Composer/Librettist Notes < Main Page

Composer/Librettist Notes

The composer speaks...

It all began with a trip.

After teaching at Penn State for some 23 years, I decided it was time to take a sabbatical, explore the country and see what musical ideas greeted me in my cross country exploration I love to drive cross country, camping at state and national parks along the way. I also love maps, and ever since childhood had wondered "what exactly is the Natchez Trace."

So en route to Taos, New Mexico, for a two-month residency at the Wurlitzer Foundation, I drove the Natchez Trace, a beautiful parkway starting just south of Nashville, Tennessee. I had gotten a late start that day; it was getting dark by the time I got on the Trace. I needed to find a place to camp.

And there it was: the Meriwether Lewis Monument campground. I discovered that this was the sad place where this famous American took his own life only four years after his trancontinental journey. How did it happen that a man so talented, with so many gifts and so much yet to give found only his own harrowing despair in this lonely spot? For me, it was the beginning of a quest, coming to know this man and his companions and trying to find a music that matched their daring, their terror and their tragedies.

My long time librettist, Jason Charnesky, fashioned a wonderful powerful libretto that is set during Lewis' last night at lonely Grinder's Inn on the Natchez Trace. The cantata begins with a lovely theme on the strings which is violently interrupted by two gun shots. I learned that nothing quite grabs the attention of a classical music audience like unexpected gun fire at the start of a concert. Then Meriwether Lewis sings to us in his despair. He has just shot himself, and we spend the long night with him as he relives his voyage and comes to find a meaning for his life.

Jason had created an almost Shakespearian Meriwether Lewis. Now I had to set it all to music. Where would we find the singer with the musical chops and the dramatic gifts to bring our character to life? The answer came on my next cross country travel. (I have found that I work best by composing during the summer far away from my Pennsylvania home, letting the long car journey and the sights of the American continent speak to me as I travel.) I was passing through West Virginia and Kentucky, attending various outdoor dramas when I happened upon Bardstown, Kentucky, just in time to catch the evening performance of Stephen Foster: the Musical! Singing the role of Foster was a young man with one of the finest voices I have ever heard, Mark Whatley. I knew immediately that this was the voice of Meriwether Lewis. So I left my card at the box office along with a note asking Mark to please be in touch. A composer had a dream and Mark had become part of it.

The writing of the cantata took place in a corner of wildness as out of the way as Lewis' Natchez Trace. Dorland Mountain Arts Colony is a magical retreat on the far side of Palomar Mountain, just outside Temecula, California. Creative solitude is guaranteed by the blessed absence of electricity or telephones. Located in a live oak grove with a nearby spring, the residence has a well-weathered big old Steinway with a most sonorous bass. Local legend has it that this was the piano Rachmaninoff always selected from the Steinway lot when he concertized in San Diego. And the cantata was written there.

Writing the inner movements of The Last Voyage of Captain Meriwether Lewis was a delight. Jason's words, always lyrical, inspiring and dramatic, helped me write the movements which relive the journey up the Missouri, across the Bitterroots, to the Pacific. But the outer framing movements, darker and very dramatic, were a challenge. Trying to capture the state of mind of our protagonist as he is moved to take his own life was very difficult. And then there was that one moment in the studio when I knew that some part of the spirit of Meriwether Lewis had been conjured up for me. I don't believe in ghosts, but for a brief moment in space and time I was not alone in that studio.

The cantata was premiered by my Penn State Glee Club in the fall of 1999, with Mark Whatley as Meriwether Lewis, lovely Elisa Matthews as Sacajawea and stalwart Korey Jackson as York. And my dear friends, the Castalia Quartet, accompanied. You can hear several movements from this performance at another page here on the site.

...At this point the librettist wrests the pen from the composer's hand and begins to write himself.

When I wrote the script to our cantata, The Last Voyage of Captain Meriwether Lewis, and tried to tell the epic story of the expedition in thirty minutes of song, I was overwhelmed with the richness, depth, and sheer number of peoples and stories the Voyage entails. So many stories needed to be heard — Sacajawea's intrepid journey with her child, the two Captains' unwavering determination, the harrowing passage across the Bitterroots, the sublime elation on first sighting the Western Sea. But one story among all of these captured me and demanded that I try to tell it in its fullness. One strange, and funny and telling incident leapt out of the journals for me: that single incident of York, the slave, amusing the Indians with talk of his young life spent as a bear who snacked upon the occasional Indian child.

Who was this man? What moved him? How did his great adventure change him? And where did his striving and dreams take him?

That, in a nutshell, is the story of our music drama York: The Voice of Freedom.

Act One is the story familiar to us all - the journey West to the Pacific. The drama opens upon the Fourth of July as news of the Louisiana Purchase travels across America, and Northerners, Southerners, slaves and Indians voice their perspective on this "Opening" into the West. That scene ends with Captain Meriwether Lewis beginning his journey West to meet up with his co-captain, William Clark, in Louisville.

