Lew Beach by Shawn Crouch, composer

Lew Beach is not a beach at all, but rather a very small town in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York where my family has an old farm house which sits on a piece of land that is large enough for no sounds of modern civilization to reach. And while there are times of sheer silent beauty, more often than not there is a frenetic energy that buzzes around you in the summer months. One hears the sounds of thousands of trees blowing in canon as the wind comes through the valley, or the polyphonic cacophony of different animal life from insects to bear sounding simultaneously. At times these sounds are jagged and disjoint (part I), at times they are nearly still and lyrical (part II), and at times they come at you as brutal onslaughts that appear at the more violent moments in nature (part III). In three uninterrupted sections “Lew Beach” is an impressionistic memory of this land.