Hugh Moffatt: Lyrics, etc

The Writing of
CORPS OF DISCOVERY, A MUSICAL JOURNEY
Music by Michael Ching
Libretto by Hugh Moffatt and Michael Ching
(speech written and delivered by Hugh Moffatt
Astoria, OR, July 23, 2005)


I appreciate the chance to talk to you. Just to give you the basics about me, I am the librettist for the three act opera, CORPS OF DISCOVERY, A MUSICAL JOURNEY, based on the Lewis and Clark expedition two hundred years ago. The opera was written over a period of about three years by composer Michael Ching and myself. It was commissioned by the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Show Me Opera Department and premiered by them in 2003. Opera Memphis mounted the premier professional production in 2004, and the opera will have its third staging this November by the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho, with some possible tour dates elsewhere in the Northwest in 2006. For those of you who know something of the contemporary opera scene, you will understand that a new opera that has had three separate productions in three consecutive years is pretty rare and something to brag about, hence, I’m bragging. Michael and I are very proud of this work.

Before I go much further, I want to point out something that should be obvious, but is still important to say. Essentially all of what we know about the Corps of Discovery and the tribes they met comes from the written records of European Americans. Extensive written records were not part of the culture of the Native Americans of that time. History is one thing, the present is another. It’s very important to listen to the current views of the various tribes on these events and most importantly on their current relationship as fellow Americans to the rest of us. Our opera recognizes some of their concerns and respects and acknowledges some of their points of view, but we do not presume to use their voice. The tribes don’t need anyone else to speak for them. They just need for the rest of us to listen a little more often. We all need to be heard.

My subject tonight is the writing of the opera. Though Michael and I learned a great deal about the expedition, I don’t pretend to be an expert on that. As I go on, I hope you will see that an attitude of learning and sharing was very important to the creation of this opera and to the opera itself. It took approximately as long to write and stage the first production of this work, as the Corps of Discovery took to organize, train and complete their journey. I think that says more about their efficiency than ours. However, a work of this scale does take a small army to complete.

I The opera was originally the idea of Eric Dillner, then director of the Show Me Opera of the University of Missouri at Columbia. Eric is now General Director of the Shreveport Opera. Eric took his idea to his music department chairman, who took it to his college dean, who took it to the provost, who took it to the chancellor and, to make a long story short, they all backed the idea all the way. You have to remember this was about eight years ago. The bicentennial was not high on the radar screen.

Eric was quite vivid in his description of his emotions the day he received a demo of the first music from the new opera. He’d already paid us part of our commission. What if it stunk, and we were on Waikiki laughing and living it up? Actually that wasn’t very likely---the Waikiki part, I mean. Chapter one of “Opera Commissioning For Dummies”: don’t give the creative team large advance payments. Fortunately, he liked what he heard.

This process still amazes me. Here is a major state institution, the University of Missouri, committing literally hundreds of thousands of state tax dollars for production and promotion and hundreds of hours of employee time (student time doesn’t count, of course) to an opera that neither they nor anyone else (including we, the alleged creators) has ever heard. I don’t think audiences and creative artists appreciate enough the courage that public commissioning bodies have to have when they make these decisions. It’s no wonder practical minded politicians hesitate to fund art programs. This is not the prospectus of a sound financial investment to say the least. Still, they do it, politicians continue to approve it, and we all reap the benefits. Let’s all make sure that never stops by continually telling our representatives how much we appreciate it.

Anyway, after considering several artistic teams, they selected Michael, the composer, and me, the wordsmith, a/k/a librettist, pretty heady term for a country songwriter from Texas. Now, where do we begin?

II I’ve heard it said that in order to sculpt an elephant you take a big rock and cut away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. To use that analogy in talking about the writing of CORPS OF DISCOVERY, the rock was there, in the form of the thousands of pages of the journals and other writings of those times and later, plus the cultural research done by and about the native tribes. The elephant was also there. The problem was it was more like a whole herd of elephants, and they all seemed to run together. Or maybe it was more like one gigantic Egyptian-pyramid-sized elephant, and we only had room for a much, much smaller show-and-tell-sized elephant that still had to look exactly like the big elephant.

We had to condense a two and a half year story into two and a half hours.

