Monroe Golden

Alabama Places

Innova 680

Alabama Places is a set of twelve duets for piano and microtonal keyboard, the fruit of an introspective four-year journey. As the title implies, each work is somehow connected to a place – some with strong personal ties, others recently discovered yet no less inspiring. If the choice of represented place is serendipitous, the microtonal structure is completely preconceived. The pieces serve as studies in the tradition of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, but in overtone-based harmony rather than key relationships. The keyboard is detuned by an interval between 4 and 48 cents, in 4-cent increments, for each of the twelve pieces. Thus, the entire set explores twelve different 24-note scales made up of two asymmetrical 12-note equal-tempered scales. Available pitches at a given moment correspond to overtone relationships from fundamental frequencies that also shift in 4-cent increments.

Monroe Golden is a composer from rural Alabama whose works often explore microtonal systems. Critics have called his music "delightfully disorienting" and "lovely, sumptuous, yet arcane." Golden has actively encouraged and promoted the innovative arts in his community, where he has presided over several arts organizations and directed festivals and performance series. He graduated from the University of Montevallo and earned a doctorate in Music Composition from the University of Illinois. His first CD, A Still Subtler Spirit, is published by Living Artist Recordings.

Ellen Tweiten was pianist for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra for 17 years. She holds BM and MM degrees in Piano from the University of Michigan, where she studied with Charles Fisher. At Peabody, she did post-graduate work with Leon Fleisher. She has appeared throughout the USA as a distinguished recitalist, including premiere performances of new works. Tweiten is active as a teacher of piano at Birmingham-Southern College, and has also taught in the music schools of Concordia College and the University of Texas. She is an award winning trainer and jump-rider of thoroughbred horses.

Kurt Carpenter is a freelance composer, conductor, pianist, painter, and writer. He has received commissions from and performed as a soloist with numerous American symphony orchestras. He was co-founder and director of the Twice Festival. Carpenter was a recipient of the Koussevitsky Prize, and was also awarded a major grant to create his cantata, Michigum, for the State of Michigan's Sesquicentennial. In 2005, in Paris, on the prestigious Les Arts George V concert series at the American Cathedral, Carpenter played a solo piano recital comprised of eight works by Alabama composers.

Linda Frost is a writer, editor, English professor, native Ohioian, and wife to a former Pell City resident, writer and editor Russell Helms. The Pell City Poems, the cycle from which the pieces that appear in this track have been taken, investigate the complex ways in which a town comes to mean guilt, fear, joy, and love. Pell City is a place we all live, the place of our imagined histories and our daily lives. It is also near the place where Monroe Golden routinely makes pesto out of a native yarrow that closely resembles Queen Anne's lace.

Iron Road is a trail at Tannehill Ironworks State Park. During the 1800s, it was the road leading from the facility to the stagecoach road to the railroad at Montevallo. While hiking there, I wondered what the sounds of 19th century industry might be like for the people traveling on the path. An imaginary landscape of alternating strokes, realized with piano and keyboard (plucked string patch), formed the basis of the composition. The pitch of the keyboard is lowered by 28 cents.

North Shelby, written for Ellen Tweiten and Kurt Carpenter in honor of their warmly cantankerous relationship, was also influenced by the drive from the south side of Birmingham to their rural home in northern Shelby County. Along U.S. 280 is an ever-growing buffer between city and country: hyper-developed suburban sprawl with surprising remnants of natural beauty. The synthesizer uses a piano patch and is detuned by 40 cents.

The Natchez Trace Parkway follows an ancient footpath that linked the lower Mississippi

River to what is now central Tennessee. Approximately 30 miles of the parkway lies in northwestern Alabama, and the ten sections of the composition loosely corresponding to landmarks (Tennessee River, Buzzard Roost Springs, Bear Creek, etc) on this brief and lovely segment. The keyboard employs a piano patch and is detuned by 8 cents.

2365 Cahaba Road was the address of the original Unitarian Church of Birmingham, which sponsored such progressive activities as civil rights mobilization, arts education, and the adventurous Artburst concert series. By 2003, the congregation had outgrown the building, so the land was sold and the quirky A-frame structure demolished. I wrote this duet following the announcement of that decision, with a mixed sense of loss, inevitability, and celebration. The synthesizer uses a harpsichord patch and is detuned by 16 cents.

