Combining story & song

As a child in Juneau, CrossSound co-founder Jocelyn Clark used to go to the museum on the weekends to hear Walter Williams tell stories.

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"He told these stories only in Tlingit, but he was a good enough storyteller that somehow we understood these stories, even though we couldn't speak the language," she said.

Years later, when she began studying the ancient narrative vocal tradition of pansori in Korea, she began to think about the cross-cultural possibilities of storytelling combined with composition. This week's CrossSound 2005 festival, co-organized by Stefan Hakenberg, grew out of the theory that through collaboration, music and story could create a new perspective on experience and place.

Since March 24, three teams of composers and writers have been working in Juneau, Ketchikan and Sitka on 20-to-30 minute multidisciplinary compositions for storytellers and musicians. The result, "RainSongs: Three Antiphonous Tales From Wet Lands," plays at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Chapel by the Lake. It also plays at the Sheet'ka Kwan Naa Kahidi house, Thursday in Sitka; the Saxman Tribal House, Friday in Ketchikan; and the University of Alaska Anchorage arts building, Sunday in Anchorage.

"The whole idea of storytelling and story-singing was on my mind, and we thought it would be a nice fit with Southeast Alaska," Clark said. "We wanted to figure out how we could make a program that really contrasted with itself, but still made sense in the context of where we are and where we live."

• In Juneau, local writer Brett Dillingham's story, "Klamott and the Land Otter People," is based on the Native tradition in which children are educated by their uncles. The protagonist, Klammot, is ignored by his uncle and grows up to be aggressive and cheeky. He mocks nature and is eventually lured underwater by land otters, the shape-shifting spirits of the river. Klammot's sisters and the rest of the people in the village must go to the shaman to ask for help in bringing Klammot back. The underlying theme: Mess with nature and pay the price.

Dr. Chan Park is the associate professor of Korean language, literature and performance studies at Ohio State. She wrote a libretto based on pansori, which she's studied since 1974. She plays all the characters in the story, not by moving but by changing her voice. She and Hakenberg have been discussing the composition since her recitals in Juneau last March and April. It runs about 35 minutes.

"This is, to our knowledge, the first time a non-Korean composer has written music for a pansori singer," Hakenberg said. "Just seeing it come together has been extremely interesting as a cross-cultural experience. It's a new art form - Southeast Alaska pansori."

"I am an outsider of Tlingit culture, and I did not want to make it sound like I knew it at all, because I don't know anything," Park said. "I came to it with dual respect and also the dual admission of ignorance. And due fascination with the culture that Alaska has to offer, and the strong conviction for the kind of shared myths, the shared-ness of the lessons, the timelessness. That gave me some strength."

The players are Mei Han (zheng), Ken Wright (violin), Andreas Brautigam (violin), Inés Volgar (violin) and Mark Wolbert (clarinet).

• In Ketchikan, storyteller, writer, radio host and arts administrator Keith Smith worked with 13 students from the Tongass School of Arts and Sciences Writer's Workshop, grades one through six, to write the Northwest Coast-influenced trickster story "Raven Goes To School." The story chronicles a mischievous trickster raven who's caught stealing fish and sentenced by court to attend a reform school. The raven promptly instigates a rebellion in the school.

New York composer Fred Ho, a writer, Asian-American activist and renowned baritone sax player, has worked with Smith to create the 22-minute composition "The Raven Suite." Ho has received three Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Art Projects grants, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and the 1988 Duke Ellington Distinguished Artist Lifetime Achievement Award from the Black Musicians Conference. He has worked extensively on stories involving the Chinese trickster monkey.

"Tricksters are fantastical creatures," he said. "They're monolithic representations of good and evil, but they have contradictory elements of all those characteristics. Tricksters are essentially rebels and destabilizers. They're outlaws. They're transgressors, violators. I feel we need to encourage that rejection of conformity, passivity and acquiescence."

Smith performs the song, taking on multiple personalities as the trickster. Ho's composition is written as a brass fantasy, with colorful parts for horns and odd changes to 98 and 1712 8 tempos. It's a departure for him, as he usually writes for woodwinds. The players are Dale Curtis (trumpet), Tia Wilhelm (horn), Wayne Houtcooper (trombone), Rob Holston (tuba) and Ho (bari sax).

• In Sitka, Korean composer Cecilia Kim has created a multimedia composition based on "The Story of Rain," a series of four poems by Sitka writer John Straley. Known for his mystery novels, Straley was influenced by "Love and Time," a collection of translated poems by Chinese Sung-period ku-wen writer Ou-yang Hsiu (1007-1072).

"I tried to write a series of poems that would create a mood and atmosphere that (Kim) could fill up with sound in anyway she liked," Straley said. "I turned to the Chinese, who are inspired by nature. And in these Chinese poems, there seems to be an open doorway between the mind and nature. I used that as the model."

Straley's work grew out of images from his journal - snapshots of rain, the gathering of clouds, the rising up of the water and the force of the rain.

Kim, a professor in composition at Sang Myung University in Seoul, has been experimenting with multimedia, film and modern dance since studying in Philadelphia in the early 1990s. Her composition uses instruments as a soundscape, more than an actual score or melody. Sounds move from one space to another, and the visual presentation includes dramatic lighting and a combination of projections.

Juneau performer Roblin Gray Davis is the storyteller, and the musicians are Jenny Quinn (viola), Sally Schlichting (flute), Karl Pusch (clarinet), Roger Schmidt (trombone), Clea Will (tuba) and Ed Littlefield (percussion).

• Korry Keeker can be reached at korry.keeker@juneauempire.com.