The wine-dark sea IV (2014)

guitar, harpsichord
14 min.

The Mediterranean looms large in my family history and genealogy. Learning the mythology of Greece and Turkey as a child through books and bedtime stories, I came to associate this body of water with mystery, no small amount of adventure and, despite my strong physical and psychological attachment to the North, a distant, muted sense of ultimate home. As I draw primarily on landscape for creative impetus, during a trip to the region in 2007, I expected to find in the lands of my ancestors a potent new source of ideas.

Although the vistas were arresting and beautiful, they did not resonate in me on a deep level. What I – a northerner by more than birth and temperament, it would seem – was allowed to carry away from that trip were merely fond recollections of a foreign place, profoundly “other” from my experience: the iconic, archetypal “Mother Sea” and its numberless shades of blue, the quality of the sunlight, the smell of flowers and herbs in the air. These are the impressions informing The wine-dark sea, a dreamlike postcard written after the fact, through a haze of memory. I could add to this a feeling of blissful honeymoon detachment and, in the choice of early instruments, a sense of the contemporary overlaying a deeper antiquity.

The wine-dark sea IV was arranged in collaboration with Rody van Gemert and Assi Karttunen, who gave the premiere at the Viitasaari Time of Music festival in 2014.