Pell City is a small town about thirty miles due east of Birmingham, along I-20 and the most dangerous stretch of roadway in the state. The five musical pieces that form In Pell City are in collaboration with and response to Linda Frost’s The Pell City Poems. Having grown up just beyond the police jurisdiction, the outsider’s point-of-view in Frost’s poems reminded me that the closest places can sometimes be the least familiar. The set may be performed with or without poetry. The synthesizer employs three different timbres (in ABCBA form), and is detuned by 20 cents throughout.

The Mobile-Tensaw Delta is unusual for an estuary: its form is elongated, rather than the typical fanning out on approach to the sea. It begins with the confluence of the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers, encompasses the Mobile and Tensaw rivers, and creeps to the Gulf of Mexico. I composed Tensaw following a canoe trip there. Like the river, it is meant to be slow-moving, lyrical, effortless, and buzzy. The synthesizer is set to a reed organ patch and detuned by 36 cents.

A crescent-shaped area in the middle lower portion of Alabama is called the Black Belt, originally because of its fertile black soil. I wrote Demopolis during travels there, primarily in the town of same name, which was founded by refugee Bonapartists along a limestone-banked bend in the Tombigbee River. The Black Belt region trails the rest of the state in jobs, education, health care, and housing. However, it reminded me of the rural Alabama I knew 30 years ago – a mix of guileless warmth and debilitating inertia. The synthesizer uses a piano patch and is detuned by 48 cents.

Montevallo is a ostensibly quiet town in central Alabama surrounding a vibrant liberal arts university, much like the ABA sections of the namesake composition. I had my first experience with electronic music and the Moog synthesizer while a University of Montevallo student in the early 80s, hence the sawtooth-like timbre of the keyboard and fleeting prog-rock references. The pitch of the keyboard is lowered by 12 cents.

The composition Coosa Basin (acoustic bass patch, detuned by 44 cents) follows the path of the Coosa River, from Weiss Lake on the Alabama/Georgia border to the confluence with the Tallapoosa River at Fort Toulouse near Wetumpka. Change in texture corresponds to change in compass direction, and cadences correspond to hydroelectric dams. The impetus for this work was a recent reading of Rivers of History: Life on the Coosa, Tallapoosa, Cahaba, and Alabama by Harvey H. Jackson.

My first visit to the rural town of Piedmont was as a young teenager, on a mission with my family to save an uncle from drinking himself to death in a flophouse. Adult perspective is considerably more attractive, with Dugger and Cheaha Mountains nearby, and Chief Ladiga Trail (Alabama’s first rails-to-trails project) running through the town. The composition (keyboard set to piano and accordion patches and detuned by 24 cents) is inspired by both the town and the general idea of plateau at the foot of a mountain range.

Scarham Creek is located on Sand Mountain, a region in north Alabama known for mountain music and snake-handling. At two one-lane bridges on a hairpin curve, next to an abandoned red gristmill, Scarham receives the waters from just-merged Shoal and Whippoorwill Creeks, flows fast over boulders to Short Creek, which runs off the mountain into Lake Guntersville. My mother grew up here, and her family operated the mill for a time. On childhood visits, I thought it the wildest place on earth. The keyboard

uses a reed organ patch and is detuned by 32 cents.

Section 16 (Township 17, Range 3 East) is the legal description of sixteen 40-acre blocks in southern St. Clair County that encompass much of the community where I grew up, and where I presently live. This is the final piece composed for the Alabama Places project. The work is in eleven divisions corresponding loosely to the other eleven duets, and is intended to serve as an anchor for the full set of works. The keyboard is tuned flat by only 4 cents for this piece.

Recorded between July and September of 2006 at the University of Montevallo, Davis Music Building, LeBaron Recital Hall.

Recorded, edited, and mastered by Tucker Robison of Robison Productions.

http://www.robisonpro.com

Produced by Monroe Golden.

http://monroegolden.com

Art Direction and Design by Penny Arnold of Golden Penny Studio.

http://goldenpennystudio.com

Cover and tray photos from the Golden family collection.

Thanks to the University of Montevallo Music Department, the Alabama State Council on the Arts, and the Alabama Music Teachers Association for their support at different stages of the project.

Innova Director: Philip Blackburn

Operations Manager: Chris Campbell

Innova is supported by an endowment from the McKnight Foundation.