Discovery

Geologist Franklin (Nick) Foit uses a million dollar time machine called an electron probe micro-analyzer to identify the chemical fingerprints of ancient volcanoes. Among other applications, those fingerprints can then be used to date adjacent soil layers and archaeological objects.

Foit recently worked with Robert Mierendorf, a student of Foit’s some years ago who is now the archaeologist with the North Cascades National Park, to date an archaeological site at Cascade Pass, a 5,400-foot pass that has been used by area Indians for ages. Using both tephrochronology and radiocarbon dating, they established the oldest human usage of the site as occurring more than 9,000 years ago.

The Cascade Range, which reaches from British Columbia to northern California, is full of volcanoes, many of them active. The ash, or tephra, they expel during eruptions can travel thousands of miles before settling to earth. Foit and others try to identify those ash layers in order to better understand both the geologic and human history of the area.

The tephra from every volcanic eruption has its own chemical makeup. Foit identifies their origin by first preparing samples of tephra for analysis by sealing them in a thin glass slide. An electron probe in the micro-analyzer measures the amounts of sodium, magnesium, aluminum, silicon, iron, calcium titanium, potassium, chlorine, and occasionally other elements. Once he gets an analysis, he calculates a “similarity coefficient,” which indicates how close  a match the sample is to one in his database of known tephras.

Although that analysis might correlate to a known source, alone it does not date an ash layer. Doing so involves analyzing the context, the ash stratigraphy right next to the volcano. Often, says Foit, the tephra will fall on vegetation, which may be preserved in the tephra layer.

Living things absorb an isotope of carbon, carbon-14. When an organism dies, it stops taking in carbon-14, and the isotope begins to decay. That rate of decay is known and is used to determine the age of the organic material.

If the strata have been undisturbed, the age of the tephra can be determined by the age of the organic material.

Foit says as many as ten tephras are represented in the meter of sediment from Cascade Pass. The best preserved were from several eruptions of Mount St. Helens, two from Glacier Peak (2,010, 5,800  years old), one from Mount Baker (7,200 years old), and one from Mount Mazama.

Mazama is the eruption that resulted in Oregon’s Crater Lake 7,600 years ago. Tephra from Mazama, which was 42 times as powerful as the 1980 St. Helens eruption, spread to the northeast, covering over a million square miles. Its distinctive tephra provides a chronological marker across much of the Western United States, British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan.

Foit is one of only two people in the United State who perform this kind of analysis. Foit has built a database of 1,700 analyses over the past 25 years, including analyses from others as well as his own.

Even with such a substantive database, however, Foit has plenty of detective work remaining. Only recently, for example, did he and colleagues solve a tephrochronological mystery.

Mount St. Helens has erupted many times. Even though each tephra is unique, there are subtle compositional differences that are difficult to tease out. In this instance it involved discriminating tephras from two more recent eruptions from Mount St. Helens critical to dating archaeological sites in the Park.

Barely a month ago, a former student, Steven Kuehn, who is a post doc at the University of Alberta, was able to chemically distinguish tephras from two eruptions of Glacier Peak that occurred closely together 13,550 years ago. Trace element analysis revealed that the older layer matched perfectly what Foit had collected in the North Cascades, providing one more solid piece of information in understanding the long geologic narrative of the Pacific Northwest.

Twenty years ago, Charles Argersinger founded the Festival of Contemporary Art Music at Washington State University to celebrate the work of talented composers and has been its tireless advocate ever since. A composer of contemporary art music himself, the WSU professor of music has been, some would say, evangelical in his support of the genre.

For Argersinger, “contemporary art music” is music that nurtures the soul and engages the heart, speaking to the full range of human emotion. It is music that is multilayered and complex. It transcends time and language to make manifest the daily and epic struggle to find meaning. It is music written for the heart and the mind, not an abstract theory, and it sounds simply beautiful.

On Saturday, February 7, during the 20th anniversary of the festival, Argersinger’s own music will fill the Bryan Hall auditorium. From the opening triumphal notes of the brass “Fanfare” to the richly layered, hopeful melodies and harmonies of “Sonnets Upon Music,” WSU faculty and students will be performing some of the most well-crafted, technically challenging, and beautiful contemporary art music in the world.

From chamber music to symphonies and from piano concertos to choral music, Argersinger creates critically acclaimed concert music that puts him firmly in the tradition of the masters of classical music. Indeed, for a performance of the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Berlin Airlift, there were three composers on the program: Johannes Brahms, Wolfgang Mozart, and Charles Argersinger.

Alecksander Sturnfeld-Dunn, a former graduate student and now a colleague at WSU, says he was an undergraduate when one of his professors played him a recording of Argersinger’s “Concerto for Piano and Chamber Orchestra.”

