Oklahoma City, Okla. – A new opera by Chickasaw classical composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate debuted Sunday Oct. 27 with Canterbury Voices at the Civic Center Music Hall in Oklahoma City. “Loksi’ Shaali’” (Shell Shaker) is a choral and orchestral composition and tells the Chickasaw origin stories of the eastern migration and the turtle rattle. “Loksi’ Shaali’” was performed entirely in the Chickasaw language, a historic world first.
“Loksi’ Shaali’” was conducted by Tianhui Ng, the Director of Orchestral Studies at Mount Holyoke College. The concert opera featured a cast of award winning American Indian singers- Kirsten Kunkle (Mvskoke), Kaitlin Morton (Cherokee), Mark Billy (Choctaw), and Grant Youngblood (Lumbee).
Tate, Kunkle, and Morton spoke with Mvskoke Media’s LiveWire on Oct 19 about the writing process, the production, and singing in the Chickasaw language.
The concept for “Loksi’ Shaali’” began over a decade earlier in 2009. The piece is a smaller movement of the larger composition, “Lowak Shoppala’” (Fire and Light) that blended modern orchestral composition, poetry, and dance with traditional Chickasaw songs. Tate said that he knew at the time he wanted to expand the 12 minute scene into a larger, standalone opera. In 2020 he looked into development grants and teamed up with Ng, who then commissioned the work with his college.
Loksi’ Shaali'” is an origin story about how we obtained our turtle rattles as our percussion instrument for Chickasaws… It’s really a hero story about a young girl named Loksi’.
Tate shares a collaborative, comfortable relationship with Chickasaw linguist and artisan Dr. Joshua Hinson, Chickasaw Nation Language Program Director. For Tate, an adult language learner, Hinson’s expertise and friendship was a critical component to the production.
“And of course he’s worked with all of the vocalists individually. He’s created vocal tracks, audio recordings,” Tate said. “So he was doing all that. So he’s just been an amazing and critical backbone to this entire production.”
Knuckle and Morton are both classically trained to sing in foreign languages, yet their professional focus is usually in the Western European traditional performance of Italian, French, or German. Both were able to draw on different experiences in their own native language during the process.
For Morton, she was able to draw on her knowledge and understanding of the Cherokee language. “I grew up singing and speaking the Cherokee language. And so being able to sing in Chickasaw, I found that it’s highly rhythmic,” she explained.
“It has those Italian legato vowels. It’s got the beauty of the consonants. It also has a bit of nasal vowels, which you find in French singing. So it’s taking these tools that I’ve learned in conservatory and everything of that classical Westernized music, and being able to use those tools to bring to life a native language,” Morton said. “It’s been a really beautiful process for me.”
For Kunkle, finding balance and understanding was key. “I had the opposite initial problem that I tried to make everything too Italianate. I tried to make it too much like the opera that I had always sung,” she said. “And it is similar in certain ways to Muscogee, but it is dissimilar in other ways. And when I would try to find that balance, I would go too far one way and then back the other.”
“I spent a lot of time just trying to learn tiny bits of grammar along with it so that I could start to understand it, because that’s how my brain works,” Kunkle said. “So it wasn’t easy by any means, and trying to find that balance for the things like the nasality and when there are those lifts with glottals.”
The process of getting it right is where Hinson’s work became crucial. “So meeting with Josh was really, really helpful to me because we geeked out over all sorts of things,” Kunkle said, “but we also spent almost two hours just going through my part.”
Morton summed up the team’s feelings on this historic first by sharing, “It’s historic not only for Native Americans, but also for the world of opera. I can’t believe that I’m a part of this, but it’s such a huge honor and I’m just grateful every day to be able to be a part of this team.”
The University of Central Oklahoma classical music radio station, KUCO, will be rebroadcasting “Loksi’ Shaali’”. For information on scheduling and their live stream, visit classicalkuco.org.
For more information on “Loksi’ Shaali’” visit Canterbury Voices.
For more information on Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, visit JerodTate.com
