Composer Christopher Stark teams up with the New York based Unheard-of//Ensemble for Fire Ecologies, an expansive paean to the natural world as it faces crisis. Premiered in an immersive performance on the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, a superfund site that has been the focus of significant preservation efforts, Fire Ecologies has been presented in locations and contexts that underscore its mission to enhance climate awareness.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 49:52 | ||
Fire Ecologies |
|||
| 01 | Scene One: Terra incognita | Scene One: Terra incognita | 14:00 |
| 02 | Scene Two: Jeux d'eau | Scene Two: Jeux d'eau | 7:01 |
| 03 | Scene Three: Louange à l'éternité de Mère Nature | Scene Three: Louange à l'éternité de Mère Nature | 10:11 |
| 04 | Scene Four: Infernal dance | Scene Four: Infernal dance | 7:52 |
| 05 | Scene Five: Dypt inne i barskogen | Scene Five: Dypt inne i barskogen | 5:32 |
| 06 | Scene Six: Marche funèbre | Scene Six: Marche funèbre | 5:16 |
Christopher Stark’s six part Fire Ecologies is a musical homage to the global environment as it faces a perilous future. Written for and performed by New York based Unheard-of//Ensemble, the piece received its premiere in a unique setting, performed on a dock in the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. Presenting Fire Ecologies in outdoor settings, and particularly in locations like the Gowanus that have critical needs with respect to cleanup of toxic materials and pollution, underscores the work’s intent to draw attention to the fragility of our natural landscapes and promote preservation efforts.
Stark was first inspired to write the work after traveling the American West in the summer of 2020 and observing several wildfires ravaging the landscape of California, Montana, Oregon, and Colorado. The influence of nature had been a key component of Stark’s work previously, but the trip catalyzed his sense of urgency to bring climate related topics to the fore in his work. Included in the electronic sounds that accompany Unheard-of’s performance are field recordings from the California wildfires and other locations on his travels. Stark’s expansive score is matched to the vast subject matter; the large scale structural movement of the work happens on a stretched time scale, as the trajectory of climate transformation unfolds in slow motion in human terms, albeit alarmingly fast in light of geological and biological trajectories.
The opening movement, or “scene," Terra incognita, opens with waves of white noise that fill the stereo field with immersive sound. The ensemble emerges with halos of harmony, as individual voices swell in and out of the texture in their respective registers. Subtle pitch bends lend the texture an otherworldly character. As the movement evolves, activated elements such as trills and oscillations animate the sonic mix. The enveloping white noise returns to close the movement, eventually darting around the stereo field punctuated by electronic glitches just before the track’s end.
Jeux d’eau places Unheard-of in a more conventional ensemble role as Stark looks back to Maurice Ravel. The piano plays moto perpetuo arpeggiated figures in dialogue with a pointillistic electronic part. A long sustained melody is supported by swift toggling figures in the clarinet and hairpin gestures in the cello and violin. A forceful groove of repeated unison attacks emerges, with polyrhythms intertwined into the rhythmic fabric before the orchestration gradually thins out to delicate electronics in a free coda that elides into Scene 3.
Louange à l'éternité de Mère Nature hearkens to the ethereal slow movements of Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, reveling in temporal expansion and poignant melodic lines in the cello over pacific, long harmonic pads. At spaced out intervals, the ensemble adds enlivening figuration as a supportive element, and the scene closes with a windswept field recording.
Infernal dance opens with an ominous ticking clock before the ensemble enters with brusque, jagged unison figures. The electronics enter with a syncopated ostinato as the instruments weave an elastic line of brisk fills and pointed motives that reinforce the groove. The driving rhythm breaks for a series of disembodied gong sounds and mournful sighs in the strings before the insistent pulse from the opening returns with increasingly virtuosic, mechanistic variations.
At the opening of Dypt inne i barskogen, we hear the luminescent chorus of crickets before the clarinet enters with a clarion call echoing through the soundscape. The strings play modulated sustains with slight microtonal pitch bends as in Scene 1, painting a constantly shifting, refracted image. Grieg’s Peer Gynt is the source of inspiration for this wooded, forest scene.
Marche funèbre closes the work, a nod to Chopin, opening with the clarinet outlining an harmonic progression and the strings contributing a simple, folkloric melody. A slowed down field recorded sound of a buzz of a high-tension powerline in the Sierra Nevada churns away in the background with a fluttering effect that comes closer and closer to the fore. When the piano joins, it integrates the melody into swooping arpeggio figuration. Scene 6 closes the work with an extended passage of the same powerline, one of the culprits for some of the wildfires in California, closing the piece with a haunting admonition about the inexorable march of technology and progress at the expense of the environment.
