NATURE AND COMPOSITION IN ROBERT MORRIS’S INDOOR MUSIC: ON STRANGE FLOWERS, OCCASIONAL STORMS DORA A. HANNINEN MAGES OF NATURE FIGURE PROMINENTLY In Robert Morris’s music and his writings about it. Many of his titles refer to water (Streams and Willows, 1972; Wang River Cycle, 1985; Meandering River, 2001; Wye, 2003; Mountain Streams, 2009; Three-Braided River, 2012), rocky landscapes (Terrane, 1989; Badlands, 1991; Along a Rocky Path, 1993; Cañon, 2003), or plants (Frondescence, 1965; Old Forest, 2005; Four Tangled Groves, 2008; strange flowers, occasional storms, 2008; Vynes, 2010). Nature photographs, often taken by the composer on hikes in upstate New York and around the western United States, introduce many of the program notes on his website. Morris’s titles are not descriptions of the music. Nor are the pieces depictions of nature, I Nature and Composition in Robert Morris’s Indoor Music 67 so much as suggestive evocations of a quality or kind of experience one might have on a walk outdoors when the mind is open and attentive to the proliferation of forms, detail, and strange, indifferent beauty of natural materials and processes.1 With Playing Outside (2001), Morris began a series of what he calls “outdoor pieces”—music designed to be performed (also often composed) outdoors—that makes the presence of nature in his music literal, as bird calls, wind, and other natural sounds enter the time and space of the performance.2 The outdoor pieces differ from the indoor music in scale and structure: they tend to be much longer and to unfold much more slowly. Playing Outside scrolls through a 50-pc allhexachord chain twice in 100 minutes. Coming Down to Earth (2002, 50 min.) is based on a different 50-pc all-hexachord chain, heard once. Oracle (2005, 64 min.), Sound/Path/Field (2006, 90 min.), and Arboretum (2008, 58 min.) are all based on chains that visit each of the 29 distinct types of tetrachords once, in 29, 90, and 35 pcs, respectively.3 In each of these outdoor pieces the temporal unit is the minute, governed by a single pitch-class or pc set and harmony. Although many of the “indoor” pieces Morris has written since 1997 are also based on pitch-class chains, there are important differences . For one, whereas the outdoor pieces involve fields of activity and improvisation, these indoor pieces are all fully notated. The much larger scale over which change unfolds in the outdoor music also engenders a different kind of listening experience, one that tends to be more relaxed and contemplative. While Morris asserts a qualitative difference between his outdoor and indoor music, it must be noted that this difference cuts across, rather than aligns with, his ideas about intimacy and nature in relation to music. In “Music as Poetry,” an essay on the Fourteen Little Piano Pieces, he describes his piano music as a “music of intimacy,” but elsewhere he identifies the intense experience of nature in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson as a radical form of intimacy.4 In an unpublished lecture on Sound/Path/ Field, he characterizes the difference between his outdoor and indoor music as one of “kind, not in degree,” but notes that “this is not a distinction between the artificial and the natural, for these concepts interpenetrate each other, especially in the arts” (Morris 2006, 32).5 Thinking along lines suggested by Cage, Morris sees music and nature as intertwined, not separate: “For me, the importance of Cage’s idea to ‘imitate nature in her manner of operation’ is that . . . music could be a form of nature, not as music had been previously conceived, separate from nature yet ‘expressing’ it” (Morris 2010, 267).6 Where he goes with this idea is, at first, predictable, especially in an essay on his 68 Perspectives of New Music outdoor pieces: “This meant to me that my music would eventually have to leave the concert hall . . .” (Morris 2010, 267). But a simple “and” introduces a conceptual reversal, a suffusion of the outdoors in, a revelation of an intuition about his indoor music: “and that I should encourage listeners to hear my concert music in the way we take in the world of...