Search Music:

Search for music by typing a word or phrase in the box below or by selecting one or more categories from the list on the side.

Thomas Goss

Duration: 15' 00" Year: 2000
music for a choreographic poem by Anandha Ray and Charles Anderson

Instrumentation
for singers and chamber orchestra - flute, clarinet, 2 bassoons, 5 percussionists, acoustic guitar, double bass; Native American singers
Programme Note

Original programme note from the premiere:

For co-choreographer Anandha Ray, this dance is a very personal introspection. Ms. Ray dedicates this dance to Dan Meeks, the seventh son of a seventh son, medicine man for his tribe, her late great-grandfather. Though her family’s American Indian heritage was kept secret to avoid the severe prejudices of the South, Ms. Ray was privileged to learn from him a few of the traditions for planting and using sacred tobacco as a healing tool. The dance was inspired in honor of this ancestry. Anandha Ray and Charles Anderson, with widely varying backgrounds and styles of dance, collaborated with Thomas Goss in each section of the choreographic process to co-create the sections and movements of the dance and music. Loran Watkins’ costume design augments the abstract representation of Ray’s memories of her American Indian culture intertwined with her family’s need to hide this heritage. The lyrics in Goss’s score were adapted and translated by Native American healer Fred Jack Miles Manitoumahwhingon from a traditional Chippewa Indian prayer for times of journey, whether physical or spiritual.