Curt Cacioppo

Featuring: Emerson String Quartet

1988 release ** Highly enjoyable album by American pianist and composer, with four piano pieces performed by Cacioppo himself plus the Monsterslayer string quartet based on Navajo cosmology performed by the Emerson String Quartet. "The principal material of the work evolved out of a system of scales, intervals, chords and rhythms that I derived from numerological, directional and other elements of Navajo cosmology. Although the connected movements more or less follow sonata form, song form, scherzo-trio-da capo and rondo form respectively, the sequence of ideas is often abstractly determined in correspondence with Navajo song structures, particularly those of the yeibichai melodies. The performance technique called for in the first movement of batting the string with the taut hair of the bow alludes to the drumming practiced in the Enemyway ceremony - every stroke of the beater is said to drive the ghosts of dead foes further into the ground. Sliding from note to note in certain melodic passages approximates the style of music played on the Apache fiddle, a tubular one or two stringed instrument made out of a length of mescal root. The broad structure of the quartet models itself after that of most Navajo ceremonies, in which an initial purification rite paves the way for recitation of chosen episodes from the creation story."