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The Philosophy of Tippet Rise
by Peter Halstead
What people mention most about Tippet Rise is its alchemy, where the atmosphere dictates the interplay between people and sculpture, between sculpture and music.
Lucas Debargue, the young French pianist who was the audience favorite at the last Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, made his American debut at Tippet Rise last summer. Before he played, he asked to have a tour of the ranch because he said he felt the atmosphere, and he wanted to learn more about it so he could put it into his playing.
Art involves not just a work, but the atmosphere which the work creates, the atmosphere which supports the work. In the way Stonehenge evokes a lost civilization based on the stars, the atmosphere of a sculpture park is a unique collaboration among the art, the land, and the sky.
What Tippet Rise tries to create is a correspondence among the elements, a metaphor.
Tippet Rise is a metaphor in a way, where the synergy among music, landscape, sky, and art makes something else, a kind of poetry.
Ensamble Studio, who have three works on Tippet Rise, have arranged their pieces like star charts, to map the sky onto the land, to bring constellations down to earth, where we can see them.
When we started Tippet Rise some seven years ago, Arup Engineers said we were at the forefront of the new direction towards small halls where music has
a more immediate effect on the audience. With Arup’s advice, we returned to the original divine ratio, the dimensions of the temple of Solomon,
of the Parthenon, of the jewelboxes where Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn performed. This shape enlarges and focuses the sound of classical music; it brings it closer to what the composers expected.
We wanted sculptures that fit the land, to annotate the music, to connect with the sky, to illustrate the sense of working with the land. The way this works
10 About Tippet Rise