We are pleased to share a special Musings, a preview of the program notes for our upcoming concert. Enjoy these notes, and buy tickets for the livestream of the concert to hear these pieces played in person.
Sky-Tinted Water
Marko Bajzer
Sky-Tinted Water was the result of my work as the Artist-in-Residence at Voyageurs National Park. It is part of a series of works about the U.S. National Parks called From Sea to Shining Sea, in which each piece/movement tells the story of a different U.S. national park.
Voyageurs National Park is located along the Minnesota-Canada border in a semi-aquatic terrain known as the Boundary Waters. As glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age, they sculpted depressions into the earth which their melted remains filled, leading to the creation of over 11,000 lakes in the state of Minnesota (mostly in the northeastern portion of the state). Today the Boundary Waters is an area that is approximately half land and half water, providing excellent recreational opportunities for hikers, boaters, canoeists, and kayakers. Voyageurs National Park comprises a part of the larger Boundary Waters ecoregion in Minnesota. Very little of the park is accessible by foot alone. A watercraft (or snowmobile in winter) is required to get just about anywhere in the park, making it somewhat unique within the national park system, like a “Venice of the NPS.”
The title of the piece is a reference to a translation of the name “Minnesota.” Often translated to “sky-tinted water,” or “cloudy water,” a more faithful translation of the Dakota expression is “place where the water is so still, it reflects the sky.” Whereas most national parks have specific attractions that attract visitation, the magic of voyageurs is that the beauty of the park lies not in specific locations, but rather this relationship between the water and sky. It is ever-changing, cannot be predicted or anticipated, and requires open eyes and a mindset of being in the moment.
This piece musically depicts several scenes from my time in the park. The first is paddling through a muddy, reedy, marsh on a gloomy morning, providing a perfect spotlight for the low reeds to shine. The marsh then opens into an estuary, protected from the wind, in which the water is a perfect mirror of the brooding sky. In this section, the first violins and violas are playing melodies that are near inversion of each other, while the second violins along with winds and bowed vibraphone hold out a drone representing the silvery surface of the water.
Emerging from the safety of this estuary and into the open waters of Voyageurs’ massive lakes, the wind and water assume a different character. Strong winds can materialize with little notice and large waves can make for a…somewhere between exhilarating and harrowing…experience for paddlers. Oftentimes the turbulence of the afternoon winds give way a meditative stillness, and towering cloud formations reflected in the water give the sense that one is rowing through the sky. Again the musical technique of inversion is employed such that the cellos and basses are a mirror image of the first and second violins while the violas’ drone represents the impossibly still surface of the water. The day progresses to a stunning sunset as the sun retreats behind the horizon in a blaze of quiet glory, both in the sky and the water.
Night falls and the sky awakens once again as the aurora borealis materializes. Northern Minnesota is one of the best places in the contiguous United States the view the aurora, and the still lakewater again creates a mirror image of the aurora in the water, for an experience that is twice as stupendous. The end of 2025 was the solar maximum, the zenith of the sun’s eleven year cycle of electromagnetic activity, which is the cause of many spectacular aurora displays in late 2025 and early 2026. When thinking of what instrument would best depict the aurora borealis, practicalities be damned, the thought of writing for six theremins came to mind as the ideal musical force. The theremin is an electronic instrument not frequently heard in the orchestra, and is mostly associated with science fiction film soundtracks. Since practical concerns do in fact exist, I decided that a suitable alternative would be one theremin with a looper pedal such that it can play over itself, thus mimicking multiple theremins. Given that even getting one thereminist is less than simple, a synthesizer via the electronics can also be employed for similar musical effect.
Interspersed in the piece are two musical quotes that pay homage to the cultural history of northern Minnesota. The namesakes of the park are the voyageurs, French-Canadian fur traders who were the first Europeans to frequent the area. Their preferred mode of transportation was via canoe, in which they often paddled for sixteen hours a day transporting hundreds of pounds of furs from the wildernesses of the north woods to the wealthy socialites of the east coast and Europe. They have a quasi-legendary status in this area, and besides their feats of strength and endurance, they were also known for their singing. In Sky-Tinted Water I’ve quoted the voyageur song, “En Roulant ma Boule,” whose tune catches the wind and breathlessly wafts in from centuries ago.
