I have just returned from a week of being “off the grid” … on an 80-acre island in Maine.

My first summer vacation was to the sea, and I wrote briefly about the power of the big water – its infiniteness, its desolate surface while teeming with life under the waves, its capacity to be calm or wild, deadly or life-giving.

This second vacation was on the ocean, but unlike the flat beaches of North Carolina, the rocky, cold Maine seaside is more of a setting for majestic mountains than for surfing and sunning. A visit to the mountains is equally refreshing, but of a completely different nature. Raising your head to the mountains makes you feel tall and strong. The cooler air is invigorating, not drowsy. The harsh angles and sharp peaks speak a different language than the tips of waves. And while mountains are more finite than the sea (you can see where they start and stop), they are unchanging.

So, how do these differences play out in music? There’s this romantic version; and of course the most famous scary mountain of all. Walter Piston‘s setting is majestic, angular, and specifically about the New England mountains.

If you don’t hang around geeky musical circles, it’s unlikely that you’ll know the name Walter Piston, but you probably know his most famous students Leonard Bernstein and Leroy Anderson. Piston wrote his orchestral suite Three New England Sketches in 1959. The movements are titled Seaside, Summer Evening, and Mountains. Piston claims there is no specific narrative in the suite, and that he chose the movement titles arbitrarily. Even so, he writes this little story about the first performance of the sketches:

… a man came up to me, following the premiere, and said, “I hope you don’t mind my saying that I smelled clams during the first movement.” I said, “No, that is quite all right. They are your clams.” Each individual is free to interpret as he wishes.

I am greatly looking forward to smelling clams by tomorrow evening – I’m off to New England for some much needed R & R.