Composer and Bloomington native, Ryan Ingebritsen, has fond memories of hiking Minnesota's state parks as a kid. His passion for music led him all over the world composing for pretty much every instrument in an orchestra.
With help from the American Composers forum, he was recently awarded a McKnight fellowship for a project that returns him to the woods he loved as a child. Minnesota Public Radio's Marc Sanchez has his story.
[MUSIC PLAYING] MARC SANCHEZ: This is Ryan Ingebrigtsen's improvisational electronic music duo. We can, and we must. When he's not composing or performing, he's the live sound engineer for the contemporary classical music ensemble Eighth Blackbird. He lives in the big, noisy city of Chicago, where-- no surprise here-- he's the sound guy for the city's cultural center.
Now, as you can hear, Ryan's world is really, really noisy. So he decided to clear his head. That's better. OK, so as I was saying, he decided to clear his head in a more peaceful and natural environment.
RYAN INGEBRIGTSEN: I tend to just listen to things as I'm walking, and I, at one point, decided that it would be interesting to put musicians in a park and maybe even use the natural features of the park to create a kind of concert in the park. And over the years, this idea has morphed into what it is now, which is essentially a listening tour in which I'll take a small group of people on a hike in a specific location that I've chosen for its sonic properties, and try to get them to listen to it as music.
MARC SANCHEZ: Ingebrigtsen has chosen banning State Park for his first series of hikes. I met up with him at Whitewater State Park near Winona. He was on a run through of his second hike, which is going to take place later this September. He calls these hikes song paths. This deep listening experience takes some concentration. So he begins each song path by trying to focus everyone's attention on the surrounding environment.
RYAN INGEBRIGTSEN: We'll start with a short meditation to get our minds tuned up, or ears tuned up to listening. So everybody could close their eyes. And just take deep breaths.
MARC SANCHEZ: It doesn't take long to start hearing the trail in a different way.
RYAN INGEBRIGTSEN: Now, focus your attention on the sound of the water.
MARC SANCHEZ: And once mines have been cleared, the maestro begins to conduct.
RYAN INGEBRIGTSEN: And open your eyes. Let's proceed along the path.
MARC SANCHEZ: My ears perk up to a symphony of bird chirps and whooshing wind and a soloist-- water.
RYAN INGEBRIGTSEN: When you move from, say, a waterfall to a place where there are rapids, each of those spaces, each of those points, has its own sound characteristic. And as you move from one to the other, you start to hear this slow transition between those things. And when you're right in between them, you have a chance to hear how those rhythms interact against each other, the rhythms each of them make.
MARC SANCHEZ: The composer in Ingebrigtsen helps him express rhythms and tones, like the shimmering highs made by the rocks tumbling over each other, or just the opposite.
RYAN INGEBRIGTSEN: Oftentimes you'll hear these low gulping swells, where the water really goes underneath a rock or a large rock blocks, the path of the water. And this sound, to me, almost creates a baseline against a scintillating type of percussion sound. And then when you listen to all that very closely and you hear the sound of the birds, you hear that the birds make certain regular rhythms. And you hear that this scintillation makes a certain regular rhythm. And you hear that this bass line makes a certain regular rhythm. So in a way, you're almost in a techno trance moment in that place.
MARC SANCHEZ: The song path takes about an hour, depending on how many movements there are in the performance. And as the music of nature begins to echo off the rocks and grab hold, Ingebrigtsen throws in a bit of a surprise. Along the path, he's added a few musicians as accompanists. At different intervals, Ingebrigtsen conducts these musicians in a series of yelps and noises. There may be a drum banging in the distance or a few sparse notes from a flute. It might be tough to tell what's real and what's being played, but I think that's the point.
RYAN INGEBRIGTSEN: As a composer, I'm trying to make everything work on-- let everything work on many different levels and let my mind go where it wants to go in the hopes that the listener, whether they be someone who's very interested in modern music or someone who's interested in minimalist music or someone that's interested in dance music or someone that's not interested in music at all, could have a really profound experience.
MARC SANCHEZ: Marc Sanchez, Minnesota Public Radio News, Whitewater State Park.
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