Ronn McFarlane and Carolyn Surrick - And So Flows The River (2023) [Hi-Res]

There are a gazillion YouTube videos of the Ortiz. But none of them have Yousif and Ronn. The world has heard the Bach Sinfonia once or twice. In fact, when we were comparing notes on a road trip, we discovered that we both heard it for the first time in 1968 - on the album Switched on Bach, thank you Wendy Carlos. But Ronn’s arrangement is a revelation.

Why? Why record them? Why record Over the Rainbow? Or Shenandoah and The Water is Wide? I Wonder as I Wander? Beach Spring? Sometimes it’s because Ronn has walked into our rehearsal with an arrangement so beautiful and so perfect for our two instruments, that we have to share it. Sometimes it’s personal - the first time I ever played Over the Rainbow, just a single gamba playing the melody, was in my father’s hospital room in the weeks before he died, ten years ago.

There are songs that the gamba can sing. Some of those songs run deep in our memories, some of them speak of home, or childhood, or mystery. And we love them.

Where do the Gymnopédies fit? I remember the first time I heard them, and I was struck by the way that these three incredibly simple pieces of music could fire the imagination so completely. I am sure that the picture in my mind’s eye, is not the same as Ronn’s when we are playing them. We are neither an accordian, nor piano.

Each of the original pieces tells a story. W. Lee’s Reel is a tribute to Ronn’s father, who deeply preferred W. Lee to Wilbur, and whose adventurous life took him from West Virginia to World War II to Costa Rica and then to Maryland. Clear Creek harkens back to vacations in West Virginia, traveling down a long dirt road to Ronn’s grandmother’s house where Uncle Austin took that young man under his wing, teaching him some of the most important lessons in life. Some deeply practical. You should ask him…
We sit together on Saturday mornings. We’re preparing for concerts, or bringing new material, or testing new ideas about old pieces and sometimes Ronn reaches into his backpack and pulls out a new tune. It is always remarkable. Usually it doesn’t have a name. There’s a place in Cora, Wyoming, Where Mountains Meet the Sky. It is a huge vista, where the light changes, the sky goes on forever, and the quiet is unparalleled, and that’s what I heard when we started to play that piece.

I wrote Liane’s Ocean when my daughter was little and we were visiting a friend at the beach. Those days held all of the glorious mystery that one could hope for - a halcyon summer that would not last. Liane’s song lives in my memory, describing a place where time does not exist, with silence saying more than music ever can.

Finally, Greenmount Avenue.

When my world fell apart in 2014, I started working at a church in Baltimore. I have a choice every morning of driving north on an expressway and then passing through lovely neighborhoods with excellent private schools, or going through town and up Greenmount Avenue. Most days I go through town.

It’s usually about 7:30am when I turn right on Biddle Street, where the row houses are abandoned, with boarded up doors, missing windows, and the roofs long since collapsed. If you go a little further north on Greenmount you can score drugs in the vacant lot near 25th Street. Or stop at Mimi’s Liquors and grab a beer. Sometimes the prostitutes are coming home, still dressed for work. And the kids are waiting for the bus.

On Greenmount Avenue there’s beauty everywhere, and despair. Helplessness, and rage. There are things you will see that you will never forget. I chose the 16th century French tune for this set of variations, Belle Qui Tiens Ma Vie - learned long ago, when destruction was all around, and when the most terrible and most beautiful things lived side by side.

We are the sum of our experiences. Our lives moving like water, from the creeks in West Virginia to the streets of Baltimore. Music is our language, motion our friend, and our instruments, home. We chose this music with intention, and so flows the river.

-Carolyn Surrick