Works for the Bassoon by Native American Composers
Liner notes by Renata Yazzie
Juantio Becenti is a Diné (Navajo) composer from Aneth, Utah. His interest in composition began as early as the age of ten when he began rearranging his piano etudes to better suit his musical tastes. By the age of fifteen, the Moab Music Festival commissioned him to write a string quartet. After high school, he set out to study composition but ultimately chose to work on his own, guided by his now well-established musical intuition. Preferring to stay close to home on the Navajo Nation and out of the public eye, he continues to write music as he feels inspired. Becenti’s 4 Pieces for Bassoon and Piano was conceived in 2018, while he was residing in Montezuma Creek, Utah with his grandmother as her caretaker. Most of the inspiration for each movement come directly from his community and the land around him, during his stay at his grandmother’s house.
While on a walk one cold winter morning, Becenti encountered a flock of bluebirds flying seemingly out of nowhere. He recalls it was “stunning” to see the pure blue against the browns of the southwestern desert. Thus, this piece, Bluebirds, draws from that once-in-a-lifetime experience, combining musical textures – a fairly marked bassoon against flutters of piano in the first half to a more robust bassoon against a daintier piano in the second half. The second movement, “Dreams” uses the 12-tone row much like Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) did—melodically. It has a dissonant feel, but the dissonance is wrapped in emotional affliction. The third movement, “Dance,” is arguably the most difficult movement of the set as Becenti wrote it as a technical exercise. The bassoon carries the melody for the entire movement. Not written with any particular dance in mind, Becenti calls to some dances that were once popular on the Navajo Nation like the country dances that took place at local chapter houses or community centers, saying, “I’m not sure if someone could dance to it, but it would be funny if they tried.” The final movement, “There is No Snow” is a lamentable reminder of the realities of climate change in Indigenous places. Becenti recalls experiencing heavy snowfall in that region as a child, and the year he wrote these pieces, there was no snow. This fourth movement is in E-flat minor, inspired by Russian composer Dmitri Shostokovich’s Dirge in E-flat minor, and this sets it apart from the rest of the movements that are not written in any particular key—“they get in the way,” Becenti says.
Connor Chee is a Diné (Navajo) pianist and composer from Page, Arizona—a bordertown on the northwestern corner of the Navajo Nation. Chee’s musical journey began at the age of six with a local piano teacher before his family relocated to Cincinnati, Ohio where he studied at the School for Creative and Performing Arts. Chee holds a Bachelor of Music and Master of Music in Piano Performance from the Eastman School of Music and the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music, respectively. He is a prizewinner in multiple competitions including the World Piano Competition which earned him his Carnegie Hall debut at the age of twelve.
Chee’s compositional journey began shortly after his graduation whereupon he began spending time recording and learning from his paternal grandfather, Keith Chee, about traditional Navajo songs sung in Diné Bizaad (Navajo language). Following a botched attempt to transcribe the songs using Western notation, he realized it was not an accurate or nuanced representation of the songs and quickly turned on the idea. Instead, Chee took all that he had learned from his grandfather about the creation, intent, existence, and philosophy of Navajo songs and began to compose piano pieces founded in Navajo understandings of song and sound. Most of his composed repertoire consists of solo piano music. Nocturne is his first work for bassoon.
The art of the nocturne, formed by Irish composer John Field (1782-1837) in the early 19th century and popularized by Polish composer Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849), characterizes various moods, auras, and scenes of the night. In Nocturne for Bassoon and Marimba, Chee evokes the wisps of a gentle wind on a calm night through delicate swells performed by the marimba. An airy bassoon provides a soothing tune layered over the marimba’s movements. While many of Chee’s compositions are based on traditional Navajo songs, this nocturne’s inspiration is instead initiated by the sound of a peaceful wind going into the night and leaving the same way it came.
Jack Kilpatrick (1915-1967) was a composer from Stilwell, Oklahoma born to a Cherokee mother and an Irish father. His early musical experiences and likely inspiration for pursuing music stemmed from his mother, Ferol Helton Kilpatrick, a beloved pianist local to northeast Oklahoma. Kilpatrick grew up maintaining strong ties to his Cherokee community, even holding conversational fluency of the Cherokee language as an adult. In 1938, he married Anna Gritts who was also a Cherokee citizen. Gritts, a descendent of Sequoyah—the famed Cherokee scholar who invented the Cherokee syllabary— spoke and wrote Cherokee fluently. She and Kilpatrick authored several books on Cherokee culture and history.
