ABSTRACT
Musicians and composers brighten and humanize the world. While I am not a composer, music has been my lifelong passion. Before I could appreciate some forms of music, like opera, I had to mature into it. Throughout my literary life I have written poetry, essays, and short ction, and published my work locally and internationally. Though I didn’t like or appreciate opera when I was younger, ironically, I came to write the oratorio, Enemy Slayer, A Navajo Oratorio, a commissioned work for the Phoenix Symphony (PS) under the direction of Michael Christie, who was the Virginia G. Piper Music Director at the time. Mark Grey, a composer, was commissioned to write a musical composition as part of a new work for the PS’s sixtieth anniversary celebration. Preliminary discussions between Michael and Mark, in which I was not involved, raised the possibility of creating a work based on a creation story from one of the local Indigenous communities, perhaps, the story “Naayéé neizghání” (“Monster Slayer”), from the Navajo mythic stories. The Navajo are also known as the Diné, which translates into English as “The People.” We are also known as the Navajo. I will use these terms interchangeably. My involvement with the project began later with Mark’s search for a Diné poet to write the libretto, the lyrics for the performance. We corresponded, and after looking over his website and speaking with him, I accepted his offer to write the libretto without knowing what an oratorio and libretto were. I looked the terms up later. While the oratorio is a form of opera, it is not as full-blown, with elaborate stage sets and a large cast. An oratorio usually tells a biblical creation story, with a single or a few soloists, an orchestra, and a chorus. Handel’s Messiah and Haydn’s The Creation are among the most well-known oratorios that were commissioned in Europe in the eighteenth century.
