Eco Ensemble

Cañon (2010) for flute, clarinet/bass clarinet, two bassoons, two trumpets, trombone, and bass trombone
When Ben Simon approached me about composing a new work for the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, he gave me several choices of “companion” pieces to choose from—works already in the reper­toire that would have the same instrumen­tation as my composition. Somewhat to Ben’s surprise, I chose the Stravinsky Octet, a piece that I’ve loved since encountering it as a student. Having a rather unusual instrumentation, the Octet is not so well known outside of professional circles—but for us composers, it’s a beloved composition, full of energy, charm, and dry wit. If you don’t already know it, you’re in for a treat.

Of course, when I took on this instru­mentation, it became filtered through my own creative lens. My sound-world is very different from Stravinsky’s. I love a certain kind of transparency in music, a kind of flow or elegance, but I also prefer the sonic choices to have special or unusual colors. So, for example, I ask the brass players to sing into their instrument while they’re playing or use multiple kinds of mutes to alter the sound. I ask for the wind players to over­blow their instrument or to split the air­stream to create “multiphonics,” the illusion of chords. I ask the flute player to play “whistle tones”—beautiful, very quiet sounds that for me evoke nature and natural surroundings.

While composing this piece, I had been reading a work of the great naturalist John Muir, The Mountains of California. Even though this book is over 100 years old, his descriptions of our land­scape (are they science or poetry?) still resonate—particularly inspiring were pas­sages describing the sculpting process of glaciers and waterways, and these had a direct influence on Cañon. Also influential was a trip I took to the amazing Iguazú falls on the border of Argentina and Brazil. The immensity of the falls is impossible to describe; the wealth of color, the tremendous power and force—these images also formed part of Cañon’s genesis.

[Four Studies of Light and Dark] (1989) for piano and percussion
Written 35 years ago, [Four Studies of Light and Dark] is the oldest work on this evening’s concert and was composed when I was still a graduate student at Indiana University. It was well received at that time and to my bemusement the recording was played widely on jazz radio stations. The piece is structured in ways that are still quite important in my work—there is a “frame” (movements I and VI) that serve as an introduction and postlude surrounding the four studies II-V. (I use brackets in the title to symbolize the first and last framing movements.) The inner studies are organ­ized symmetrically, with II and V illustra­ting light and dark respectively. Movement II is cast in a high register and is very fast, with a running high piano and xylophone melody that you will recognize again in dance sections of The Road to Xibalba on the second half of the program. Movement V is a complement of II in its low register and likewise fast tempo with fast piano clusters and loud tom-tom drums. The inner Movement III is slow and dark, with a chorale-like chordal melody low in the piano and swirls of tam-tams played with brushes and a bow, and it moves without pause into movement IV, which continues the chorale melody high in the piano with percussion crotales, with bowed suspended cymbals. The odd timbre that is prominent in the piano at the beginning and end of the piece is a dime inserted between the strings of the D-flat just above middle C.

I did quite a bit of performing when I was a graduate student, and my intention with this piece was to write something fun and challenging for myself at the piano and my percussionist friend Kay Stonefelt. Four Studies was originally conceived as a dance piece, with “light” and “dark” symbolically portrayed by two dancers and was choreo­graphed a few years later by the Larry Pech Dance Company.

Hishuk ish ts’awalk [All Things are One] (2014) for clarinet/bass clarinet, violin, viola, cello, and piano
The entwined and enwoven puzzle pieces of my Hishuk ish ts’awalk were inspired by a visit to the wild temperate rainforest in the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve of Canada. To the First Nations people of the Nuu-chah-nulth, the title means “all things are one.” My vision was to create a resonant, forceful, yet fragile musical ecosystem, with a musical space full of echoes, noise, and silence.

The large-scale form is in three parts, separated by pauses. There are two move­ments in Part One, two movements in Part Two, and one movement to finish, making a total of five movements in the piece. Spatial relationships predominate; you will hear the same music reappear in a different register and moving in a different direction, turned upside down and varying in character and speed.

