, an opening, between the retreat of the forest from the virgin ground and the forest's return to ground that has been worn out and given up. In the woods here one often finds cairns of stones picked up out of the furrows, gullies left by bad farming, forgotten roads, stone chimneys of houses long rotted away or burned.

II. The Path

The dog runs ahead, prancing and looking back, knowing the way we are about to go. This is a walk well established with us - a route in our minds as well as on the ground. There is a sort of mystery in the establishment of these ways. Anytime one crosses a given stretch of country with some frequency, no matter how wanderingly one begins, the tendency is always toward habit. By the third or fourth trip, without realizing it, one is following a fixed path, going the way one went before. After that, one may still wander, but only by deliberation, and when there is no need to hurry, or when the mind wanders rather than the feet, one returns to the old route. Familiarity has begun. One has made a relationship with the landscape, and the form and the symbol and the enactment of the relationship is the path. These paths of mine are seldom worn on the ground. They are habits of mind, directions and turns. They are as personal as old shoes. My feet are comfortable in them.

III. Sea Level

Underlying this country, nine hundred feet below the highest ridgetops, more than four hundred feet below the surface of the river, is sea level. We seldom think of it here; we are a long way from the coast, and the sea is alien to us. And yet the attraction of sea level dwells in this country as an ideal dwells in a man's mind. All our rains go in search of it and, departing, they have carved the land in a shape that is fluent and falling. The streams branch like vines, and between the branches the land rises steeply and then rounds and gentles into the long narrowing fingers of ridgeland. Near the heads of the streams even the steepest land was not too long ago farmed and kept cleared. But now it has been given up and the woods is returning. The wild is flowing back like a tide. The arable ridgetops reach out above the gathered trees like headlands into the sea, bearing their human burdens of fences and houses and barns, crops and roads.

IV. The Pool

Not far from the beginning of the woods, and set deep in the earth in the bottom of the hollow, is a rock-walled pool not a lot bigger than a bathtub. The wall is still nearly as straight and tight as when it was built. It makes a neatly turned narrow horseshoe, the open end downstream. This is a historical ruin, dug here either to catch and hold the water of the little branch, or to collect the water of a spring whose vein broke to the surface here - it is probably no longer possible to know which. The pool is filled with earth now, and grass grows in it. And the branch bends around it, cut down to the bare rock, a torrent after heavy rain, other times bone dry...

V. The Road

Like the pasture gates, the streams are great collectors of comings and going. The streams go down, and paths always go down besides streams. For a while I walk along an old wagon road that is buried in leaves - a fragment, beginningless and endless as the middle of a sentence on some scrap of papyrus. There is a cedar whose branches reach over this road, and under the branches I find the leavings of two kills of some bird of prey. The most recent is a pile of blue jay feathers. The other has been rained on and is not identifiable. How little we know. How little of this was intended or expected by any man. The road that has become the grave of men's passages has led to the woods.

And I say to myself: Here is your road
without beginning or end, appearing
out of the earth and ending in it, bearing
no load but the hawk's kill, and the leaves
building earth on it, something more
to be borne. Tracks fill with earth
and return to absence. The road was worn
by men bearing earth along it. They have come
to endlessness. In their passing
they could not stay in, trees have risen
and stand still. It is leading to the dark,
to mornings where you are not. Here
is your road, beginningless and endless as God.

—A Native Hill, Wendell Berry (b. 1934), excerpted by the composer