Nick Virzi

Cello and Electronics

Composer's Notes:

Riverdaughter (2023) is based on the character Goldberry, the "River-daughter," from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Part One: The Fellowship of the Ring. In Chapter 6, "The Old Forest," Tolkien introduces Goldberry, an enigmatic being thought to be the spirit of the river Withywindle. When the Hobbits first encounter Goldberry, Tolkien describes her voice:
"Then another clear voice, as young and ancient as Spring, like the song of a glad water flowing down into the night from a bright morning in the hills, came falling like silver to meet them."Riverdaughter is an imagined realization of Goldberry's voice, inspired in part by the sounds of water heard throughout my travels in the wilderness of California. The music is composed using naturally occurring acoustic phenomena, including sympathetic resonances on the cello. The electronics are performed live using field recordings of water sounds from the Yuba River in Northern California. The music video for this piece was also filmed on location at the Yuba River. The Yuba is itself an idyllic natural setting inhabited by people living in harmony with the natural world, perhaps a close real-world equivalent to Tolkien's Withywindle.