Cartographic Etude No. 1

This piece is a study in the imaginary tradition of conveying directions by means of melodic lines. 

I heard a story recently on the radio about homing pigeons, and how some of them got inexplicably lost during a race across the Atlantic. The investigator reached the conclusion that the way the birds were navigating was by hearing the actual frequencies emitted by the earth, which would presumably reflect density, altitude, and so on, and that their course was interrupted by a sonic boom from the Concorde airplane. 

I have no idea if this is true, and it has very little to do with this piece. But it made me think, what if birdsongs were actually maps, oral transmissions of directions for migration or general navigation? And then, what if not only birds did it, but people? What if people learned a musical language, encompassing a scale corresponding to cardinal directions, and passed down songs (or rather, melodies) indicating safe passages between points? 

This etude then, is an attempt to imagine how such a system might work. The guitar, in this case, plays the melody, which is in fact a map of the border between North and South Korea -- roughly the 38th parallel, but of course meandering through physical and political boundaries as in reality. The first bar is a key, defining the pitch aligned to due south, and outlining the tempo that corresponds to distance (this piece is marked dotted quarter = 20 bpm = 1 km) -- knowing these crucial bits of information, a listener should be able to follow the melody to describe the actual border between the two Koreas. 

The piano and vocal lines, in this case, describe some of the features one might see along the way -- the various mountain ranges and plateaus that would help to verify the directions. In the imaginary tradition above, these would be optional, neither informing nor detracting from the actual melody, but rather adding artistic and personal interest to a melody that is bound by geography.

Recorded at Baltimore Composers Forum’s Intersegmental 38: Baltimore concert, November 19, 2023

Ji Eun Kim, soprano, Young Jun Lim, guitar, and Bonghee Lee, piano