– Dan Lippel
Recorded at Big Orange Sheep, Brooklyn
Engineered by Chris Benham
Mixed by Christopher Stark
Mastered by Guy Davie at Electric Mastering, London
Cover photo by Christopher Stark
Graphic Design by Sarah Downen
Ford Fourqurean (clarinet), Matheus Souza (violin), Iva Casian-Lakoš (cello), and Daniel Anastasio (piano) form the core of Unheard-of//Ensemble, a contemporary chamber ensemble dedicated to connecting new music to communities across the United States through the development and performance of adventurous programs, using technology and interactive multimedia. Unheard-of is committed to the idea that new music belongs in every community, and implements this mission through concerts and educational workshops throughout New York, as well as across the United States through touring. Unheard-of’s scope and impact has grown dramatically since forming in 2014, now a nation-wide community across multiple artistic genres. With an approach that is open and welcoming of all voices, Unheard-of strives to be a vehicle for imaginative voices novel and experienced, experimental and traditional, uncomfortable and accessible.
https://www.unheard-ofensemble.com/Christopher Stark (b. 1980, St. Ignatius, MT) is a composer of contemporary classical music deeply rooted in the American West. Having spent his formative years in rural western Montana, his music is always seeking to capture the expansive energy of this quintessential American landscape. Stark, whose music The New York Times has called, "fetching and colorful," has been awarded prizes from the American Academy in Rome, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, Chamber Music America, ASCAP, and the Barlow Endowment. Named a 2017 "Rising Star" by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, his music has been performed by such ensembles as Alarm Will Sound, Los Angeles Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, BIT20 Ensemble, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Momenta Quartet, Unheard-of//Ensemble, No Exit New Music Ensemble, and New Morse Code. In 2012, he was a resident composer at Civitella Ranieri, a fifteenth-century castle in Umbria, Italy, and in June of 2016 he was awarded a residency at Copland House. Recent highlights included performances at the 2016 Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival and at the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of the 2016 NY Phil Biennial. In 2018, he was in residence in Bergen, Norway where he worked with musicians from the Bergen Philharmonic, and in 2020, he was in residence at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy as the Aaron Copland Fellow in Music. His score for the feature-length film, "Novitiate," premiered at Sundance in January of 2017 and was theatrically released by Sony Pictures Classics. His debut CD, Seasonal Music, was released in 2019 on Bridge Records.
http://www.christopher-stark.comIn July 2022, my daughter and I paddled a canoe around the Gowanus Canal as a prelude to our second experience of Fire Ecologies, a multimedia piece composed by Christopher Stark with images by Zlatko Ćosić. Performed “with aplomb” on a floating dock by the estimable Unheard-of//Ensemble, whose 2019 debut I pronounced “fantastic,” the work was a haunting reflection on an American landscape being reshaped by climate change and industrial depredations, which are, after all, interrelated phenomena.
In my review, I remarked, “Combining footage of nature across the country - including the 2020 wildfires - with music that ranges from pensive to mournful to mysterious, Fire Ecologies has gotten richer and more dynamic. A movement called Infernal Dance, with its emphasis on electronics and rhythm, was especially dazzling.”
A mere three years later, you can be dazzled in the comfort of your home, as Unheard-of//Ensemble has released a stunning recording of Stark’s piece, which has only become more shapely and propulsive in the ensuing revisions. Scene Four: Infernal Dance, which so impressed me in 2022, now sets a high bar for electro-acoustic music in 2025, with the band (Ford Fourqurean, clarinet/bass clarinet; Matheus Souza, violin; Iva Casian-Lakoš, cello; and Daniel Anastasio, piano/sampler) moving as one through Stark’s lethally elegant score.
Beginning with fractured phrases that chase after each other, Infernal Dance soon takes on an unstoppable momentum. The blend of strings, clarinet, and electronics takes on a hardened character, leavened only by swirling, swooping lines from the violin and cello. The movement soon takes on a brooding cast, with yearning cello and pulsing electronics. Fourqurean finds an unearthly tone on the clarinet, made only more so by echo effects, while the strings start jabbing at each other, like people arguing over whose turn it is to clean the kitchen. Or the planet. After a spacey reprieve, the dance grows infernal yet again, even approaching a sort of stuttering funk. It ends on an upward glide, leaving the listener on the edge of their seat.
The whole album is fantastic and a wonderful confirmation that what I heard alongside the lapping of the canal against my canoe, was an incredible work of art. While Fire Ecologies more than holds its own as pure music, the team has put together a thought-provoking video for Scene 2: Jeux d’Eau. You can also experience it on the Gowanus like I did in 2022, at the record release party on September 27th, canoe not required.
— Jeremy Shatan, 9.20.2025
Originally a multimedia work, Fire Ecologies is an hour-long live experience commissioned by Chamber Music America for the Unheard-of Ensemble, which consists of clarinetist Ford Forqurean, violinist Matheus Souza, cellist Iva Casian-Lakoš, and pianist Daniel Anastasio. The ensemble premiered the work in 2021 in Brooklyn, New York, and Unheard-of performed a unique release concert coinciding with Climate Week NYC that allowed audience members to immerse themselves in the work by listening from land or from the water.
Fire Ecologies incorporates field recordings from the 2020 California wildfires and natural soundscapes from Stark's travels around the United States. The aim is to spark a conversation about climate change beyond the walls of the concert hall and bring attention to areas that are in need of conservation efforts.
“Nature has always been a central theme in my work because I grew up in western Montana in a very small town at the base of the Rocky Mountains and on the southern shore of a large glacial lake,” wrote Stark. “But in recent years the inspiration I take from nature has become more complicated as climate change has begun to haunt our planet.”
