Eve Beglarian's River Project

Getting organized to be on the road for a year has been kind of a lot of work, especially because I only got news of the McKnight funding a month ago, and without that funding as a basis, I don’t know that I would have had the courage to take on this River Project in its full incarnation. Getting everything settled in NYC for a year away, catching the Ethan Allan to Rutland Monday, and sleeping in my tiny cabin on my land in Brandon the last two nights has been a really THRILLING first step! I feel such a strong sense of finishing one phase of my life and beginning anew. It’s pretty great to wake up along with the brightening sky and lie here looking out at the clouds and the mountains and the sun gradually adding light and heat to everything.

Last night I started reading a book about Dorothea Lange’s fieldwork in 1939 for the Farm Security Administration. One inspiration for my River Project is the idea that I want to understand this country at this moment in history. For so many years, I didn’t really feel like this was my country, exactly, and the election changed that. And the current financial crisis made me think a one-person WPA project (since even Obama’s administration is unlikely to imitate FDR and hire artists to travel around the country documenting and interviewing!) might be a really worthwhile thing for me to take on. And since I’m a musician, my documentation will start from sound rather than image, and my relation to words is also different from a writer or historian…

So last night, I was reading about how in 1958, Dorothea Lange taught a course at the California School of Fine Arts called “The Camera, an Instrument of Inward Vision: Where Do I Live?”

“To ask ‘Where do I live?’” wrote Lange, ”presupposes that one lives in a house, or a trailer, or a house boat or someplace with a certain amount of things–personal things. ‘Where do I live?’ could also suggest a type of dream-land full of ideas and ideals, or a social structure which seems to have established a guiding class ethic. Yes, this is where I live: in a land of road markers and guide posts; yet every man must still find his own way.“ [p. 45]

When I think about the question ‘Where do I live’, I realize that on one level, I have lived in the same apartment in NYC for twenty years, and I am rooted there about as deeply as a person can be rooted in a place. On another level, I really don’t have a clue where I live. And I hope this journey will help me find out.

Destroying Levees in a State Usually Clamoring for Them – NYTimes.com.

from The Guardian: “America, now entering its hurricane season, was today urged to abandon the outmoded “patch and pray” system of levees – whose failure magnified the devastation of Hurricane Katrina – and borrow from the Dutch model of dykes and management.”

click the photo for the whole article:

Welcome to the blog for The River Project, my year-long journey down and then back up the Mississippi River. I am very happy you have found your way here, and I’m hoping this will turn into a gathering place for everyone who is joining me on this journey, either physically or vicariously.

I have posted an overview of my thinking about The River Project that I wrote in March of 2009 as an application to the American Composers Forum for a McKnight Visiting Composer’s Fellowship, and I’m delighted to tell you I GOT that fellowship, so the project is now officially real and for sure going to happen.

I’ve set up The River Project to be open-ended enough to support multiple collaborations and agendas, some of which I’ll be talking about right away, and others of which will only develop once I’m on the river.

For now, I can tell you that in late July I will be meeting up with Richard Steadman-Jones and Mac Walton in Minnesota, and we’ll head up to the headwaters of the Mississippi River at Lake Itasca to start kayaking down the river!

More very soon…