Today I’m introducing you to the American pianist and composer Tewksbury from Hamilton, Canada. Tewksbury has been a musician for his entire life even though this project is fairly new.
The track Sitaantaago Elegy is taken from the album Paths, which was released in June 2021.
Tell us something about your track Sitaantaago Elegy!
The song ‘Sitaantaago Elegy’. It comes from the Sitaantaago Glacier (more commonly called the Mendenhall Glacier) in Juneau Alaska. I was lucky to spend a few weeks in Juneau in Alaska, this place that feels unreal how big and empty and raw it is, housesitting for a friend, and my daughters and I went hiking almost every single day while we were there.
Seeing a glacier in real life is stunning, and you’re never really prepared for it, since it makes you reflect on time, and your place in this time on the earth. The Sitaantaago Glacier is in accelerated retreat due to climate change, and as you hike in to it, you pass rock cairns that mark where the glacier was at different times in history – 1700, 1800, 1924, 1956, 1988. It’s retreated 2.5 miles so far, so you keep experiencing how large it once was as you, yourself, move through space. It’s stunning, and dire, and within a few decades the glacier will be gone. It’s sobering to experience a thing that is almost certainly already dead. In this song, I wanted to write a farewell, and to say goodbye with a beautiful moment. It’s a dark place to go, but I see beauty in it, and I hope that people who hear this song do, too.
Thank you very much for this!