composer's note

White Sand and Gray Sand takes its name from an 18th-century street cry originating in England, later brought to the United States by English and Irish immigrants. Street cryers stood on street corners singing the song, selling sand that would help to blot ink for quill pens. White sand was unused and the gray sand was recycled. My first experience hearing the rich harmonies of the song was during my Kodály training. Coincidentally, Sara learned the song as a member of the Kodály Chorus in New Haven, CT and shared, “It later resurfaced, with different words, in a song collection” that she shared with her own kids. “I have always loved this round and its tug of melancholy, despite all of its major thirds.”

I began to think of how Sara retreats to the Midwest each summer for the Bay View Music Festival, living in Tucson the rest of the year. Having grown up in Tucson, I now live in Bloomington, Indiana. So I turned to our own “sands” of these respective lands, particularly limestone and caliche. Although I am by no means an expert in geology, I learned as much as I could about the geological processes of these two sedimentary rocks. I saw similarities between the formations’ processes and the canon’s melody: horizontal lines layered with repetitions and colors to create vertical harmonies and bindings. It was at this point that the piece metamorphosed into a symbolic gesture, each movement emulating the process of the sedimentary rock formations: Caliche in the Southwest (White Sand) and Limestone in the Midwest (Gray Sand). In its introduction, I present the song as a whole, both horizontally and vertically, flirting with gestures and subtle liberties. Drawing from the five-note question, “Who’ll buy my white sand?” White Sand–Caliche emulates the rising of minerals, binding of calcium carbonate with other materials, and rain. Gray Sand–Limestone takes from the final five-note question, “Who’ll buy my gray sand?” Depicting the movements of marine life, these intervals weave throughout the movement. All motions eventually fossilize, though they are never completely static.

The eloquent words of poets Lois Roma Deeley and Scott Russell Sanders, alongside the beautiful images of printmaker Melanie Yazzie, helped me to articulate these geological processes through music.  As it morphed into a metaphor for 2020, composing White Sand and Gray Sand has helped me to find meaning in such an eventful yet challenging year. Every place is defined by unique cultural landscapes. Like music, its stories alter over time: seemingly permanent but forever fluid.    — S. Maggie Polk Olivo

Intro: Calx

The northern and southern boundaries are marked by the main stem and East Fork of the White River—meandering stream that the Miami called Wapahani, meaning, White Sands.

 — Scott Russell Sanders, Stone Country

I. White Sand: Caliche

In the Sonoran, the fickle desert rain

never comes when you need it—

but when the wind picks up, it pours itself out

empties itself of the black sky

rages down dry gullies and aching river beds

like a promise. Or a curse,

leaving behind caliche—white rock soil—

the ground which refuses to be tamed.

 — Lois Roma Deeley's “Caliche,” published in Quiddity International Literary Journal (2018)

II. Gray Sand: Limestone

Solid as rock, we say. Build your foundations upon stone, we say. 

But of course, the rocks are not fixed.

Waters carve them, winds abrade them, heat and cold fracture them,

the twitches of the heaving earth buckle and warp them.

The sands on our beaches started out as bits of mountain.

The soil that feeds us is laced through and through with pulverized stone. Right this minute, the oceans are manufacturing the stuff, and so are volcanoes. From one millennial blink to the next, God would see an altered world. Still, in our hasty sight, the rocks seem fixed.

 — Scott Russell Sanders, Stone Country

IMAGE CREDITS

artwork by Melanie Yazzie, used with permission

photographs by Sara Fraker  •  White Sands National Park, August 2021

recorded by Wiley Ross at the University of Arizona Haskell Recording Studio

Tucson, Arizona

March 2022