Upon graduation from high school, Kilpatrick attended Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma where music professor Rowland Leach, encouraged Kilpatrick to pursue further studies in music. Thus, he attended Northeastern Oklahoma State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma before transferring to the University of Redlands in Redlands, California where he earned his Bachelor of Music degree in 1938. Around this time, he is thought to have begun employment with the Oklahoma City Symphony as an arranger with additional duties including composing and giving concert lectures. His starting date is unknown, but he moved on from the job in 1942. In 1943, he began working towards a Master of Music degree from the American Catholic University in Annapolis, Maryland and was concurrently employed as a music teacher at the U.S. Naval Academy. In 1946, he accepted a position as a professor of theory and composition at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. In 1950, the University of Redlands awarded Kilpatrick an honorary doctorate. He passed away on February 22, 1967 in Muskogee, Oklahoma.
Kilpatrick’s oeuvre contained approximately 155 opus numbers that spanned works for orchestra, choir, chamber ensemble, opera, and voice and piano solos. Romance, originally scored for bassoon and piano, is performed in this recording for bassoon and marimba. Much like many of his solo piano works, Romance also takes on the form of a character piece. Kilpatrick often drew inspiration from his Cherokee heritage, infusing the essence of it into his music, whether by direct quotation and gesture, or through musical imagery. Many of Kilpatrick’s works were lost until 2018 when a librarian discovered them in a storage room at the University of Oklahoma School of Music. While the opus number and composition year of this piece are currently unknown but 1975 appears to be a posthumous publication date.
Raven Chacon is a Diné (Navajo) composer, performer and installation artist originally from Fort Defiance, Arizona, Navajo Nation. Chacon received a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts from the University of New Mexico in 2001 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Composition from the California Institute of the Arts in 2004. His foray into the arts began quite early. Citing the musical influences of his family from heavy metal to songs his maternal grandfather would sing in Navajo, Chacon believes all his musical experiences as a Diné person, have shaped him into the composer he is today. At the age of seven, he began formal piano lessons which set a musical foundation for him to explore not only the usual instruments like guitar and drums but to also build his own instruments and experiment with electronic music, field recordings and other kinds of noise output devices.
Chacon’s works have been featured all over the world by various artists, chamber groups, and musical collectives. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for a composition entitled, “Voiceless Mass” written for the pipe organ and large ensemble at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Since 2004, he has mentored over 300 Native American students in composition through the Native American Composers Apprenticeship Project. Chacon’s sound often edges listeners’ ears into avant-garde territories as he plays with sound, often by redefining and reorienting an instrument’s techniques for sound output. Such is the case in For Jacqueline Wilson.
For Jacqueline Wilson is one piece in a collection of thirteen graphic scores dedicated to contemporary American Indian, First Nations, and Mestiza women who have devoted their lives to worlds of music and sound. The title of the series, For Zitkála-Śa, recognizes the legacy of Zitkála-Śa, a Yankton Dakota composer, activist, librettist, writer, teacher, and political activist. She attended the New England Conservatory from 1897-1899, played and taught the violin, and composed the first American Indian opera, The Sun Dance Opera.
The score For Jacqueline Wilson features five columns and nine rows of shapes arranged as an isosceles triangle each representing the same pitch played throughout the piece, but with different fingerings. Each fingering is represented by an open circle, a square, a triangle, a diamond, or a closed circle and changes the timbral quality of the singular pitch. When the performer has completed the score, top to bottom, they must turn the score 90-degrees counter-clockwise and perform the piece top to bottom, from that orientation. The piece begins with a pure tone and ends with a sequence of pure tones. Wilson describes the process of her performance as undertaking life as a musician who must navigate their identity amidst a world that demands adaption and compromise. These events are sonically expressed through the chaotic timbral confusions, but the final moments of the piece offer a reprieve—a return to home, to a place of rest and to one’s authentic self.
Louis Ballard (1931-2007) was a composer of Quapaw and Cherokee heritage and is widely considered as the “Father of American Indian Classical Music.” Ballard was born in Devil’s Promenade near Quapaw, Oklahoma to a Quapaw mother and a Cherokee father. His Quapaw name, Honganózhe meant “Grand Eagle” or “Stands with Eagles.” Ballard began his education at the Seneca Indian Training School in Wyandotte, Oklahoma. Ballard’s mother, Leona Mae Quapaw, was the resident church pianist and composer of children’s songs. She encouraged him to play and made it possible for him to receive both piano and voice lessons. He continued his education at the Bacone Indian Institute in Muskogee, Oklahoma, graduating in 1949. Ballard continued his music education at the University of Oklahoma, then Northeastern Oklahoma A & M, before remaining at the University of Tulsa where he received both a Bachelor of Music in Music Theory and a Bachelor of Music Education in 1954. In 1962, he completed his Master of Music degree in composition at the University of Tulsa.
