Cleft Ridge

The lockdown in New York began the day after Gryphon Rue and I held what would be our last concert for over a year, though neither of us knew it at the time. We’d been on the verge of canceling the event, as events throughout the city were getting postponed amid concerns over the rapidly spreading new virus, but we ended up performing for an audience of four. Afterward, on our way home through the eerily empty streets of Manhattan, we glimpsed the first signs of the ghost city New York would soon become. The city that never sleeps was finally taking a break. Over the next two months, I experienced a strange dissonance: everything I was hearing and reading described the world outside my apartment as a breathable death threat, but the view from my window was of life in full bloom. Spring had arrived, the trees on our block were bursting with blossoms, and – unless an ambulance’s siren was cutting through the silence, which was often – the uncharacteristically hushed soundscape of Brooklyn had filled with a greater diversity of bird calls than I’d heard in all my previous 13 years as a borough resident. In my local community of musicians, the onset of Spring was especially dissonant with the fact that we couldn’t do one of the things we loved most: sounding together. Online jam sessions felt unsatisfying, so Gryphon and I started scheming ways we could meet in person for socially-distanced musicking. We masked up and brought our musical saws to various Brooklyn parks, brandishing our blades at each other from opposite sides of a bench. During our initial sessions, it was often challenging to hear each other over the wind and other ambient noise, so we began scouting for outdoor areas with good acoustics. Prospect Park, with its network of hilly paths, supplied a series of tunnels which turned out to be perfect rehearsal rooms. Our favorite, Cleft Ridge archway, soon became a popular spot for local musicians who were also looking for ways to sound together. This audio clip contains fragments of recordings I made in that tunnel, with sounds of my voice and my partner Michael playing tenor saxophone. I had decided to compose a piece that would be staged across a series of locations in Prospect Park, to celebrate the haven the park had become for musicians during those times of sonic isolation. These sounds were my initial sketches. I based the piece on field recordings of local bird calls, as an homage to the birds whose voices comforted me during lockdown by co