ABSTRACT
The work, Tzinquaw, was devised and produced in the Vancouver Island town of Duncan by Morrison, a local school teacher and church musician. Tzinquaw was first performed on the stage of the Cowichan High School Auditorium on November 22, 1950. Tzinquaw the opera was the end result of a long musical project undertaken by Frank Morrison and members of the Cowichan First Nation during the 1940s. Although the critical response to Tzinquaw was divided, the opera heightened awareness of the perilous state of First Nations culture in Canada of the 1950s. When enough material had been gathered and written down in Western music notation, Abel Joe asked Morrison to write a musical theater piece about the legend of the Tzinquaw, the Thunderbird, using the piano transcriptions of the Cowichan songs. Frank Morrison and Cecil West's own Western cultural aesthetics were imposed on the musical and spiritual culture of the Cowichan First Nation.
