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Craig Coray’s We Walk to the Sky for Chamber Ensemble

by Dr. Sean Dowgray, CMS Faculty Organizer and Term Assistant Professor of Music

In February, music instructor, ethnomusicologist, and composer Craig Coray visited the department’s Alaska Native Music course, lecturing to the students on various song and dance practices from the Dena’ina peoples. Coray discussed his upbringing in villages in Pedro Bay and then Nondalton. Coray’s parents moved from Los Angeles to become the first school teachers in Pedro Bay in the 1950’s. In this, we learned that his father, John Coray, made the first recordings of Dena’ina song and speech in 1954 in his efforts to send audio “letters” to his parents back in Los Angeles. These recordings would later be returned to Craig by his grandparents, which he edited and compiled into the book, Dnaghelt’ana Qut’ ana K’eli Ahdelyax (They Sing the Songs of Many Peoples). This book with an accompanying CD contains 26 songs, translations, text descriptions, and in some cases, transcriptions.

Coray also discussed broad concepts such as Animism: the belief that all things have a spirit and are in that sense, alive. This does not pertain just to animals, but plants, rocks, trees, mountains, and lakes. The sense of aliveness comes from the fact that all these things are in constant change; everything is alive in its unfolding. Such a concept feels particularly immediate in a place like Alaska, where the land is vast, immense, and change is constant and extreme. However, this is more than just a general feeling for the Dena’ina, as is seen in aspects of their language. For example, in naming places, verbs are often used rather than the more familiar noun for westerners. “Nouns objectify as if on a permanent basis whereas verbs describe what is actually happening,” Coray noted. Wassillie Treffon, who performed many of the works found in the accompanying CD to Coray’s book, grew up in Dilah Vena, translating to “fish swim in lake,” identifying the place by what happens there. You can hear more about Coray, his father’s work, and get a glimpse into the materials of his book in a presentation that he gave in 2013 on KSKA Anchorage as part of the hosted by the Arctic Studies Center and the Anchorage Museum.

Through Coray’s involvement with the Alaska Native Music course, I became interested in Coray’s compositions given his background. The chamber work, We Walk to the Sky (1994) for violin, cello, flute, clarinet, saxophone, and timpani immediately stood out to me given its instrumentation, rhythmic material, and the interweaving of various melodic lines. In the work’s preface, Coray describes:

We Walk to the Sky is an Athabaskan (Denaina) name for a particular mountain pass that appears to lead gradually but infinitely upward. I have used the title rather loosely to convey the idea of walking in mountains, which for me is a source of renewal, both physical and spiritual. Most of the music was composed from a boat at my wilderness home in Lake Clark, where I was able to see the mountains as I worked.

The subtitles of the two movements make reference to aspects both of mountains and of the music itself. Thus ‘Contours’ is essentially linear and contrapuntal, suggesting the profile of mountain; whereas in “Patterns” the strong rhythms and repetition were influenced by the feel of walking in mountain terrain.

The instruments were chosen for their sonorities, particularly the saxophone, which because of its proximity to the human voice seemed most appropriate for the song-like melody in the first movement.

While I have not hesitated to incorporate native Alaska melodies into my compositions in the past, these are in reality my own, though I would like to think that in their intervallic and rhythmic structure some of them would be indistinguishable from Denaina song. There is no programmatic intent in the music, except that the transformation of themes which takes place during the work could be interpreted as a transformation of spirit.

The piece opens with a relatively constrained melody from the cello alone, however, the slides (indicated by diagonal lines attached to certain notes) give off both the impression of mountain terrain as well as inflections that a voice might do when singing a melody.

 

 

This opening is contrasted with the entrance of saxophone and timpani, resulting in material with greater rhythmic momentum. After a series of melodies played by different groupings of instruments, the saxophone, violin, cello, and timpani, all play together in what is the most dense texture of the movement, resulting in four independent lines, each phrased in a slightly different metrical way. In certain moments, the music seems to suggest focus on a single mountain and its features, while at others, the immensity of the entire range is more readily felt.

The second movement begins with greater momentum at the outset, introduced by a saxophone melody that, while notated within a regular meter, constantly changes its rhythmic groupings of two and three. The percussion comes in shortly after the saxophone’s entrance, providing a steady, driving rhythm against a changing melody.

