Background

The Blued Trees Opera is based on a previous project by Aviva Rahmani called Blued Trees Symphony which began in 2015.

The project has received support from the Pollock Krasner Foundation.

Blued Trees Symphony is a spatial and acoustic outdoor installation across North America, embodying trigger point theory. The installation covers many miles of proposed pipeline expansions, exploring how art, science, and law can change environmental policies about fossil fuels. The installation is composed of trees marked with a painted vertical sine wave. Each marked tree is GPS located, indicating an aerial musical score for an overture. Using copyright law, the artwork on the trees is protected, subsequently protecting the land from eminent domain takings for pipeline development.

The Blued Trees Symphony launched on the Summer Solstice, June 21, 2015, with an overture in Peekskill, New York. It is now installed in many miles of proposed pipeline expansions. Each 1/3 measure of those miles have been copyrighted for protection as a single work of art. Variations of each movement are based on an iterative score created for the overture. All installations are created at the invitation of landowners. The overture was accompanied by an international Greek Chorus at a total of twenty sites internationally. Individual trees were painted and musical variations of the score were performed to echo the theme of connectivity to all life. The score is simultaneously spatial and acoustic and concluded with a coda, a final movement that recapitulated and resolved previous formal themes, on the American presidential Election Day, November 2016.

The Peekskill site for the overture was chosen because the pipelines would pass 105 feet from the infrastructure of the failing Indian Point Energy Center, a nuclear facility thirty miles from New York City. The score corresponded to a pattern that would have prevented the movement of heavy machinery. The paint for each vertical sine wave is a casein slurry of nontoxic ultramarine blue and buttermilk that grows moss (based on a Japanese gardening technique).