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Photo by Daniel Sheehan |
PULLMAN – Composer Wayne Horvitz will present his oratorio “Heartsong of Charging Elk” at 7 p.m. Saturday, March 27 in the Kimbrough Music Building, Room 101.
Horvitz’s oratorio for four voices and 10 chamber instruments is based on James Welch’s novel, “The Heartsong of Charging Elk” (New York: Doubleday, 2000). Welch (1940–2003) was one of the best-known Native American writers of his time.
Inspired by historical events, “Heartsong of Charging Elk” tells the story of an Oglala Sioux who was hospitalized for broken ribs and influenza in Marseilles, France, in 1889 while touring with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. When the show moved on, Charging Elk, now recovered from his illness and injuries, was left stranded in the French city, speaking neither French nor English.
“Using that historical predicament for his springboard,” Horvitz has written, “James Welch conjures a poetic narrative of Charging Elk’s displaced existence following his abandonment.”
A native of New York who now resides in Seattle, Horvitz is an internationally known keyboardist, composer and producer. Although best known as a jazz musician, he works in many musical genres. He has had commissioning grants from Meet the Composer, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Arts Council, the Mary Flagler Carey Trust, the Seattle Arts Commission, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, the Fund for U.S. Artists and a Rockefeller MAP grant. He has composed and produced music for PBS programming and film director Gus Van Sant.
Horvitz will provide a short lecture and question and answer about the oratorio with the audience.
The event will also bring two speakers, Professors Kathryn Shanley and Raymond J. Demallie, who are experts on James Welch and on Black Elk, a real Sioux man who did travel with the Wild West Show and actually was stranded in France, eventually making his way to England and then back to his home on the Great Plains. The pair will speak at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 27 in Kimbrough Rm. 101.
Professor Kathryn Shanley earned her doctorate in English and Native American literature at the University of Michigan. A member of the Assiniboine Tribe, Shanley is now a professor of Native American studies and assistant to the president and provost of the University of Montana. She has edited Native American Literature: Boundaries and Sovereignties (2001) and is working on a book on James Welch.
Professor Raymond J. Demaille is chancellor’s professor of anthropology and adjunct professor of folklore, director of the American Indian Studies Research Institute, and curator of North American ethnology at the Mathers Museum at Indiana University. Demaille has researched and written extensively on Great Plains tribes. In 2008 he annotated a new edition of John G. Neihardt’s famous Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, first published in 1932.