gretchen jude: divide

Joining John Bischoff, Kevin Corcoran, and Shanna Shordahl to realize Gretchen Jude’s Divide, a performance score exploring peaks of the Great Divide, the Americas’ primary watershed comprised of topographical ridges separating eastward and westward flows.

Gretchen writes

At an elevation of 6720 feet, Western Montana’s Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge (nestled high in the Centennial Valley) is a rare and striking place. Moose, grizzlies, and angus roam free. Peregrine falcons and red-tailed hawks circle to eye me, strange bipedal interloper. At this height, divisive human contentions seem to flatten out, worn away by brutal winters and raucous thaws.

Divide is comprised of three hand-drawn graphic scores that trace silhouettes of mountains that dominated Gretchen’s stay at the Taft-Nicholson Environmental Humanities Center (Lakeview, Montana). Field recordings illustrate the failings of human technology at the fringes of civilization. Instructions to my friends down in the city, at sea level, are an invitation to sound out our differences. To brave the divide.

Expect the concert bass drum.