|
Description
|
Great Spirit Song, for treble choir, Native American flute and recorded computer music soundscape, is an invocation to the Great Spirit inspired by the culture of the Native American people. The choir sings a two-part adaptation of the text “Great Life-Giving Spirit.” Interludes between the text sections include Yeibichai-inspired pow-wow chanting in interlocking antiphonal rhythms. The pow-wow drum functions as the heartbeat of the piece. The recorded soundscape includes synthesized voices of ghost ancestors and Native American flutes created with Csound along with sampled natural sounds, such as birds and wind.
On the video Songkeepers, Kevin Locke tells the origin story of the Native American flute: that as woodpecker ran back and forth, opening and closing the holes in a hollow branch, the wind played it as a flute. Somewhat like a recorder in its design, the Native American flute has a "fetish," often shaped as an animal, controlling the air flow.
The piece is in five parts using the traditional minor pentatonic scales come from the four Native American flutes. Part 1 celebrates the North with Eskimo throat singing along with northern birds and animals such as wolves, whales and polar bears. Part 2 celebrates the East, the direction of the sunrise. Part 3 celebrates the warm winds from the South, and features a ceramic imitation of an eagle bone flute. Part 4 celebrates the sunset in the West, as the flute merges with the mournful cry of the coyote. The soundscape also includes rattlesnakes and ghost horses against the afterglow of synthesized Native American flutes in the background. As Part 5 celebrates the Earth and Sky, with eagles and fragments of the other sections, we may imagine that we have entered the Native American dreamtime, where we can travel in several places at once without physical limitations. (2007)
|
|
Notes
| Treble Choir, optional Native American Flute and Soundscapes (8:56 minutes) Commissioned by the Hong Kong Composers’ Guild for St. Stephen’s College Preparatory School Senior Choir. |
