I feel a special attachment to Lulu City, since I hiked there with Brian the day he recorded the river sounds. Lulu City is in Rocky Mountain National Park, at around 10,000 feet, way up the Colorado River. It's a beautiful spot. I sat by the river and read a book while Brian poked around, drew a map and looked for artifacts. (Full disclosure: almost nothing is left of Lulu City. We found an old pail, and there are a few foundations still visible. But really. Not much.)
I think the wild cross-rhythms of Terlingua Meditations will sound more satisfying with the addition of the drumset holding the meter. I'm glad they're playing it in the springtime, too: May is such a special time of year for me, this being about the sixth year in a row that I've headed west right about now. The two trips that inspired the piece were both in the spring of 2008.
I'll once again provide the Peter Garland quotation that serves as the piece's epigraph. I had actually named my movements (Stasis and Action) a month and a half before I read this passage, but when I saw Garland's words, it was a stunner. It's as though he was on the same trip to the west Texas desert and had heard the piece already. The whole thing is right here:
"The lure of traveling: its greatest magic is in the chance encounter, the road taken, strangers met, views...The surrealist writers in the 1920's walked at random in Paris and its environs in search of the marvelous encounter. And this kind of traveling is certainly similar--the call to throw away the maps and lose oneself...In the quiet hours of driving, in hiking silently through deserts, one's mind works--absorbing views, landmarks, memories, charting past correlations. Traveling as meditation/action combined--the endless unraveling of pavement, the limitless visual scroll of scenery, and an unremitting waking dialogue and waking dream..." (PG, Americas)
* P.S. There is now a beautiful recording out of Garland's String Quartets no. 1 and 2 played by Apartment House.
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