Today I’m presenting you with the track The Rolling Green of Snowdonia by the American composer and piano player Deborah Stokol, located in Los Angeles. Deborah started to play the piano at the age of six, but has composed and sung her own song her entire life. She has previously worked as a journalist and a teacher but has since 2021 taken a year off to focus on her music.
This track, The Rolling Green of Snowdonia, was released on the EP 88 Keys to Countless Kingdoms: Impressionistic Solo Piano Voyages Through the Dreamscape on the 20th of June, 2022.
Tell us something about your track The Rolling Green of Snowdonia!
The whole EP musically explores fantastical-seeming real-world places and dreamscapes. It seeks to allow your mind to wander. This song is named after the famous national park of North Wales, one I have long wanted to see but have never actually visited. I first learned about it in Susan Cooper’s *Dark is Rising Sequence* books, about King Arthur, modern magic, time-travel, and likely a very real influence on the creation of Harry Potter 25-30 years later. So even though I have been fortunate to visit the UK several times, I have not seen Snowdonia, so it exists as a sort of magical mystery to me. I know it’s real. And I’ve been to places that look like its photographs, but for me, it sort of represents the perfect marriage of three-dimensional living with imaginary land. So in composing this dreamy, mystical piece, I hoped to evoke some of that…the lush greens of the hills, the rain-soaked green, the wondrous unknown, a place of mythic proportions and history.
I have thought about these things for decades, but I wrote this piece pretty recently, sitting at the piano with my DAW and one mic, and I just played. I liked the sonic exploration and started threading it with others that seemed to tell alternate but related, complementary stories and put together this EP.
Thank you very much for this Deborah!