WINGATE’S LANDSCAPES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Landscapes of Consciousness was written in honor of the 75th birthday of the composer’s mother. The original cello and organ version received its premiere on April 6th, 2008 at Trinity Church in Fort Collins, Colorado, with the composer at the cello and Marcia Yernberg at the organ.

Melodically, the piece makes extensive use of a pair of minor thirds a half-tone apart, also known as set class 4-3 (0134), while harmonically, the dissonant counterpoint is anchored to the depths by blocks of open fifths and fourths creating temporary tonal references.

Rather than asking the pipe organ to be more cello-like, the piece instead challenges the cello to forsake its characteristic lyrical expressiveness for a more organ-like tone of perpetual exhalation. This strategy, combined with the almost constant presence of two contrapuntal voices rendered in complicated double stops, presents formidable technical challenges to the cellist. The final operatic leap to the stratospheric high E-natural is a kind of homage to the composer’s mother, a retired operatic soprano, and longtime admirer of Mado Robin’s spectacular altissimo high C’s.

In its other transcriptional incarnations, Landscapes of Consciousness survives and even flourishes in its new musical costumes, not unlike Pärt’s Fratres or even Barber’s famous and justifiably overplayed Adagio for Strings (from his First String Quartet), whose rebirth as a choral setting of the Agnus Dei was the inspiration for the choral version of Landscapes.

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