Artists

Program Notes

Birds of Fortune and Coyote Goes to the Sky
Program Notes by Chris Castro and Susan Strauss

Castro: Left Coast Chamber Ensemble asked me in December of 2018 to compose two pieces to accompany storyteller Susan Strauss's Birds of Fortune and Coyote Goes to the Sky. The commission gave me a unique challenge because Susan never tells the stories the same way twice. For a composer who writes strictly notated music, I had to give special consideration to how I would accompany and interact with a changing foreground. Writing both of these works was like trying to hit a moving target.

Susan sent me a recording of her telling each story. I was hesitant to listen too many times, as I didn't want to have an "urtext version" of the stories in my mind. I listened just enough to possess them, and never listened again.

Each story has integral moments that need to be told to assist the plot: for example, "The moment his cap went on to his head" in Birds of Fortune. I used these moments as nodes, or weigh stations for my music. I composed long phrases, both atmospheric and interactive, between these nodes. At these nodes my phrases logically found themselves at points where the music could either repeat itself (without sounding like a broken record) if Susan chose to elongate any detail, or could move forward to the next long phrase. My goal was to write an atmospheric and flexible counterpoint to her imaginative storytelling.

Strauss: Coyote Goes to the Sky is a traditional story from the Karuk people of Northern California. I researched it from the work of linguist, Dr. William Bright, in the University of California, Los Angeles publications of linguistics. The initial recording produced the story in a word for word translation which preserves the rhythm and syntax of the original language; this was followed by an additional “free translation” in English. My early storytelling work was focused on Native American traditional stories researched from anthropological and linguistic texts in addition to work with Native elders, and I learned to speak some Nez Perce from one of my teachers.  

Birds of Fortune is a traditional Japanese story. My interest in the story was inspired by a Japanese colleague. The story was researched from three texts of the story and is characteristic of Japanese traditional folk literature which focuses on the wisdom of nature.