Commissioned by CBC Radio for Two New Hours
Radio premiere: May 17, 1992, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
About Beneath the Forest Floor:
“Beneath the Forest Floor is composed from sounds recorded in old-growth forests on British Columbia’s westcoast. It moves us through the visible forest, into its’ shadow world, its’ spirit; into that which effects our body, heart and mind when we experience forest.
Most of the sounds for this composition were recorded in one specific location, the Carmanah Valley on Vancouver Island. This old-growth rainforest contains some of the tallest known Sitka spruce in the world and cedar trees that are well over one thousand years old. Its’ stillness is enormous, punctuated only occasionally by the sounds of small songbirds, ravens and jays, squirrels, flies and mosquitoes. Although the Carmanah Creek is a constant acoustic presence it never disturbs the peace. Its’ sound moves in and out of the forest silence as the trail meanders in and out of clearings near the creek. A few days in the Carmanah creates deep inner peace – transmitted, surely, by the trees who have been standing in the same place for hundreds of years.
Beneath the Forest Floor is attempting to provide a space in time for the experience of such peace. Better still, it hopes to encourage listeners to visit a place like the Carmanah, half of which has already been destroyed by clear-cut logging. Aside from experiencing its huge stillness a visit will also transmit a very real knowledge of what is lost if these forests disappear: not only the trees but also an inner space that they transmit to us: a sense of balance and focus, of new energy and life. The inner forest, the forest in us.
Beneath the Forest Floor was commissioned by CBC Radio for Two New Hours and was produced in CBC’s Advanced Audio Production Facility in Toronto with the technical assistance of Joanne Anka and Rod Crocker. Thanks to Norbert Ruebsaat for providing his recordings of an adult raven and a young raven from Haida Gwaii. All other recordings were made by myself mostly in the Carmanah Valley on Vancouver Island, as well as in forests near Cowichan Lake on Vancouver Island, on Galiano Island and in Lighthouse Park near Vancouver. All sounds were recorded throughout the summer of 1991. Thanks to Peter Grant for assisting in much of the recording process. Special thanks go to David Jaeger, producer of Two New Hours for making this possible and for giving me the opportunity to work in the above-mentioned all-digital facility at CBC Radio, Toronto.
Beneath the Forest Floor received a mention at Prix Italia 1994 and was recommended for broadcast by the International Music Council’s Rostrum of Electroacoustic Music in 1992. Excerpts of Beneath the Forest Floor appear in Elephant (2003), a film by Gus van Sant.”
About Hildegard Westerkamp:
“Hildegard Westerkamp was born in Osnabrück, Germany in 1946 and emigrated to Canada in 1968. After completing her music studies at the University of British Columbia in the early seventies she joined the World Soundscape Project under the direction of R. Murray Schafer at Simon Fraser University. Her involvement with this project not only activated deep concerns about noise and the general state of the acoustic environment in her, but it also changed her ways of thinking about music, listening and soundmaking.
While completing her Master’s Thesis in the 1980s, entitled Listening and Soundmaking – A Study of Music-as-Environment, she also taught acoustic communications courses until 1990 in the School of Communication at SFU together with colleague Barry Truax. Since then she has written numerous articles and texts addressing issues of the soundscape, acoustic ecology and listening, has travelled widely, giving lectures and conducting soundscape workshops internationally.
In 1993 she was instrumental in helping found the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (www.wfae.net), an international network of affiliated organizations and individuals who share a common concern for the state of the world’s soundscapes. She was chief editor of its journal Soundscape between 2000 and 2012. In 2003 Vancouver New Music (VNM) invited her to coordinate and lead public soundwalks as part of its yearly concert season. This in turn inspired the creation of The Vancouver Soundwalk Collective, whose members are continuing the work on a regular basis. For some years now she has mentored a variety of younger composers, sound designers, soundwalk leaders and people pursuing careers in soundscape studies and acoustic ecology.
Hildegard’s compositions have been performed and broadcast in many parts of the world. The majority of her compositional output deals with aspects of the acoustic environment: with urban, rural or wilderness soundscapes, with the voices of children, men and women, with noise or silence, music and media sounds, or with the sounds of different cultures, and so on. She has composed film soundtracks, sound documents for radio and has produced and hosted radio programs such as Soundwalking, and Musica Nova on Vancouver Co-operative Radio.
She has combined her treatment of environmental sounds with the poetry of Canadian writer Norbert Ruebsaat and Sharon Thesen. In 2000 she created together with photographer Florence Debeugny, At the Edge of Wilderness, a sound installation about ghost towns in British Columbia, commissioned by Vancouver’s Western Front Society. And in her 8-channel composition Für Dich—For You, based on poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke and its translation by Norbert Ruebsaat, she explores the theme of love and connectedness with the sounds and languages of her German-Canadian existence. Some of Westerkamp’s compositional work appears in US filmmaker Gus van Sant’s Elephant and Last Days.”
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