L.A. Dierker Explores the Sounds of Harrisville

Composer L.A. Dierker in her studio at the Storehouse in Harrisville, New Hampshire (Photo by Lori Pedrick)

A portrait of a town in Sound

This summer the clatter of Model Ts, steam locomotives, and horse-drawn carriages could once again be heard in Harrisville. The occasion was the premiere of L.A. Dierker’s new composition Harrisville Soundscape, which was commissioned by Historic Harrisville for both the town’s sesquicentennial and the organization’s 50th anniversary.

Those who attended HHI’s 50th anniversary open house had the opportunity to hear Dierker’s piece inside St. Denis, a deconsecrated Catholic Church now under the care of Historic Harrisville. Dierker’s piece is not a traditional piece of music, but a soundscape created by imagining the sounds of the past and listening to those of the present. 

“The essential difference between an electroacoustic composition that uses prerecorded environmental sounds as its source material, and a work that can be called a soundscape composition, is that in the former, the sounds loses all or most of its environmental context,” writes composer Barry Traux. “In the soundscape composition, on the other hand, it is precisely the environmental context that is preserved, enhanced, and exploited by the composer.”

Dierker says that she enjoys “the challenge of bringing together disparate sounds; sounds which are not normally heard together, to create a musical form which makes sense to the listener.” “It seems comparable to contemporary abstract visual art in contrast to earlier representational art,” she explains. “On the surface it seems less of a challenge. But the soundscape can be just as challenging as notated music, just a different sort of challenge.”

During the process of recording sounds and composing her piece, Dierker made two inspiring discoveries. “The sounds of the Harrisville Designs Spinning Mill…immersed me in an entirely new world; one I had never previously experienced. Then I discovered Ron Trudelle’s eloquent description of the working mill of the 1950s. His essay put into words aspects of my own experience of the Spinning Mill."

The carding machine at the Harrisville Designs’ Spinning Mill (Photo by Jenn Bakos)

Yarn being spun at the Spinning Mill (Photo by Jenn Bakos)

The sounds of steam locomotives, car engines, and horse-drawn carriages are an integral part of a Harrisville Soundcape.

Creating a Harrisville Soundscape

The foundation of Dierker’s composition are two major landmarks—the sounds of the streams and the mill. “The bass line in the composition is the sound of the stream, which flows in and around the mill buildings,” she writes. “Then various distinctive sounds enter, each conveying, in chronological order, an aspect of the town.” 

“The horses and wagon/carriage and steam locomotives speak to the earlier town of the industrial era; steam engines prior to electrification and the introduction of the internal-combustion engine,” Dierker continues.

“The Model T automobile heralds a new era for the Cheshire Mills. The narration describes, in vivid imagery, the sounds enveloping the town and is accompanied by the spinning machines of the mill, along with dance tunes, which would have been heard from above the general store on dance nights.”

Dierker in her Harrisville studio, which looks out to the canal. (Photo by Lori Pedrick)

Dierker spent several weeks roaming the town with a small recording device, capturing relevant sounds. “In these last fifty years, with the closing of the mill, new soundmarks distinguish the town; the hand looms of Harrisville Designs, the Children’s Center, and the cafe of the HGS.”

Ending the composition is the soundmark heralding the future of Harrisville, the turbine powering not only the mill, but the town!”

A Life in Medicine and Music

Before she embarked on a career in music, Dierker worked for 25 years as a physician, specializing as a psychiatrist. She earned a Doctor of Medicine degree (MD) from the Ohio State University College of Medicine (where she was 1 of 8 women in a class of 150 students), and went on to train as a resident and fellow in psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.

But throughout her medical career she never lost her love for music. After a 25-year hiatus, she unpacked her clarinet and started studying it again in earnest. She also began performing and teaching, and with the goal of improving her proficiency, took clarinet lessons from the world-renowned clarinetist Jonathan Cohler. With his encouragement, she auditioned and was accepted into the Masters program in Clarinet Performance at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While there, Dierker transitioned to composing and graduated with a Masters in Composition in 2002.

In the years following graduation, in response to a professional musician friend’s comment, “Your music is so visual,” Dierker began to work with film. Using a small digital video camera, she captured scenes of the natural world around her home and began to create short films, scoring them with music and sound. In 2011, she undertook further study at the Vermont College of Fine Arts as a candidate for an MFA in Music Composition. She produced two films there, Bailey Brook and Strands, and received her degree in 2013. 

Dierker now composes both traditional and experimental work from her studio in Historic Harrisville’s Storehouse. She and her husband David, who live in Nelson, have three grown children, seven grandchildren, a dog, cat, and assorted wildlife.

Visitors had the opportunity to talk with L.A. Dierker and hear her new work in St. Denis during HHI’s 50th Anniversary Open House in August. (Photo by Mike Phillips)

For Dierker, the premier of Harrisville Soundscape was a rare opportunity to share her music with the local community. “I was very pleased, as it worked just the way I had envisioned. The sound equipment, (thank you, Gordon Peery) set within the arched ceiling and wooden floor of the church, enhanced the soundscape so that the listener could experience something as Ron Trudelle described:”

I watched the rows of looms whack a wooden shuttle back and forth while harnesses flew up and down to make the patterns in the cloth. This action made the whole room vibrate, and you got the feeling that if the mill wasn’t built on stubborn Yankee bedrock, the machines would probably have shaken the mortar from the bricks.

“In the Harrisville Soundscape, when the 1920s Model T auto fades out, it leaves the sound of the spinning mill,” Dierker explains. “When it is joined by the fiddle music (Harvey Tolman), this duet—fiddle and spinning mill—is the cue for the narration of Ron Trudelle’s ‘In The Shadow of  Cheshire Mills.’ With Ron’s experience of the weave room in mind, I set the volume of the recording up to its limit. It was thrilling to feel the floor of the church vibrate as the sounds reverberated off the ceiling and walls! As if you were in the weave room with Ron.”

“I hope listeners enjoy this soundscape as much as I enjoyed creating it, and are inspired to go out into their world and listen.”   

Listen to a Harrisville Soundscape

To hear a Harrisville Soundscape, please click the play button below. You can learn more about L.A. Dierker and her work by visiting her website.

The score for L.A. Dierker’s Harrisville Soundscape