Journey to the Nagual
 
The title of this program denotes the musical expedition that both musicians and listeners will travel – at times individually, while at other moments, as one. The journey encompasses a multifaceted, metaphorical excursion; while each work was inspired by a specific idea or event, all of the compositions embody universal, existential themes. Comprising just over an hours-worth of music, this travel-through-sound will broach anger, death, despair, hope, capitulation, realization, and various perceptual states of being.
 
Composer, Kevin Day, tells us that his Symphony Basquiat “musically personifies the work of Black neo-expressionist painter and artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.” In speaking about his art, Basquiat remarked “I don’t think about art while I work, I try to think about life.” Accordingly, Basquiat’s Riding with Death is layered with cultural, historical, and societal references. The sparse image of a dark-skinned male figure, riding a white skeleton on all fours, is unsettling. It is thought that Basquiat was suggesting his disappointment and pessimism about the future of the society in which he found himself, a personal despair that, soon after completing the painting, contributed to the artist’s decision, at the age of 27, to take his own life.
 
Augusta Read-Thomas’s Plea for Peace was commissioned by The University of Chicago for the commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of Pile-1, the world’s first artificial nuclear reactor. The first human-made nuclear chain reaction occurred there on December 2, 1942, and was part of WWII’s Manhattan Project. In determining how to set her feelings about humankind’s need to restrain from employing the horrible potential nuclear arsenals possess, the composer eventually settled on a simple, vocalise – a plea that comes straight from the heart, rather than through any particular text. This setting for soprano and small wind ensemble was premiered in April 2024.
 
David Del Tredici created In Wartime between November 2002 and March 2003, while absorbed by “the shocking international reality of war. Composing music at such a time…served to keep me sane, stable and sanguine, despite the world’s spiraling maelstrom.” In the opening “Hymn,” Del Tredici uses fragments from “Abide With Me” and, eventually, the entire hymn tune, to suggest “prayer before battle.” Part II, “Battlemarch,” built on the national song of Persia, “Salamati, Shah!” and laced with quotes from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, was directly motivated by the war in Iraq, but more generally depicts humankind’s seemingly unending propensity to make war.
 
According to composer Anna Clyne, “Overflow is a wind dectet inspired by Emily Dickinson’s ‘Poem, By the Sea,’ in which we experience the ocean’s power over the poet’s imagination.” Clyne was further inspired by an image from Rumi’s poem, “Where Everything is Music,” “whereby the tiniest motion of a pearl on the ocean floor can cause great waves above.” We live in an age of previously-unfathomable overflow of many kinds, an ocean of data that often overwhelms our minds. Neil DeGrasse Tyson cautions us that “as the area of our knowledge grows, so, too, does the perimeter of our ignorance.” Reflecting on the power that single pearls carry seems a necessary obligation, especially during times of extraordinary overflow.
 
Michael Colgrass’s Winds of Nagual is based on the writings of Carlos Castaneda, specifically, his 14-year apprenticeship with Don Juan Matis, a Yaqui Indian sorcerer from Northwestern Mexico. Colgrass informs us that his musical fable is centered around finding the “nagual,” what Don Juan calls “the creative self.” This definition of “nagual” is not at odds with other, more widely accepted notions, including the concept that a being who is a nagual is not limited by their ego or everyday observations, but has learned to access a perceptual world far beyond themselves. Perhaps the antidote to our often overly-self-referential existence lies in just such a search, a personal journey to the nagual.
 
–Gary Hill