David Axelrod on “Scene with Cranes”

The first drafts of “Scene with Cranes” emerged in the autumn of 2016. 

The title, as many readers will recognize, is borrowed from a piece of incidental music Jean Sibelius wrote for his brother-in-law’s play, the unhopefully titled Kuolema, that is, Death in Finnish. It’s my understanding that a couple in the play have a child delivered to them, as in Finnish folklore, by a migrating crane. Given the play’s title, you can likely guess the rest.

Sibelius, however, reworked the incidental music into what I think we can properly call a tone poem that depicts in fifty-nine measures what its title describes. My familiarity with the music is entirely through my obsessive listening to Gidon Kremer’s arrangement of it for string orchestra. It’s the first piece performed on the Nonesuch album De Profundis by the Kremerata Baltica. 

The contrasts between the wandering melody played by the first violins and the darker-toned gravity provided by the second violins in the opening measures fade, but later return as anxious sforzandos in which the violins, joined by viola, cello, and double bass, answer the plaintive calls of two cranes in the voices of clarinets. 

The drama and moodiness of Sebelius’s music surely gave shape to my attention that cool, still morning four years ago, as I bicycled along the margins of Ladd Marsh in northeast Oregon. There were many dozens of Sandhill cranes present in harvested wheat fields, who had arrived overnight to join earlier arrivals. They rested and foraged, and periodically squabbled among themselves and with an unlucky coyote who passed too close.

A storm was then approaching from the Gulf of Alaska, so I understood they were staging for departure southward and would soon begin calling out to others dispersed around the marsh who would join them as they spiraled higher and higher, and eventual vanished into the blue. The cranes would not return for another six months.

The improbable observations, scribbled later that day onto a piece scratch paper and from which the poem emerged, noted that grain fields are “a message from chlorophyll”—absent in those senescent fields then—and “there’s the time of the body’s memory and the time of a tree’s memory.” I must have wondered how awareness accounts for radically different domestic worlds than one that’s strictly human, and at the same time how imagination might incorporate these other forms of cyclic time, memory, imagination and knowing. 

The urge for going, as Joni Mitchell sang long ago, is countervailed here by rootedness in and familiarity with the rituals of place. The frustrations and satisfactions of the domestic world share the same space. And obviously, the poem shares as much DNA with Kuolema as it does with Sibelius’s tone poem, though the emotion that emerges at the end of the poem is inflected by climate crises, extinction, and the loss of certainty in the resilience of life that once stood as a consolation for mortality.

As for this particular poem’s network of objects and phenomena that emerge at the periphery of awareness, simply reading through its imagery is evidence enough of what environmental factors revealed themselves and constellated the poem, though the familial drama that also plays out in the poem suggests other points of origins far more personal than observation of any external world. 

Given my familial roots in the rural Baltics, I surely am prone to a heritable melancholy in autumn that is peculiar to northern latitudes, and it was in full operation that morning Sibelius and migrating cranes converged there in the Grande Ronde Valley. What I didn’t know in the autumn of 2016 was that, after thirty-one years, I would leave the Grande Ronde Valley permanently and return to the place where my household first formed and had remained “half-finished.”

David Axelrod

Missoula, Montana