notes from the kelp

…click to listen:

…about the music

This stuff is deep.

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Readers of this humble bloglet know that I see a lot of awesome things from my desk. Each photo in this post is either of something in front of it, or… on top of it.

Chugging along past the grand Olympic mountains…

Not too long ago, an outside-the-taco-shell-thinking musical blogizen named Greg Sandow invited me to be a guest writer in his neck of the e-woods, and the result, in an essay titled E-ing There, was a vivid description of how I can stay tethered to this desk while also remaining tethered to the outside art world. One power outage, of course, and I’m livin’ large Mozart-style by candlelight, only able to share my music with those within a very limited radius.
I keep score paper and a candle on my piano for just those moments.
And I have my acoustic guitars.
And if it’s a clear night, I have a telescope to entertain my futile search for infinity.
(Which is often how things feel for a composer as s/he flails in the midst of all those little black dots on the music staff).

Happily, cameras don’t need electricity too often; a backup battery is always close at hand, and the relative simplicity of shooting photos, versus running my sometimes daunting, power-dependant high-tech/low-amperage digital recording setup, is welcome.
Besides: I love to capture the power generated by others:

It’s hard to think of this enormous creature as merely a juvenile Bald Eagle. Wow.

The mountains grazed by the morning light, or the soaring eagles, or the breaching orcas…

Wheee!

It’s these moments that boomerang back to me, in the form of all those little black dots that humans read on white pieces of paper and translate into sound.

Foxes are very poor sight-readers.

But the biggest, and most emotional boomerang effect of all, is the kind of thing that happened just last week. One of the commissioners of my oh-so-watery electroacoustic symphony for winds and percussion, IMMERSION, is Yale University. The piece is an anthem to the sea. It’s obvious to anyone looking at all the photos of weird squishy things on this blog, that I’m a wannabe marine biologist. Who, had I made the choice to actually become one, would have probably been a lousy scientist, because I’d always be creatively extrapolating on What Things Are in my quest for a really good story, rather than the [often more] boring truth.
See? It’s a damn good thing I became an artist. We don’t care about truth. Our job is to make everything up.

When the Yale Concert Band gave their premiere performance of IMMERSION last Friday night, conductor and all-around fearless leader Tom Duffy invited me to speak to the audience via Skype. If you click on the essay link above, you’ll see that this is not new territory for me, and it’s certainly something I love to do. Heck, I don’t even have to wear pants:

Mary Bauer conducts a 2012 rehearsal of PAPER CUT at Mount Mansfield Union High School in Jericho, Vermont, as I’m beamed in from my living room on the opposite coast.

After I finished my on-camera introduction of the music, this particular performance went a step further. With the good fortune of a three-hour time difference that had me in bright sunshine while the concert-goers in New Haven’s Woolsey Hall were steeped in evening’s darkness, I turned the concert into a live music video by pivoting my webcam to the sea in front of me. As the music of the first movement, DEPTH, began filling the hall, there on a large screen behind the band was the real-time sight of the waves rolling past my desk.

E-ing there.

These are the same waters that inspired the very music everyone was playing and hearing.
From my desk. To their music desks. Out to the audience. And finally, back to me.
Right where it all began.

A screenshot from my monitor, the lefthand part of which shows the Salish Sea as viewed by me, and by the audience on the east coast, from the perspective of a bassist’s music stand. Clearly, a geo-multimedia first!

The band was being conducted as a Skype session was being conducted. As the hair on the back of my neck was being conducted by the electricity of this powerful confluence. In the middle of nowhere, my music, the sea I love, and I, floated in the center of everywhere.