II I was raised in Texas, Michael in Hawaii. We didn’t know much about Lewis and Clark, so we started reading. We spent a year researching, beginning as most people do these days, with Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage and progressing through a lot of the journals themselves, writings by well-known Lewis and Clark scholars such as James Ronda, anthropological works about the Native Americans, volumes of letters, histories of people of the times including Thomas Jefferson, and finally interviews with historians and Native American experts on their tribes’ relationship both to the expedition and to the place of the story in current times. We also visited as much of the trail as was practical, including the Lolo Trail, Fort Clatsop, other Washington and Oregon coastal sites, and sites along the Missouri River in Missouri, North Dakota, Kansas, and Montana.

Without claiming that we became experts, we did gain a rough working understanding of the rock and of the big elephant.

III The actual writing began with a session in Eric Dillner’s living room in Columbia, MO. Michael and I took yellow sticky notes and wrote down everything we thought we wanted in the show: one idea or scene per sticky note. This included all kinds of things: the dangerous encounter with the Sioux, the winter with the Mandans and Hidatsas, the birth of Baptiste, Sacagawea meeting her long lost brother who was now chief of the Shoshone (try making up something like that!), the sighting of the Pacific, Christmas morning at Ft. Clatsop, the death of Lewis (Two bullets in him and he took all night to die----talk about tailor made for opera!)… lots of other things. The dog, the dancing, the stories, York, the slave, and his life before and after the expedition…there were a lot of yellow sticky notes pasted on Eric’s living room wall. I think we had to take most of his artwork down.

So we had the scenes and the principles, but the story was missing. Michael and I, like most writers, are completely character driven. I have often said that I write by first getting to know my characters really well. Then I just follow them around and write down what they say. And yes, I do keep clear of psychiatrists when I’m in my writing mode.

What we finally agreed on was a three-part story, which developed into the three acts. There is a historical and a dramatic structure in each. Historically, the first act tells the story from the beginnings of the Corps at Camp DuBois at the mouth of the Missouri River through the following winter at Fort Mandan. The second act takes them to the Pacific Ocean, and the third act is a short epilogue based on the death of Lewis.

IV But the opera is not a musical history lesson. The drama comes from certain characters and their experiences and their development. The first act focuses on two minor members of the corps, George Shannon, at 17 the youngest, and John Potts, one of the older members. It all begins in a rowdy tavern in St Louis a week or so after the Corps has returned from their expedition. A local patron enters bringing with him Shannon and Potts to show off to his friends. Excitedly, the crowd focuses on them and asks them to tell their story, and so the scenes of the first year begin, interspersed with comments to and from the tavern crowd.

One of the important reasons to choose minor characters is to give room to create and to dramatize. We have done our best to retain historical accuracy, but in areas where the historians don’t know much, we are relatively free, and not much is known about Shannon and Potts during the years of the expedition. They did not keep journals and are mentioned generally only in passing. Dramatically, our Potts is a brooding, rootless German expatriate who gains meaning in life from his experience in the wilderness. Our Shannon begins as a youth full of excitement and the romance of adventure, who finds himself growing up and longing for a home and family of his own. At the end of ACT I, Shannon is ready to settle down, and Potts just wants to “go back out there”. Historically they both followed these paths. Shannon became a lawyer and politician. Potts joined another ex-Corps member, John Colter, in adventuring in the west.

Thus there is a opposite development in the two characters. This is expressed in two back-to-back arias near the end of the Act, “The Rapture of John Potts” and “Shannon’s Aria”. Their characters mirror those of Lewis and Clark. Lewis, like Potts, is a brooding nature lover, who is never really comfortable in civilization. Clark, like Shannon, is a healthy extrovert, ready to get back to home and family after the job is finished.

Act II focuses on Sacagawea. We use the phonetic pronunciation that Clark recorded in his diary. There’s little doubt that this is how she was called as a member of the Hidatsa and as a member of the Corps of Discovery. It is a Hidatsa word that means Bird Woman. She was born Shoshone of course, and the Shoshone make a case that her Hidatsa name was based on a Shoshone word meaning Boat Pusher that is usually pronounced today as Sacajawea, and may have been her Shoshone name. Hence the two versions of her name.

Though much has been written about Sacagawea, not much detail is really known. She was born Shoshone, stolen by the Hidatsa and she became a member of their tribe. She married the French trapper, Toussaint Charbonneau and spent 18 months traveling as a respected and honored member of the Corps of Discovery. We have drawn her very freely as a modern woman, whose experience with many cultures leaves her enriched and also somewhat alone, a part of all the cultures she has known yet not fully a member of any one. Her aria “Sacagawea’s Discovery” expresses this conflict and its resolution within her.

