solo marimba
or solo piano

Recording: Trent Petrunia, marimba (recorded at The Banff Centre for the Arts’ Rolston Recital Hall by Jonathan Ives)

Duration: ca. 9′
Composed: 2003
Click here to see a sample page of Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky.
Order marimba score from Keyboard Percussion Publications

Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky, composed for Trent Petrunia during the 2003 winter residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, was inspired by Canadian painter Emily Carr’s 1936 painting of the same name. Trent premiered it in the Banff Center’s Rolston Recital Hall on March 13, 2003.

“There’s a torn and splintered ridge across the stumps I call the ‘screamers.’ These are the unsawn last bits, the cry of the tree’s heart, wrenching and tearing apart just before she gives that sway and that dreadful groan of falling, that dreadful pause while her executioners step back with their saws and axes resting and watch. It’s a horrible sight to see a tree felled even now, though the stumps are grey and rotting. As you pass among them you see their screamers sticking up out of their own tombstones, as it were. They are their own tombstones and their own mourners.”

—Hundreds and Thousands, The Journals of Emily Carr (1934)