Antarctica Bound

By Cheryl Leonard

Cheryl Leonard

[For the next few weeks, we are featuring reports by a guest blogger, composer/performer Cheryl Leonard. Armed with a specially chosen kit of field recording gear, she is about to embark on a musical adventure to the icy continent. Ms Leonard will regularly post information about what it takes to record, edit, and compose in extreme temperature conditions. To read more about her adventures, you can visit her personal blog.]

In just a few days I am going to Antarctica, not to study the decaying ice sheets, or gawk at penguins from a cruise ship, but to make music. Each year the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program grants a handful of artists the opportunity to travel to the bottom of the world and make art about this remote place and the science that is happening there. My project is to create a series of musical compositions based on the forces that shape environments and ecosystems in Antarctica, using only sounds from the natural world.

This year eight artists from a range of fields will be making the trip: Michael Bartalos (book arts), Lisa Blatt (photography/video), Judit Hersko (multimedia installations), Anne Noble (photography), Richard Panek (author), Oona Stern (visual arts), Scott Sternbach (photography), and myself. You can read about their projects here. Some of these artists have already returned from their adventures and the rest of us are about to deploy. That’s right, deploy. It turns out the U. S. Antarctic Program is full of military terms and acronyms, many of which are inscrutable to outsiders. Luckily, I have been given a glossary and will soon be part of the Antarctic club.

The process of getting one of these highly competitive grants is not trivial. I would liken writing my grant proposal to the amount of effort it took to complete my master’s thesis. But now, after two years of research, applications, logistics, planning, and, more recently, emptying my bank accounts to buy fancy field recording equipment (I am doing my personal best to stimulate the economy!), I am really going. My eticket to South America is on the desk in front of me, and my floor is littered with a chaotic jumble of expensive recording devices, microphones, windscreens resembling small furry animals, cables, batteries, cameras, tripods, backpacks, and drybags. Don’t worry, I am not forgetting to bring warm clothes, they are just covering the floor of the room next to this one.

Antarctic Gear for recording

The U.S. government runs three research stations in Antarctica: McMurdo, on the Ross Sea and the largest station on the entire continent; Pole, located at the South Pole; and Palmer, where I will be living and working for about a month. With a maximum population of around 40 people, Palmer is the smallest U.S. Station (McMurdo, in contrast, can have up to 1,100 people at one time). Palmer is located on Anvers Island on the Antarctic Peninsula, which stretches north towards the tip of South America. To get there will involve just under a week of travel. First there are three flights to get from San Francisco to Punta Arenas, Chile. Then I have about a day in Chile during which I will be fitted for ECW (extreme cold weather) clothing and briefed about how things work on the Laurence M. Gould, an NSF research icebreaker. That’s right, the last leg of the journey is a 4-day boat ride south from Punta Arenas to Palmer Station across the Drake Passage, which is reputed to have the roughest seas in the world. And I will be on the ship for New Years. Hopefully the ocean will be calm and/or it will miraculously turn out that I don’t get sea sickness.

Once I arrive at Palmer I’ll begin working on my project, creating a set of short musical pieces with natural sounds from Antarctica. I’ll be composing with a mix of human-initiated sounds and recordings of natural soundscapes. In Antarctica I will play amplified natural materials such as ice, rock, water, moss, feathers, shells, and bones as musical instruments and record compositional elements and improvisations created with them. I will also be collecting field recordings on the peninsula’s islands and in the surrounding seas, and I have received special permission to gather a few Antarctic natural objects (rocks, fossils, shells, penguin bones) to bring back with me to the United States. These will later be used as instruments that will be played live on stage.

Each composition from the set will have a unique subject matter and instrumentation. The musical structures, sound sources, and development process of each piece will reflect that work’s specific subject. Pieces will explore: sea and land ice, the Antarctic circumpolar current, wind and storm patterns, geological and paleontological histories, human exploration and exploitation, adaptations of life to environmental extremes, and changing terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Themes will focus on topics under current scientific investigation in the region, and highlight connections between the Antarctic Peninsula and global climate change.

I’ll be at Palmer Station from approximately Jan 3 to Feb 2nd. Then there’s another week of travel to get home (and another crossing of the Drake Passage). Upon my return I will start putting together a final set of compositions from all the materials I gather in Antarctica. The project will culminate in a DVD release, and a series of live performances and educational presentations in late 2009.

More soon….

Cheryl Leonard