Ballard’s Hungarian composition teacher Béla Rózsa steered Ballard towards the works of his colleague Béla Bartók (1881-1945). Bartók, a pianist and ethnomusicologist, was renowned for his research and collection of Hungarian folk tunes that he would arrange or quote from in his own compositions. Ballard decided early on that he did not want to take this transcriptive approach to his compositions, preferring instead to articulate Indigenous cosmos and existence through Western musical practices. Listeners familiar with various forms of Native American songs might hear some of the more direct inspirations within Ballard’s music, whether it be rhythmic, scalar or via form, phrasings, or instrumentation, but his musical intent, particularly with the Katsina Dances was, “to achieve a musically and culturally viable universal statement without violating the integrity of the indigenous milieu.”
The Katsina Dances: Suite for Violoncello and Pianoforte was composed in 1970 and has an approximate performance time of 25 minutes. A katsina is a spiritual being—a deity—in Pueblo cultures of the Southwest United States. It is understood as a supernatural being that can be represented through katsina dancers and katsina dolls or figurines. Ballard wrote this suite with katsinas dancers of the Hopi peoples in mind. There are over 500 different katsinas that represent the energies of all elements of life. Ballard chose just ten as inspirations for this suite. He writes that these pieces do not have religious significance and do not violate or infringe on Hopi beliefs. Rather, Ballard aimed to understand a “small segment of Native American cosmos,” through musical expression in the form of this suite.
Jacqueline Wilson is a Yakama bassoonist, pedagogue, collaborator and advocate. Wilson grew up in Kennewick, Washington near Yakama lands, where her high school band teacher introduced her to the bassoon. Wilson went on to earn degrees in music from Eastern Washington University, Boston University’s College of Fine Arts and most recently, a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 2011. She is now an Assistant Professor of Bassoon and Theory at Washington State University and serves as the Principal Bassoonist of the Washington Idaho Symphony. Wilson’s approach to classical music as a Yakama woman has unfalteringly shown that loving, performing and studying classical music does not compromise one’s Native identity, but can in fact, strengthen it. Her research focuses on the legacy of Native American musicians and composers reclaiming and redefining classical music—an artform historically used in boarding and residential schools as an assimilation tactic. Wilson has sought not only to better understand our ancestors who loved classical music, but to continue their legacies by uplifting classical Native spaces and adding her own voice.
Composed in 2021, Dance Suite for Solo Bassoon contains six movements each representing a dance style from the contemporary North American powwow tradition. A powwow is a community gathering of Native peoples from all over North America who come to socialize and celebrate Native cultures through song and dance. Wilson writes of being inspired by the composition for solo oboe, Six Metamorphoses after Ovid Op. 49 by English composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976). In the work, Britten characterizes six figures from Roman mythology through music. The six movements in Wilson’s work correspond to the Grand Entry which marks the beginning of the powwow, and five additional specialized dances: the Grass, Men’s Traditional, Fancy Shawl, Women’s Traditional, and Fancy Feather dances.
Each dance at a powwow is backed by a drum group consisting of several singers sitting around a drum. Each drum group typically sings their own songs unless called upon to sing a special song. Thus, Wilson’s pieces are her own songs—they are not transcriptions of powwow songs or ceremonial songs. Rather, she uses the “characteristic movements and origins of each dance as a point of inspirational departure” for each original theme. For example, the first movement fluctuates between a steady beat characteristic of a drum juxtaposed with the expressivity of impassioned voices. The fifth movement which corresponds to the Women’s Traditional Dance evokes a “maternal strength” through a sincere and steady melody. The sixth movement, “Fancy Feather,” represents the fast-paced athletic Men’s Fancy Dance which requires agility, strength and speed as dancers flip and spin around the arena.
Wilson invites non-Native performers and listeners to experience the movements of powwow dancing on the bassoon within the parameters she has set, that ask non-Native peoples to respect Indigenous sovereignty, cultural authority, and the importance of self-representation. These include but are not limited to educating one’s self on powwows through attendance, media, or literature written by Native authors, and refraining from using her compositions as fodder for romanticized notions of who Indigenous peoples are. Thank you, in advance, for respecting her request.