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Tallgrass Canticle

Variously described as found music, ambient music, weirdbient music or noise, the work of Gurdonark is different things to different people, but his skill lies in his ability to create a mood or a feeling that transports the listener to an entirely new place. "Tallgrass Canticle" uses the metaphors of prairie and praise to suggest the inward liberation of metaphoric endless fields. The term "canticle", a synonym, among other things, for "hymn", connotes here less a literal religious song than the sense of life and presence embedded in the fields. The religion, if that is the term, is in the seas of grass. Where the casual viewer might find only a landscape of green, the discerning searcher hears the songs of meadowlarks who nest among the grasses and see the kestrel's swift descent among the leaping grasshoppers. As one observer said in the 19th Century:

"Soul melting scenery that was about me! A place where the mind could think volumes; but the tongue must be silent that would speak, and the hand palsied that would write. A place where a Divine would confess that he never had fancied Paradise—where the painter's palette would lose its beautiful tints—the blood-stirring notes of eloquence would die in their utterance—and even the soft tones of sweet music would scarcely preserve a spark to light the soul again that had passed this sweet delirium.

I mean the prairie, whose enameled plains that lie beneath me, in distance soften into sweetness, like an essence; whose thousand velvet covered hills, (surely never formed by chance, but grouped in one of Nature's sportive moods)—tossing and leaping down with steep or graceful declivities to the river's edge, as if to grace its pictured shores, and make it "a thing to look upon."
--George Catlin

Gurdonark lives twenty five miles north of Dallas, in what is termed a "prairie transition zone", because the woodlands to the east complete their transition to the prairies to the west in his home area of Collin County.

Collin County serves as a southern border for the blackland prairie, which once covered thousands of miles with tallgrass plants, prairie flowers and wildlife. The ecological disaster which arose from unfettered cultivation of the soil reduced the prairie to isolated pockets, often a pristine hayfield left unfurrowed. Fields of bluestem grass supported a panoply of wildflowers, native birds and small mammals.

This EP does not seek to address the literal prairie, nor the passing of scenic places and spiritual moments. Instead, the six pieces here seek to evoke the prairie within--the sprawling wash of inward fields, and the resonating hymn of presence in eternal life, in its mystery.

The pieces here were all created with software readily available to the casual computer user. The freeware program Anvil Studio, from http://www.anvilstudio.com, supplemented by an inexpensive extension to permit VST plug-in synthesizers to be used with its workings, was used by Gurdonark as the sequencer upon which most of the compositions here were created. The VST plug-in Crystal, the wonderful freeware creation of Glenn Olander, is available for free at http://www.greenoak.com, and served as the voice for "Texas Rat Snake". Gurdonark made ample use of the much-beloved easy-interface sampler Slicer, from http://www.ixi-software.net in order to mold and morph the resulting wave forms. The recording studio programs used here were the reasonably priced Magix Audio Studio 10 and the nearly-free Magix Audio Studio 5, although the works here could easily have been created on Audacity or other freeware softstudios. Gurdonark used the freeware program by Ian Shatwell, "Wave Goodbye", http://www.btinternet.com/~irshatwell/WaveGoodbye/intro.html as a device to convert various wave portions back into MIDI pieces for further restructuring. Gurdonark lives in gratitude, because, among others, gifted software developers make freeware accessible to the creation of a truly sharing culture.

The songs were all composed and performed by Gurdonark, except for "Forgotten Fields", which is a cover of Verian Thomas' "Forgotten" from the NSI EP release "Down". Verian provided the general MIDI setting, and, of course, wrote the melody. Gurdonark reimagined the song, as released here.

The goal is these pieces is to provide small moments of simple delight. When Gurdonark stands on a small hill at Park Hill Prairie and looks down at a field of wildflowers, he sees an expanse of grass and wildflower. If these pieces give the barest hint of that sense of wonder, then this canticle shall have served its purpose as an indirect, and wordless, hymn of joy.

The songs are:



Endless Fields Of Grass has been downloaded 2744 times
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Mint Marigold has been downloaded 2653 times
Forgotten Fields has been downloaded 3198 times

Tallgrass Canticle

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Front Cover Photograph by Pfly, rear cover Photograph by Jeff Fennell both pursuant to Creative Commons license.

Also Available by Gurdonark

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.