“I just knew I wanted to study with this guy,” he says.

Another former student, Austin Schlichting, says he was compelled to attend WSU for his undergraduate education after hearing Argersinger’s piano piece, “…Between Scylla and Charybdis.” Now, as a graduate student in music at Ithaca College, he says he continues to be inspired and awed by Argersinger’s music and can see Argersinger’s influences on his own compositions. “I keep a recording of his first piano concerto with me wherever I go so I can show people,” he says. “In fact, I have a copy in my backpack right now.”

“His compositions are incredibly well crafted and constructed,” says Jeffrey Haas, director of Indiana University’s Center for Electronic and Computer Music and the featured festival composer in 1991. “Charlie has a breath-taking clarity of thought. You really understand what he’s thinking about the music as you hear it.”

Michael Schelle, the festival’s first guest composer back in 1989, also speaks about Argersinger’s clarity, marveling at “the clarity with which he presents his material as a teacher and the clarity with which he presents his music as a composer.” There’s an economy to his work, he says. “He writes to share rather than to show off.”

But for all that clarity of thought, Argersinger is anything but single-minded, especially when it comes to music.

What his friends know, but many people don’t, is that Argersinger is equally skilled at creating˜and performing jazz charts.

“He’s a phenomenal jazz arranger with an extraordinary voice, melodically, harmonically, in every way,” says Sunny Wilkinson, a jazz vocalist and music professor at Michigan State University. Wilkinson, who met Argersinger when they were both undergraduates at Arizona State, says Argersinger may compose award-winning symphonies, but he also “swings like crazy.”

For most musicians, says Martin Rokeach, the festival guest composer in 1998, “You can’t walk both sides of the street.” But in fact, Argersinger does. “I’m really jealous of his jazz side,” Rokeach says. “I’d flaunt it if I could play like that. To me it’s a testament to a powerful talent.”

“It’s like being Kobe Bryant and Kurt Warner at the same time,” said Jim Linahon, a professional trumpet player who has been creating award-winning music for television, film and special events for 25 years. Linahon and Argersinger have collaborated on dozens if not hundreds of projects, but he still remembers the first Argersinger composition that he ever heard, “Imagination Flight 5:15,” written when he was a master’s student at Arizona State.

As Argersinger tells it, he wasn’t impressed with the music his student group had been practicing for a jazz competition in Las Vegas, and he said as much to his conductor. The conductor challenged him, on a Friday, to write something better, so on Monday he showed up with his own chart and it premiered at the competition.

“It was brilliant,” says Linahon. But also brilliant, he says, was the music Argersinger wrote for “Gradus ad Parnassum,” a CD of contemporary art music featuring Linahon on trumpet.

“Charlie is an absolute omnivore,” says Todd Gustafson, who first met Argersinger when he was teaching jazz studies at DePaul University in Chicago. “Whatever he’s going to do, he’s going to do it to the hilt.”

Argersinger’s love of both classical music and jazz started at an early age, nurtured by his parents. Nancy Hass, his sister, a professional oboe player and wife of Jeffrey Hass (Argersinger introduced the two at Interlochen music camp), says her older brother spent hour after hour listening to works by the masters–Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Vivaldi–and to Dixieland jazz.

Dixieland? “Yes,” Argersinger says, smiling. “Dixieland is pure unadulterated happiness, and that’s a good part of the emotional spectrum to address.”

In fact, he says, while he’s still most powerfully affected by the classical music he first loved as a child and still loves today and by the contemporary music that grows from that tradition, he’s come to appreciate just about all types of music.

“It used to be I had no interest in country music,” he says, “but even that has been accepted into the hall of possibilities.” It’s honest music, he says. People are talking about what they feel in a language they understand.

“I’ve often thought I might compose a country song,” he says, completely deadpan. “It’d say, ‘I’ve lowered my standards, now up yours.’”

But Argersinger isn’t lowering his standards. Next month he will be joining the ranks of emeritus faculty at WSU, a move that will allow him to concentrate more fully on composing. Several years ago he was a fellow at the prestigious Yaddo artists retreat and made substantial progress on a second piano concerto. With two movements finished, he’s working on the final movement.

“Every note counts,” he says. “The choice of every note has to be thoughtfully deliberated on.”

It takes time to write music for the ages, but that’s the music that speaks to him most powerfully. Hear it for yourself this Saturday at the Festival of Contemporary Art Music.

You can also listen to recordings of Argersinger’s music at http://libarts.wsu.edu/music/audio/composition/index.htm, or at Argersinger’s website: http://www.charlesargersinger.com/Audio%20Files/Audio%20Files.htm

Links

Festival of Contemporary Art Music

Charles Argersinger’s web site