I’m going to be spending most of the rest of 2018 on a commission from Blue Streak Ensemble, a new music ensemble based in Cleveland and directed by composer Margaret Brouwer, who I’m proud to claim as my colleague and collaborator.
Margaret asked me to compose a piece for a concert coming in January 2019, and asked that it specifically be about the Cuyahoga River fire in June 1969 that, although actually quite minor and short-lived (so short that there are no known pictures of it), catapulted the nascent environmental movement into further prominence. The work will be about 10 minutes long, and for Pierrot-plus-percussion, and I’m quite excited to get to work with Blue Streak. Since I moved to Cleveland, I’ve wanted to become as much a “Northeast Ohio” composer as possible, and this is the kind of piece that will develop that connection.
I immediately contacted two of my colleagues at Lakeland, and both were helpful. Dr. Matthew Hiner, in our history department, sent a batch of articles, and suggested that I canoe the Cuyahoga if possible (I haven’t been in a canoe since the early 1990s, so it may or may not be possible…). Dr. David Pierce, a geologist at Lakeland, gave me more homework, including the excellent, locally-produced documentary Return of the Cuyahoga, which I made Becky watch with me last night. It has provided excellent background, but there is nothing like seeing the place to really inspire a composer.
So yesterday, I took Noah and our bicycles and we headed for the Towpath Trail of the Ohio and Erie Canalway. Noah was just along for the bikeride, although he got a fair amount of history lesson from me at the same time with some riding commentary. We started behind Steelyard Commons, a large retail development just off I-71 and near the Tremont neighborhood. To one side was the retail area, where we parked the minivan, and on the other side was the railyard for the Cuyahoga Valley Railroad, which served the steel mills. Across the rails was the plant for LTV Steel, now Arcelor Mittal. Riding past this on bikes really gave a sense of the scale of the place. Steelyard Commons was actually the site of even more of LTV’s plant, and it is fascinating to me how the land is continually reshaped and repurposed to fit the needs of its era.
The Steelyard Commons loop of the Towpath Trail is a little more than a mile long, although there is more trail under construction now at both ends of the loop, which is exciting to see (what a ride it would be from the Flats all the way to Bolivar and the end of the Canalway!). We hopped back in the car and headed for the Canalway Nature Center at the Ohio & Erie Canal Reservation of the Cleveland Metroparks. The Nature Center is wonderful, and I have plans to return. Noah was enthralled by an exhibit of spiders, including the largest spider I’ve ever seen, a Goliath birdeater tarantula. We were here to ride, though. If at the Steelyard we were able to see neither canal nor river, both were in abundance in the Metropark, and in some places, the towpath runs with the canal on one side and the river on the other. We were able to see one lock up close, and to get a good look at the shape of the river in this area. As we headed south from the Nature Center, we crossed under multiple railroad bridges, and passed more of the enormous heaps of slag and ash, even in this park-like setting (which the Steelyard most certainly was not). After crossing under I-77, we came to the Southerly Waste Treatment plant, representing the biggest threat to the Cuyahoga River today: combined sewer overflow. Like many American cities, Cleveland’s sewers are designed in such a way that storm, sanitary and industrial sewers share a common pipe. When heavy rain overwhelms the system, the outflow of all three mix together and flows directly into the waterway, untreated. The result is bacteria-laden water that makes the river unsafe for swimming, and can result in beaches in Lake Erie being closed as well.
The juxtaposition of the canal–probably one of the core reasons for Cleveland’s early success as a city–the natural environment, and heavy industry and infrastructure is striking. It is as though the whole history of the area is laid out there. I hope in the next few weeks to spend some time in the Flats as I embark on this project. Musically, I don’t really know where it’s taking me yet, but I’m excited to drill down into the subject matter at least.