The work is made up of six scenes that evoke contrasting moods, Fire Ecologies also pays homage to previous composers' relationships with the natural environment. “They [the piece's scenes] take their titles from pre-existing, nature-inspired music in an attempt to recontextualize these old pieces through the contemporary lens of global warming,” writes Stark. “For example, the second scene is called Jeux d’eau ( Water Games) after Maurice Ravel, and the fifth scene is called “Dypt inne i barskogen” (“Deep in the Forest”) after Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt.”
— The Violin Channel, 10.01.2025
Quite a number of contemporary composers have focused on environmental concerns, using music to convey a sense of urgency and alarm. Besides being a natural way for composers to express themselves creatively, environmental music overcomes, at least momentarily, the gloomy sense of helplessness that countless people feel. On his personal website Christopher Stark (b. 1980) reveals his deep roots in the American West (he was born in the tiny Montana mountain town of St. Ignatius, located on the Flathead Indian Reservation). Traveling through Western states in 2020, Stark observed raging wildfires in California and elsewhere, including his native Montana. That trip intensified his already strong inclination toward environmental issues and became the seed for Fire Ecologies, a six-movement electroacoustic piece
In isolation, confined to concert halls and other conventional venues, music doesn’t seem to have much impact on global issues as devastating and potentially cataclysmic as climate change, but Stark went a step further with his work. Fire Ecologies debuted on a dock beside the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. It was the first step in a mission. Performing the piece in outdoor settings, particularly sites involved in the cleanup of toxic waste and pollution, “underscores the work’s intent to draw attention to the fragility of our natural landscapes and promote preservation efforts,” to quote New Focus’s program notes.
Originally the piece was commissioned as a multimedia experience with music and images. The ideal would be an immersive outdoor performance—one reviewer speaks of attending the debut in a canoe with the canal’s waters lapping around him—but Fire Ecologies still makes an impressive impact on CD. The live acoustic portion of the performance is by the highly regarded Brooklyn-based Unheard-of//Ensemble, a quartet of violin, cello, clarinet, and piano. The electronic portion includes white noise, watery sounds, and field recording that Stark made on his 2020 journey (some gathered at the California wildfire).
Each scene, as Stark dubs the movements, emerges from an individual sound world. The first scene, “Terra Incognita,” has the feeling of planetary change occurring over eons of geological time (akin to the near-stasis heard in works by John Luther Adams). A sustained electronic background, beginning as white noise rising from silence, is interrupted by the acoustic instruments, sometimes with bare notes or decorated with trills and oscillations. The effect is blended into a seamless texture that unfolds like a sonic panorama. There are glitchy gestures in the electronics, which are like a skipped sample, a click, or digital crackle.
The second, more conventional, scene, “Jeux d’eau,” takes its title from Ravel’s piano piece of 1901, and it serves another of Stark’s aims, to show hoe composers in the past responded to Nature in contrast to contemporary composers. Rapid piano arpeggios dominate at the start, punctuated by strafing electronic surges. There is an ephemeral clarinet melody and stamping chords in unison. These varied events aren’t directly relatable to Ravel except by association, but Stark’s depictions of playing waters is just as evocative.
The third scene, “Louange à l'éternité de Mère Nature” (Praise to the Eternity of Mother Nature) has its analog in Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, both scores using extended lyricism to suggest the timeless. The core of this scene is a soulful cello line underscored with electronic gestures that are slow and sustained. The mood is quite touching before it tapers off in field recordings of untamed wind.
The title of the fourth scene, “Infernal Dance,” is a direct reference to Stravinsky’s The Firebird and the dance of the demon Kastchei. After an introduction of ticking sounds (reminding us that climate change is like a time bomb waiting to go off?), the cello is again prominent in slashing, jagged jabs that create a minatory mood. The agitated feelings that many people experience in the face of ecological catastrophe is vividly evoked. Of the last two scenes, “Dypt inne i barskogen” (Deep in the pine forest) is the title of a number from Grieg’s Peer Gynt, transformed into electroacoustic forest music The final scene, “Marche funèbre,” gives a nod to Chopin’s “Funeral March” Piano Sonata with the electronic equivalent of a march rhythm and the slowed-down field recording of high-tension power lines.
The mood is far from funereal, however, with the entrance of a tender clarinet melody that later gets turned into sparkling piano arpeggios, but the innocent-seeming buzz that ends Fire Ecologies is a reminder that power lines were partially culpable in the California wildfires in 2020. The program notes call this gesture an admonition from Stark, which may be so, but one of the strengths of his piece is that it doesn’t lecture. The imagination that went into the score is compelling enough that climate change fatigue isn’t an issue, or any of the wrangled politics that surround it.
Fire Ecologies creates six unique soundscapes that are far removed from Nature, given the use of electronica, but at the same resonant with the composer’s abiding love of Nature. The performance by Unheard-of//Ensemble, who debuted the piece, is immaculate.
— Huntley Dent, 11.01.2025
New Focus Recordings is an artist-led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
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