But it's only after all that national hoopla has done finished that the real drama begins. On a small strip of land in front of William Clark's residence at Clark's Point, Mary, a young woman very much in love with York, waits to say goodbye to her love before he goes out West, maybe forever. What comes across most strongly in this scene are the characters of Mary and York. Mary is fiery, willful, almost a force of nature with her spirit unbroken. York is dutiful, reliant, obedient and absolutely sure of who he is - he is his mater's servant.

In the rest of Act One we see the Voyagers journey West. And York slowly comes to see imself in a different light. Miles away from home, worlds away from the society of masters and servitude, personalities away from simple obedience - York becomes a member of this band, bound together by common purpose, equally in danger, equally faring forth.

And slowly York comes to see himself as an equal member and dares to believe that at the end of it all his payment will come not as a grant of land or a gift of gold, but in freedom. That last word of Act One, uttered at the edge of the Western Sea, is "Freedom!"

Act Two tells the story of what happens after the journey, after the journals, after the dream.

York receives no reward; rather, he is returned to slavery - for, of course, he had never for a single moment been out of it. Clark permits York to wed Mary. But the two are separated quickly. Mary is the property of a different master, and when that master moves away York's wife is taken from him. York becomes surly, truculent, and unmanageable. He is even rented out to a sterner master to teach him a lesson. Just as the hardship out West on the Voyage challenged York and made him change, so now the hardships of slave life hardened York. If the Voyage forged in York a soul of steel, the years afterwards tempered that steel to razor sharpness and adamant strength.

Although still owned, and by law still property, York is no slave in his soul or his mind. He never ceases his struggle to be free and to be united again with Mary.

When at long last this happens, York discovers he has a fourteen year old daughter whom Mary has named Pacifica: child of the Western Sea. At long last, York come to Mary - with money he has earned by his own labor, and which he will use to purchase his family's freedom.

By the end of the drama we have seen York develop into a free man who wills and acts of his own accord, and for his own sake acts against the brutality that surrounds him. York is a fatehr now, and his dreams are now dreams for his daughter and her children. York swears that the sort of life he lived will never be known to his daughter's children. And he sets off West, beyond the reach of masters.

Let me quote York's last words in the drama:

I LIVED MY WHOLE LIFE CHASING AFTER A DREAM.
IT'S DEAD NOW AND BURIED.
CHILD, I VOW THAT YOU WILL KNOW A BETTER WORLD.

SOMEWHERE THAT YOU MAY WANDER AND BE FREE,
SOMEWHERE WITH CHILDREN BORN IN LIBERTY.
SOMEWHERE I ONCE KNEW,
LAND WITH NO MASTERS,

FOUND BY PURSUING THE WILD HEADWATERS
OF THE MISSOURI,
THE NATIVE MISSOURI.
TRACE THAT MISSOURI BEYOND THE CRUEL SWAY
OF MASTERS AND BONDAGE.

I KNOW OF A VILLAGE
WHERE WOMEN ARE TREASURED
AND NO MAN IS SLAVE!

And the composer gets the final word....

Composing York has been a labor of love. I feel privileged to be able to bring this character to life again.

We have started to assemble a cast and production team which you can learn about on other pages at this website. But finally a few thank yous.

To Jim Ryan, who believed in the project from the beginning.

To our wonderful planning committee for the conference.

To Melanie Doebler, for everything she has done for the conference and the production.

To Ed Williams, the College's Associate Dean for Research, who has tirelessly worked to help us find funding for the production.

To Don Leslie, the College's Associate Dean for Resident Instruction, who has also tirelessly helped to find support in the sometimes strange and arcane world of academe.

To Stephen Ambrose, whom I met at the National Planning Seminar in Kansas City, and when I told him of our plans for an opera said: "Write it! It is a story that needs to be told. William Clark was an honorable man, but what he did to York demonstrates the horrors of the institution of slavery. Write it!" These words of encouragement have reverberated with me through the years.

And finally to Jason Charnesky, who knows how to write lyrics that bring out the best of my talent. He writes lyrics that sing on their own, create humor, pathos, inspiration and, especially with York, teach us what it is to be human.

The coming bicentenary of the Lewis and Clark Expedition will, no doubt, be the occasion for the creation of many other performance pieces. York: The Voice of Freedom is unique, I believe, among these in giving voice to the part that African Americans and Native Americans played in our national drama. York will challenge audiences to grapple with the realities of America's past and present in order to fulfill the promise of our future. York: The Voice of Freedom adds a salutary voice to the contemporary discussion of what is, after all, the most important question faced by every American citizen: what has our past truly been, and how must we live in the present to honor that past?

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Updated: August 24, 2002