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The Sound of a Going in the Tops of the Mulberry Trees

from ORDO by Philip Blackburn

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about

The Sound of a Going in the Tops of the Mulberry Trees ties together strands of my interests in site-specific works and coded soundscapes. It is a fantasy on the imagined soundworld of the Underground Railroad as it passed through Ohio before the Civil War. For me, it is about our connections to the terrain and to each other, how momentum gathers towards a goal, signs and disappointments, and various meanings of freedom.

One of my ancestors, Charles Cheney, moved to Mt. Pleasant (formerly Mt. Healthy) near Cincinnati in the 1830s on a mission to plant 3000 mulberry trees that would feed silkworms for the family silk business in Connecticut. This was a misguided endeavor as the climate wasn’t suitable and the non-native trees soon died. But while there, he became a prominent Abolitionist and clandestine conductor on the Underground Railroad (aided by the fact that he was also president of the Cincinnati and Hamilton Turnpike Company and could thus ensure safe passage up the line for those coming from the South, escaping slavery).

Traveling by night, sound cues become life-or-death important. What were the sounds along the Underground Railroad? Three encrypted knocks on the window of a safe house, tapping stones to indicate presence, squeals of train brakes, steam engines, owls, hushed voices, even the internal sounds of the saplings that I recorded from inside a mulberry tree trunk. I took audio recordings of many of these and analyzed the waveforms, making detailed transcriptions playable by regular instruments (but mostly unrecognizable). The resulting harmonies sometimes sound tonal but are more related to expanded and shifting noise spectra than to traditional chords. The work is in two sections. In the first, each performer is on their own finding a pathway through the material (tracing a map of the historic escape routes superimposed over a musical score). The second aligns the individuals to the conductor’s beat in a common unified direction.

Gospel hymns make an appearance too after I read that Harriet Tubman would go around singing the spiritual “Promised Land”, changing the tempo according to how safe it was for the escapees to move. Another tune relates to a story where a man shipped himself in a box to a trusted recipient up north. When the box arrived there were bounty hunters nearby and a knock came from inside the crate. The recipient started singing “Hush My Babe, Lie Still and Slumber” to let the person inside know to remain quiet.

Finally — connecting sound to religion, travel, and place — according to the Old Testament Book of Samuel, God reportedly told David to wait for “The sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry trees” before heading to battle to vanquish the Philistines. Waiting for a change in wind conditions is normal procedure in military affairs so it didn’t really require divine guidance – and He confused the word for mulberry with that for quaking aspen, native to that area – but I nevertheless kept the title. The quest for destiny, using clues from the land, continues.

Commissioned by Timothy Beyer for No Exit New Music Ensemble.

credits

from ORDO, released October 21, 2023
NO EXIT New Music Ensemble
Timothy Beyer, artistic director
Sean Gabriel, flute
Gunnar Owen Hirthe, clarinet
Cara Tweed, violin
James Rhodes, viola
Nick Diodore, cello
Robert Kovacs, piano
Luke Rinderknecht, marimba
Philip Blackburn, conductor

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Philip Blackburn Saint Paul, Minnesota

Philip Blackburn was born in Cambridge, England, and studied music there and at the University of Iowa with Kenneth Gaburo. He is a public artist specializing in sound — a composer/environmental sound-artist. Blackburn’s works have been heard in ships’ harbors, state fairs, forests, and coming out of storm sewers, as well as in galleries, parking lots, and on concert stages.

philipblackburn.com ... more

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