The dramatic situation of ACT II has her telling to the women of her Hidatsa family the stories of her time with the Corps, while she decides whether or not to let Captain Clark take her son, Baptiste, with him to St Louis when he heads back down the river in a few days. Clark became attached to the child, and very much wanted to raise him as his own son. The Act has two arias of complementary feelings near the end, similarly to ACT I. This time they are both sung by the same character, Sacagawea. The first is “Sacagawea’s Discovery”, that I already mentioned. The second, “Sagagawea’s Vision”, describes her dream vision, in which the sacred elder Grandmother Who Never Dies appeared to her to show her the future life of her son in order to help her decide about him now. These two arias show the conflict within her but ultimately also show her transcending the conflict to claim her identity as an individual.

ACT II is the most native based part of the opera. The portrayal of the Hidatsa culture is based mostly on the essential anthropological study, Hidatsa Social and Ceremonial Organization, by Alfred Bowers. We also drew from many other books including the wonderful Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden.

We are deeply indebted to Amy Mossett of the Three Affiliated Tribes in North Dakota and to tribal elders Gale Baker and Rosalee Mandan for their patient and tolerant review of the Act and particularly for their work in providing the Hidatsa language parts. We also had invaluable help from Hobby Hevewah of the Shoshone tribe for similar input and for the Shoshone language parts.

Sometimes people ask me if this opera is in English (many people associate opera with only continental European languages). I say yes, which is essentially true, but some sections are in French, Hidatsa and Shoshone as well as a few scattered words of German.

This is very fitting. It’s important to remember that the Corps of Discovery was itself made up of many cultures. There were the European-Americans, many of them of French origin and French speaking. There were several men of mixed European-native origin. There was at least one African-American, Clark’s slave, York, and probably others of mixed African-American origin, and of course, Sacagawea. As historian James Ronda put it, “No 'village on the move’ could represent more fully the astounding diversity of American life than the Corps of Discovery. For them, as for us, the journey was to discover not only the land but themselves and each other.”*

The last part of this quote is key to what we hope is the main impact of our musical journey. Though I’ve talked a lot today about historical and cultural sources and our efforts at accuracy, it is above all a work of fiction and must stand or fall on the success of its theme.

The result of the exploration was far from being all positive. It’s for good reason that those of us directly involved in the Bicentennial refer to it as a commemoration rather than a celebration. But there is something important about The Corps of Discovery that we can all celebrate. Their journey itself, separated from what followed it, was remarkable for its peaceful nature. You cannot read the journals very long without recognizing a very human story of cooperation and sharing among diverse cultures. In our modern day of rapid worldwide communication, it’s hard for us to imagine how different these people were. I don’t just mean the Euro-Americans and the Native Americans, the different tribes were themselves often complete strangers to each other.

In many ways, the story of the Corps of Discovery recalls the Camelot legend. The history of the cultures leading up to the journey and the history after the journey has many ugly and tragic parts. The story of the Corps itself, though, is inspiring as a story of friendship. They had their misunderstandings and their dislikes and they had some “bad days”, but those were the exceptions. If we, today, can get along with each other as well as they did, we’ll be doing very well. Actually we have to do that well. We really don’t have any choice. As big and diverse as we are, we are all Americans. United we stand, and most certainly, truer now than ever, divided, we fall.

I’m going to close by reading the text of the Chorale that ends the opera. At the end of ACT III, Lewis has died and left the stage. Members of the cast enter one by one as actors and Americans rather than as their characters and sing directly to the audience. They start with these lines sung individually:

Potts- We must remember the past

Shannon- And we must honor the past

Black Buffalo- (or other Native American)
We can’t forget the past

The Partisan- (or other Native American)
We must not repeat the past

York- We will not forget the past

Sac- We cannot change the past
But perfect in health
Perfect in spirit
Committed as one
All- We are free to change today

Then the whole ensemble sings to the audience, Americans to Americans, the closing chorale, “Land of Freedom”. This is the text:

York- I see a land where all are free
Potts- A land of hopes and dreams
The Partisan- Where all can live with dignity
Sacagawea- Where all have a place

Company- This land of freedom
Hopes and dreams
We’ll keep it strong
We’ll keep it free

Each one of us
Must do his/her part
In our hearts we know the way
America!

We’re the future of this nation
From sea to shining sea
All cultures, all opinions
Together differently

This land of freedom
Hopes and dreams
We’ll keep it strong
We’ll keep it free

Each one of us
Must do his/her part
In our hearts we know the way

America!
America!
America!



Thanks for your time and attention.


* Voyages of Discovery, James Rhonda, p. 330