By Christopher Fulkerson
The dramatic madrigal scene Celestial Sixties I for six male voices was completed in 1990, to a commission from the men's chorus Chanticleer by its founder, Louis Botto. It is about ten minutes long, and opens the Celestial Sixties epicycle. It was revised in 2009.
It is a setting in one movement of the following texts in English:
All Along the Watchtower, by Bob Dylan
The Mantra of Padmasambhava
Proverbs for Paranoids I, from GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, by Thomas Pynchon
Lay Down (Candles In the Rain), by Melanie Safka
Together with its companion piece CELESTIAL SIXTIES II it forms one of the epicycles of the Work In Progress music festival at which CF has been working since 1984. The Buddhist Mantra of Padmasambhava, from a terma ("revealed treasure") biography of that Tantric master, links the two halves of Celestial Sixties I, is set as a three-voice cadenza that rises from the lowest voices, through the ensemble to its highest voices. At the parallel place in Celestial Sixties II, this highpoint from the Mantra of Padmasambhava is recalled and that of the Heart Sutra takes up in its place, moving in another three-voice group cadenza downward to the lowest voices. Between them, the two cadenzas thus describe a "Gravity's Rainbow," as meant in the title of the eponymous novel by Thomas Pynchon.
The Celestial Sixties cycle is meant to capture the visionary and
ecstatic spirit of the 1960s in California and the rest of America, when a new level of awareness seemed to have been achieved by some (though resisted by others), as well as the transcendental but at times troubled mood of its cultural scene, translated into the Expressionist musical idiom of modern Classical music. The texts were chosen for their sometimes subtle, and at other times provocative interrelations, both within each piece, and between the two of them.
The score is 60 pages, in a professional copyist's fair hand. Hard Copy of the Study Score, mailed to you, is $10.