Music from Tree Rings

Monday, December 19, 2022

The Arizona Daily Star newspaper's front page lead article for December 19 was on the collaboration between Margaret Evans of the LTRR and several musicians and artists on an ambitious multi-media, multi-disciplinary project to compose and perform music derived from tree-ring data. Oboist Sara Fraker of the University of Arizona's Fred Fox School of Music coordinated the musical aspect, enlisting Australian composer Lachlan Skipworth to create a score based on the tree-ring data that Margaret Evans and Kelly Heilman of the LTRR provided, and gave the first of several live performances on December 5 2021 in the Bryant Bannister Tree-Ring Building lobby with colleagues Jackie Glazier and Marissa Olegario. Kelly Leslie of the University of Arizona School of Art not only oversaw the visual aspects of the project, but brought in an exhibit of posters that students in her digital illustration class had created for specifically for it. The newspaper coverage comes shortly after the November 2022 release of a studio recording of the piece, Pine Chant, on the Soundset label.