The resonance of the piano’s sostenuto pedal is employed throughout Part One and Part Three, against clarinet subtones, and special bowings, harmonics, and swaying double stops in the strings. The clarinet solo at the end of Part One, with its interposed noisy multiphonics, descends to complete move­ment two, and is complemented by the rising cello solo at the beginning of Part Three. The center of the piece, Part Two, features a silvery and lilting unison line that loops around on itself in the third move­ment. A contrasting and complementing palin­drome, the fourth movement rises with forceful, loud snaps in the strings, slaps in the bass clarinet, and a huge culmination and climax of everyone to the top. In Part Three, the opening music returns, with piano resonance, trembling strings, and the disembodied clarinet sounds.

Scenes from The Road to Xibalba (2023, World Premiere) for narrator, four singers, large chamber ensemble, and field recordings
The Road to Xibalba’s story is drawn from the great ancient Maya text, The Popol Vuh. Poet John Campion developed the English libretto for The Road from his own transla­tion of the larger work. The Popol Vuh is a creation myth according to the K’iche’ Maya people in what is now Guatemala. The text is an ancient account of their origins and cosmology in a world before the coming of Westerners and Christianity. In the early 1700s, a Domin­ican friar named Francisco Ximénez recorded a transliterated K’iche’ text (in a phonetic script with Latin charac­ters) parallel to a Spanish translation (con­sidered the oldest known version of The Popol Vuh).

The Road to Xibalba outlines the exploits of Maya “hero twins” who go down to the underworld to play a ball game with the Lords of Death, and in defeating them affirm the eternal cycle of life. It is a tale full of whimsy, pathos, and timely ecological reflections. There is a humorous cast of ani­mal characters and charmed figures that ultimately point to a higher relation of cosmo­logical order and spiritual con­nected­ness.

In preparation for this piece, Campion and Cox researched the written materials and visited scores of Maya archeology sites and museums in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. Among many others, these in­cluded Chichen Itza, Tulum, Palenque, Ux­mal, Tikal, and Copan.

SYNOPSIS
Tonight we present eight scenes in a concert version drawn from the four-act musical theater work that will ultimately include a chorus and dancers. The scenes tonight mostly come from the first half of The Road to Xibalba. Each scene opens with a field recording of sounds from Central American birds and wildlife, and roughly follows the 20-day Maya cycle.

The presentation opens with an intro­duction by the Narrator, who serves multi­ple roles as a poet, a jokester, and an intimate informer. In the second scene, we meet Little Blood, daughter of the fearsome Lords of Death in Xibalba, the underworld. In the forbidden garden, she encounters a skull in a tree that she mistakes for a squash. This skull originally belonged to one of the sons of grandmother Xmucane. He had been called One Hunahpu and was mur­dered along with his twin (Seven Hunahpu) by the Lords of Death after the boys lost a ball game. Following a very humorous verbal exchange, the skull of One Hunahpu spits into Little Blood’s hand and makes her pregnant with twins. In the third scene, the Lords of Death are very angry when they find out about Little Blood’s pregnancy. For punishment, they send a messenger owl to kill her, with explicit instructions to return with her heart as proof the deed was done. Little Blood manages to evade being killed with some clever talk and by providing the owl the red sap from a copal tree that she shaped into a heart. The sap, she convinces the owl, is red like a heart and will burn sweet as incense. The owl agrees and takes the sap back to the Lords and fools them completely.

In the fourth scene, Little Blood flees Xibalba, goes to live with grandmother Xmucane, and gives birth to the hero twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque. The fifth scene five opens with Hunahpu and Xbalanque working in the field. They hide themselves to find out just who has been eating all their produce—which is how they catch the Rat. In exchange for his freedom, the Rat con­fesses that grandmother Xmucane has deceived the twins into believing they are farmers, when in fact they were born to be ball players, just like their fathers One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu, who were killed in Xibalba. He shows them where the ball-playing equipment is hidden and the twins joyously play a game. In the sixth scene, the Lords in the underworld hear the ball playing and send for the twins to come to Xibalba. In the ninth scene, the twins say a tearful goodbye to their mother Little Blood (now called Blood Woman) and grand­mother Xmucane, and leave for Xibalba. In the final scene this evening, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, having shown that death is not the end but part of the cycle of life, enact a ritual invoking the breath and spirit encircling the world.

—Cindy Cox