Displacements

 

Thoughts and ideas can sometimes encode the place in which they arose. If you create something from those initial impressions, the location gets encoded in memory, and replays every time you encounter the piece. 

In the piece Moonrise in Hernandez I’m not recalling New Mexico when I play it, but the much less remarkable Saganashkee Slough in Palos Illinois. That’s the place that’s recorded in memory because that's where the melody and rhythm idea first came to me. 

 

 

A composer can write an opera set in Rome, and the only encoded memory would be a windowless room in New York, or a street corner where the idea emerged. 

The interesting thing about imagination in music is that it displaces the places that you were in. In this case, Hernandez New Mexico displaces (or better, replaces) Palos. Also, I'm doing a kind of "sensory substitution" by composing a score to a photograph.

 

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The approximate location where the image was taken is 36.057186°N 106.116974°W