Exploring Landscape in Music: 3 Recordings to Discover

Landscapes frame out days, our journeys, our memories.

Those ideas are endless sources of inspiration for musicians, as well.

Eliza Gilkyson is a versatile and creative musician who based herself for a number of years in Austin, Texas. Many of her songs address, comment on, or include in some way social justice.

Gilkyson grew up in northern New Mexico. Recent years have found her drawn back more and more often to her home ground in the Taos area. Eventually she decided it was time to move back.

The Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico and their foothills and valleys have their own look; so too, the confluence of First Peoples, Hispanic, and western American ranch and cowboy lifeways and histories makes for a distinctive mix. This is all part of what Gillkyson enjoys about the place, and part of what turns up in her music in her album Songs from the River Wind.

In Songs from the River Wind Gilkyson draws on memories of people and places and stories from more than 40 years of her traveling the west sharing her music.

The recording includes original songs, thoughtfully chosen covers, and traditional songs from the west with touches of her own lyrics enhancing the tale> It is a love letter to the west, told through the singer’s own reflections and the words and stories of the characters and landscapes she introduces.

There’s the dancer of Bufflao Gals Redux, and the questioning cowboy of Farthest End, side by side with Gilkyson’s vivid and economical memories of place, time, and relationship in The Hill Behind the Town.

Landscape frames all these, as it does with the evocation of past times in Before the Great River Was Tamed. Bristlecone Pine and At the Foot of the Mountain offer stories in which northern New Mexico’s landscapes are present as clearly as the people in the stories told.

Gilkyson offer a reflective and thoughtful journey. She has always had a way with writing and singing unique love songs. That is part of the mix here. As ever, there are considerations of present day challenges in the songs too. Though songs such as Before the River Was Tamed and At the Foot of the Mountain present these in a more a gentle way than she’s done in other recordings, they are there if you listen, just as hope and love are in her more politically involved work.

The songs are also vividly grounded in landscapes of the west. Part of Gilkyson’s gift is that she does that while reaching beyond limits that idea might suggest. Her graceful voice carries and illuminates the stories

So does the work of musical friends who join in, among them Don Richmond on several instruments and he and his western group The Rifters on harmonies. Michael Hearne adds his voice as well, while Kym Warner plays mandolin and Warren Hood sits in on fiddle.

Landscape in another country informs and inspires the work of Rory Matheson and Graham Rorie on We Have Won The Land. In their case it is Rory’s native area. Assynt in the far north of Scotland.

Given time away from touring ( Rory is in the band Fara; Graham is in Gnoss, both top Scotland based ensembles) during the pandemic, the two friends collaborated on a project that had long been on Rory’s mind.

It comes from the not so distant history of Assynt in the northwest Highlands, when in 1993 local folk came together to form a trust which eventually was able to buy the land on which they lived and worked from an overseas land speculator.

It was an event that has inspired people in other communities to work out ways to take ownership of the land on which they live and work.

It was that, but not, you might think, a source of musical inspiration.

Rory and Graham have made it so, though, through ten mainly instrumental tracks that frame the stories of the local crofters’ journey to ownership (it wasn’t always a straight path) in music by turns lively and reflective.

Both men are grounded in traditional music, a natural fit for this history. Both are past finalists for BBC Scotland Young Musician of the year, and have worked as session musicians in Glasgow. Graham, who comes from Orkney, has set a part of his own region’s history in music in his album Orcadians of Hudson’s Bay.

“The crofters buyout means a lot to me because my family supported the campaign and were heavily involved in the process from the beginning,” Rory said. “It’s a really powerful story and a part of Highland history that I was very inspired by,”

Stating Intentions evokes energy, hope, and commitment at the start of such an project as the crofters faced. Several bids for the land are made and refused as the musical story goes forward.

Who Possesses This Land? invites reflection, as must have been the case for the crofters at this turn of events. This is followed by the thoughtful singing of James Graham on Currie Dubh nan Ròpa, a song and melody Rory well remembers from Assynt. Reflective itself, it works as a fine illumination to Who Possesses This Land and a graceful bridge to...

The Winning Bid, a lively tune of joy. That is not quite the end of the story, though, as reflection and celebration as well as determination and hope are brought into the story through the tunes This Is Ours and the We Have Won The Land set,

Rory’s instrument is keyboards. Graham plays fiddle, mandolin, and tenor guitar. In addition to James Graham on vocals they are joined by a number of top class players, among them Kristan Harvey on fiddle, Anna Massie on guitar, Charlie Stewart on bass and Fraser Stone on percussion.

Landscape plays a part on Jacqueline Schwab’s album I Lift My Lamp too. Many landscapes and yet all connected: she has chosen music of those who have come from other countries to the United States over the centuries.

This includes music that both celebrates tradition brought along and new communiites created, and in other cases looks back at what’s been left behind.

Her approach to the music celebrates her own traditions as well. Schwab is a storyteller through her piano. She began her life in music taking part in folk dances in Pittsburgh, where she grew up, and went on to play for folk and country dance ensembles and events, as she still does.

You may know Jacqueline’s work through her work on the soundtracks of many of Ken Burns films. The Civil War, Mark Twain, and Lewis and Clark are but three on which you may hear her work. She, in turn, credits the experience of working on these projects with developing her ideas of the telling of stories with her music.

That she does on I lift My Lamp, taking listeners through nineteen tracks and a bit more than an hour of pieces than range from Scotland to African America, from a Chilean melody to a Yiddish one, with many other sources explored along the way.

The music on I Lift my Lamp is connected by Schwab’s own sure and distinctive touch with her playing which now and then holds a hint of her playing for the dance added in. The music is also connected by the idea Schwab inlcuded for the subtitle of her album: Illuminations From Immigrant America.

Her sleeve notes, which are well worth the reading, tell a bit of Schwab’s own family background and how she came to look at this music as well as how perceptions of folk music might be changing. There are stories of the music and why she chose certain tune too.

Standout tracks include For Ireland I’ll Not Tell Her Name paired with the Blarney Pilgrim, Oyfn Pripetshik/On the Hearth, from a Yiddish song, and Take Me Out to the Ballgame as you’ve likely never heard it. Really though I Lift My Lamp well deserves to be listened to all the way through as the artists has designed it.

That is true of Songs from the River Wind and We Have Won the Land as well. Different artists, different visions different landscape, each will illuminate your own understanding of place and creativity.

You may also wish to see
A piece about Graham Rorie’s album Orcadians of Hudson’s Bay (and music from Karine Polwart and Dave Milligan too
Beautiful World, an earleir album from Eliaza Gilkyaon which includes among other songs The Great Correction, which has become a classic song of the times
jacqueline Schwab oftne lends her talents to recordings by other artists. Read about one such, Aoife Clancy’s Silvery Moon.

Photograph from Lochinver in Assynt by Ivor Bond from Pixabay Photograph of Carlingford Lough and the Mourne mountains in Ireland by Kerry Dexter

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