During the second intensive set change of the Louisville Orchestra concert themed around “From the Sea,” Teddy Abrams asked the audience if anyone would like to say something about their relationship with rivers, the idea of a river, with water – all of the things he’d asked us to consider before hearing John Luther Adams’ Become River, and what we thought now, having experienced it. It wasn’t rhetorical, and he spent a few moments facing the crowd, hand above his eyes to seek out any raised hands.
It’s not the first time Abrams has asked his audiences to consider the river; he composed a multi-media piece of his own last year titled The Song of the River that envisioned an apocalyptic future where the Ohio rose above its banks and consumed us. He conducted the world premiere of Michael Gordon’s Symphony for Nature as Music Director at the Britt Festival Orchestra, another work that moved the actual position of the musicians relative to the audience to invite deeper consideration of the natural elements it evoked. In Become River, that rearrangement stayed confined to the stage, but when Gordon’s Symphony was played at Crater Lake National Park, the additional musicians surrounded the rim of the crater, and distant pairs would fade from one side of to the other. The LO’s collaboration with My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James, which was released today, is titled The Order of Nature and is described by James as dealing with the absence of hate in nature.
Each track flows seamlessly into another, emphasizing its construction as a song cycle. Abram’s experience writing and conducting for orchestras paired with typically non-orchestral instruments shines here as the orchestra, modern band and chorus layer to create a wondrous, almost surreal atmosphere that gathers momentum as the cycle marches on. The chorus in particular lends an impressive gravity to even the lighter moments.
Occasionally, James’ delivery of the lyrics flattens into uncomfortable triteness, like the closing of “The Human Touch” where his lament “Have we lost the touch that means so much / have we lost the human touch” falls so short it becomes disruptively simple in a way entirely absent from the Nina Simone piano recording it’s a cover of. This is especially apparent in “Set it to Song,” where the lyrics feel underdeveloped and overly simple. It’s consistent with his tone in interviews: “Think about the organic nature of an orchestra. Most people in the orchestra are playing pieces of wood. They’re using nature to create music,” the LEO quoted him as saying. When The Order of Nature is merely ordinary, there is no place for the echoes of a well meaning guy who is so stoned and so concerned about the environment attitude to hide.
But each of these lackluster interludes are succeed by well-metered lines like “Yet death is on demand / and blood is on my hands / if I do nothing” during the call to action in “In Demand” and and the rapid monotonic monologue in “Same Old Lie,” bringing the sincerity of the ecologically conscious message back into alignment with the grandiosity and compositional proficiency.
While the LO’s continued highlighting of contemporary works that use music to explore human relationships with the natural world builds on its history of commissioning living composers, their collaborative commitment makes them a useful signpost pointing toward similar efforts by other musicians and artists asking the same kinds of questions. For the Pine Mountain Sessions, James and Abrams joined other LO collaborators like Ben Sollee and Rachel Grimes along with a host of other Kentucky luminaries like bell hooks, Wendell Berry, and Joan Shelley (whose newest album is titled Like the River Loves the Sea) in a chapel on Harlan County’s Pine Mountain to create an album to raise awareness of and funds for the Kentucky Natural Lands Trust and Pine Mountain Settlement School. Sollee, a cellist who “ditched the van” for some of his touring, is playing at Twigs and Swigs to benefit Trees Louisville next week along with Small Time Napoleon and DOMDI. In September, Berry headlined the Speed Museum’s After Hours monthly celebration in a night that included a fair amount of outdoor-themed activity for an indoor museum. Not too far northeast of Pine Mountain, in Harlan County where so many protest songs were written and sung, Appalshop is celebrating its 50th anniversary of documenting and amplifying rural Southern voices and stories, right on a bend of the Kentucky River. Along Beargrass Creek, Bernheim Forest is defending its commitment to art, learning, and conservation as LG&E moves to build a pipeline through its lands at the same time as Beargrass Thunder is promoting backyard biodiversity and building their own community-run alley gallery.
This collaboration is not just set against this backdrop – these are some of the threads of the fabric in which The Order of Nature is woven. It’s tempting, maybe, to call a spectacular performance of unusually mundane character out of the ordinary. Maybe in some other town, in some other state – but not here. The significance of this album is not limited to either the local or abstract national context, but is best understood in relation to all the parts it seeks to bring together. It could not exist without the continuous work of Kentucky musicians and advocates over more than a century, a body of work only minimally excerpted above and that only continues to grow and evolve.
As an organization that has somewhat improbably become a loud and vibrant force in the landscapes of Louisville arts and American orchestras, the LO has taken up its legacies of questioning what it means to foster new American music and commitment to the communities it serves seriously. (The trend of LO-related documentaries including one about Abrams’ first year at the LO, the one about Symphony of Nature, and the one on The Order of Nature speak to more than a few people’s occupation with the present that will become the past, too.) It is a lazy mistake to claim that because it is vibrant and loud that it is the most important or leading voice, especially when the LO itself is so enthusiastic about critically engaging with the space it occupies as part of a history and the wider present.
It’s just as lazy to dismiss Kentucky from ecological activism because of coal’s legacy when union organizers died fighting for miners’ better working conditions throughout the 20th century and miners are suffering today from a black lung epidemic, or from lack of clean drinking water, or pollution that harms more Black Louisvillians than white. If I have any issue with this album, it’s that I prefer the specific and referential discussion of space and relationship to nature exemplified by Rachel Grimes’ The Way Forth, a folk opera collaboration with the LO which premiered the following year, to the abstracted, generalized pontificating of The Order of Nature.
Still: I was there the night this performance was recorded. When it was over, I stood and clapped and would’ve whistled if I could, so I just hooted and hollered. A genuine message that seeks to give voice to the weight of the past and the weight of the present by integrating many intricately interwoven parts, even when that message is imperfectly expressed, is capable of inspiring awe and wonder if it’s spoken it in unison.
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When Teddy asked what our answers were to his earlier question about our relationship with the river, I almost raised my hand. I was thinking of algae blooms that had just cancelled part of the Ironman competition. During Garth Neustader’s Seaborne, I had thought about the fits of coughing that plagues Louisville audiences year-round but had now grown with flu season and fall allergies, and when the scenes shifted from sprawling aerial views to sink just below the surface of the waves, I considered the luxury of being able to breathe. I was thinking, as I often do, the anger and awe I feel every time I drive that curve of highway downtown and find a slant of sunset light has dyed the Ohio River blue-beautiful even though I know it is choked with sewage and pollution and mud.
I said none of that, because I was overwhelmed, and because I was afraid.
May we all be brave enough to set it to song, and may we all remember some songs are best sung together.
the Louisville Renaissance Project 