 

 

It is not uncommon for composers to take the majestic landscape of Alaska as inspiration for their musical works. The Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival has an annual two week residency with the purpose of nurturing that very idea: . While We Walk to the Sky certainly fits into this category, it stands out to me amongst other pieces I have heard that take Alaska’s landscape as its inspiration. Coray’s work seems to come less from an impetus of individual creation (“what do I have to say of this place”), but from one rooted in listening to a place and its people over a significant period of one’s lifetime (“what is it that this place may be saying?”).

On Friday, April 11th at 7:30pm in the Davis Concert Hall, an all-star group of musicians will perform Coray’s We Walk to the Sky for violin, cello, flute, clarinet, saxophone, and percussion as part of the event, “Frozen Frequencies: The Fiber of Music.” The Circumpolar Music Series, the International Chamber Music Alaska (ICMA), and the Mana Music String Quartet from Hawaii come together to present an evening of chamber music by J.S. Bach, Johann Halvorsen, John Luther Adams, Craig Coray, Jeffrey Cotton, as well as Hawaiian folk tunes and more! 51�������� music faculty percussionist Dr. Sean Dowgray and violinist Dr. Yue Sun will join forces with acclaimed violinist Eric Siberger, and cellist Joshua Nakazawa from Hawaii. George Rydlinski (FSO), Renee Muir (FSO), Dr. Michael McConnell (51�������� Professor of Woodwinds), and Dorli McWayne (51�������� Professor of Flute) will be featured in Coray's We Walk to the Sky.

 

 

 

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51�������� the Author

Dr. Sean Dowgray is a classical percussionist specializing in modern and contemporary music. Dowgray is a proponent of creative collaborations which has resulted in recent musical works by Daniel Tacke (Vorrücken and einsamkeit), Josh Levine (Shrinking world/expanding and Les yeux ouverts) as well as new chamber works by Justin Murphy-Mancini (Sic itur ad astra and A Song of Grecis.) and Lydia Winsor Brinadmour (As if, sand). In the recent past, Dowgray has collaborated closely with composers including Jürg Frey (Garden of Transparency), Christopher Adler (Strata), Ioannis Mitsialis (Machine Mode), Lewis Nielson (Where Ashes Make the Flowers Grow and NOVA), and James Wood (Cloud Polyphonies). As a soloist, Dr. Dowgray has focused extensively on works that stretch the technical and expressive capabilities of both instrument and performer. This includes the work of Jason Eckardt, Josh Levine, Daniel Tacke, Salvatore Sciarrino, Lewis Nielson, David Lang, Christopher Adler, Brian Ferneyhough, Luciano Berio, Richard Barrett. Dowgray has been featured as a soloist at the Oberlin Percussion Institute, the Percussive Art Society International Convention (PASIC), the WasteLAnd New Music Series, Harvard’s Institute for Advanced Learning, the University of Arizona, the SoundON New Music Festival, and Eureka! Musical Minds of California. As a creative practitioner, Dowgray has focused recently on his project, WHEN for mixed ensemble set to premiere in 2025. He recently completed the interdisciplinary collaboration, In A Time of Change: Boreal Forest Stories featuring artists and scientists. As part of this collaboration, Dowgray created the work Moving Through the Boreal Forest in partnership with Maïté Agopian (light and shadow work) and Daryl Farmer (poetry), Associate Professor of English at 51��������. Dr. Dowgray is a graduate of the Interlochen Arts Academy where he studied with John Alfieri, the Oberlin Conservatory (B.M.) where studied with Michael Rosen, the 51�������� (M.M.) where he studied with Dr. Morris Palter, and the University of California San Diego (D.M.A) where he studied with Steven Schick. In Dr. Dowgray's dissertation, Time Being: Percussion as a Study of Time, he presents an analyses of new and rarely heard works for and with percussion through theoretical frameworks of time study from authors including Jonathan Kramer, J.T. Fraser, Edward T. Hall, and others. Recent notable performances include John Corigliano's percussion concerto, Conjurer with the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra and Lewis Nielson's Lengua Encubierto for solo percussion at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention (PASIC).