Wilderness Suite (2020, in progress)

About Wilderness Suite

Wilderness Suite - currently in progress - is a nine-movement evening-length set of music composed by Ruby Fulton for the icarus Quartet (iQ), a chamber ensemble comprised of two pianists and two percussionists, with an accompanying short films created by a team of video artists including Benjamin James. Two movements of music have been written with the film and the rest of the music forthcoming. Focused on, and inspired by, Idaho’s Big Creek Drainage in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, this multi-modal project-in-process is a bold interdisciplinary collaboration of geography, music, and film that explores themes of environmental change, wilderness and water. As one of the first interdisciplinary initiatives of the University of Idaho’s Confluence Lab, this initiative combines data, music, film, science communication and water and features the UI’s Taylor Wilderness Research Station and work of its director, geographer Teresa Cavazos-Cohn and her graduate student collaborators.

Wilderness Suite builds on a rephotography project called “Human and Ecological Change in the Frank Church River of No Return,” which explores environmental change along Big Creek through 50 historical photographs paired with current photographs retaken by Micaela Petrini in summer 2019, and related interviews of Big Creek stakeholders sharing their perspectives of environmental change. Wilderness Suite adds additional dimension to this project, using music and film to explore human-environmental relationships, and change, in tactile, sensory ways. The music utilizes voice excerpts of recorded interviews including outfitters, watershed restoration specialists, recreationists, private landowners, and USFS employees about their experience of and ideas about environmental change. Our unique collaboration between geography and the arts engages both rational and emotional processing systems, maximizing meaning-making and integrating public perceptions and stories of water in ways that are impactful to a broad audience.

Wilderness Suite I. When it Became the Wilderness

I. When it became the Wilderness introduces the setting of Idaho’s Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness and examines the bizarre phenomenon of humans declaring a place to be a “protected wilderness area.” Of course, it has been wilderness all along.

This is a score follower video and not the original film.

Wilderness Suite III. CAT

Because of wilderness legislation preventing human development and the use of mechanized and motorized equipment, the Frank Church River of No Return’s protected 2,361,767 acres tell a unique story of “anti-development” that illuminates the effects of taking humans out of a space. III. CAT highlights the strange story of how large farm equipment was buried to comply with new laws, and encourages listeners to consider questions about sustainability, including: Can the environment sustain humans without itself being depleted? What role do protected wilderness areas and their water conduits play in enabling human and nonhuman resilience? How do protected wilderness areas affect sustainability in an age of climate change? 

This is a score follower video and not the original film.