The other significant and much longer lived cultural history of the area is that of the Ojibwe people, the Indigenous Americans who are part of the larger Anishinaabe, and have lived in what is now northern Minnesota for millennia, and are among the largest tribal populations north of the Rio Grande. The Ojibwe hunted and skinned the furs, and then traded them to the voyageurs for various goods.
In the late 1800s, a woman named Frances Densmore grew up along the bluffs of the Mississippi in Red Wing, Minnesota near a Native American reservation where she was enamored by their singing, dancing, and ceremonies. In the early 20th century she saw how the policies of the US Federal Government encouraged assimilation of the Indigenous people into American society, which indirectly endangered important aspects of Indigenous culture. Having studied music at Oberlin College, her love for Indigenous music took her around the country, recording songs from tribes across the country with wax cylinders. On July 4th, 1910, she visited the Red Lake Nation in northern Minnesota where she attended various ceremonies and recorded forty songs. After visiting other reservations in the region, she wrote an anthology entitled “Music of the Chippewa,” in which she notated these songs and wrote about her experiences learning them from the people who taught them to her. The tune from one of these songs, as sung by a man named Ki’miwûn, is entitled, “Approach of the Thunderbirds,” and is played by the flute.
The piece also employs the use of electronics, which, besides the theremin substitute, consist of sounds one might hear when visiting Voyageurs National Park: the ripple of paddles through water, the swirling of waves on a windy day, the buzz of mosquitoes, the howl of the wolf, the chirping of crickets, and the iconic calls of Minnesota’s state bird, the common loon.
Another source of musical material is a tone row that is subtly woven into every work within From Sea to Shining Sea. It was given to me by the varied thrushes of Redwood National Park in 2022. The bird’s most frequent call is one long, clear note which sounds not unlike a piccolo playing with a light flutter tongue. The birds, having little to no formal training in music theory, call at seemingly random pitches (though the ones during that particular visit did seem to favor G#), and in numbers their calls resemble a serially-constructed composition. Due to the redwoods’ massive trunks, and their propensity to dominate the ecosystems in which they grow, redwood forests tend to have much more pronounced echoes than other forests. Thus hearing these thrush calls with their somewhat serialist-sounding notes echoing hauntingly through the woods always felt somewhat surreal, as if I had accidentally invaded Arnold Schoenberg’s dream. At the time, the row assembled from the notes of the thrushes felt like one small fiber of the universe, and in pulling on this fiber one realizes that is attached to an unfathomably large tapestry which is the rest of the universe. Reflection on these ideas yielded the realization that just as most of the music I listen to and write is more or less made of the same dozen or so notes, so is much observable universe mostly made up of a dozen or so elements. The varied thrushes of Redwood National Park, the lava from Lassen Volcanic National Park’s volcanoes, the stars of the night sky looking down on the ancient bristlecones of Great Basin National Park, or the waters of Voyageurs National Park are all made of the same basic building blocks. Everything in the universe is a different manifestation of the same “stuff,” and all music that has been written and will be written is a different manifestation of the same Truth. In this piece, the tone row appears in the flute, clarinet, and violins, in the section depicting the rough waters.
A big thank you do everyone who made this project happen, including Beverley Everett and Katey Lutz from the Bemidji Symphony; Chia-Hsuan Lin and Amy Lindstrom from the Rochester Symphony; Manny Laureano and Sara Kleinsasser Tan from the Bloomington Symphony; Bob DeGross, Erik Ditzler, and Katherine Severson at Voyageurs National Park; Breanna Trygg and Kate Fenske at the Voyageurs Conservancy; and Jan and Dale for hosting me in Rainier, Minnesota during my residency (and especially for Dale, who rescued me when my canoe floated away in the middle of the night in a storm – RIP canoe, wherever you are!).
The rest of the Musings for “Impressions: How Do They Do That?” are posted on the Bloomington Symphony website. Join us in person on Sunday, April 12 at 2 p.m. at the Gideon Ives Auditorium at the Minnesota Masonic Heritage Center. This concert includes Marko Bajzer’s Sky-Tinted Water, Samuel Dangerfield performing Camille Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No. 1 in A Minor, and Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome. Purchase your livestream ticket here.