from the Boston Globe, August 22
By David Weininger
“Henry David Thoreau was a great musician,” wrote Charles Ives in “Essays Before a Sonata,” his ruminative preface to his “Concord” Sonata. That was so, Ives held, not because of whatever facility Thoreau possessed in conventional music making, but because “he did not have to go to Boston to hear ‘the Symphony.’ The rhythm of his prose, were there nothing else, would determine his value as a composer. He was divinely conscious of the enthusiasm of Nature, the emotion of her rhythms and the harmony of her solitude.”
Oddly for such a dazzling musician of the written word, musical works inspired by Thoreau are rare. The most famous is the fourth movement of the “Concord,” the last of its evocations of New England transcendentalists.
Jonathan Bagg and Laura Gilbert are codirectors of Electric Earth Concerts, which is presenting a multimedia performance shaped by the writings of Henry David Thoreau.
The Electric Earth Concerts series seeks to fill that gap with “Music in Every Sound,” a Thoreau-centric concert Saturday in Peterborough, N.H. Going beyond settings of Thoreau’s words, the multimedia performance aims for the deep interaction between nature and sound that animated his writing.
Jonathan Bagg, codirector of Electric Earth, hopes that listeners will take from the concert “a renewed admiration for the sensibilities of Thoreau and of composers and artists who take from their environment something that motivates them and gives them that kind of enthusiasm for life. I want listeners to have a sense of how the temperaments of Ives and composers of this day are connected by Thoreau’s approach.”
