Manitou

The commission for Manitou had been arranged by my friend Toru Takemitsu for the International Program for Contemporary Music Composition at Suntory Hall, Tokyo, and was premiered there in 1995 by the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra. The idea for the concert was unique and could be repeated elsewhere. The commissioned work was to be the centerpiece of the program; but the composer was to choose the whole program, which was to consist of a composition from past repertoire that had influenced him and a work by a young contemporary composer of promise. I gave them the option of performing Leoš Janáček’s Taras Bulba or Carl Nielsen’s Inextinguishable Symphony (they chose the latter); and for the young composer I selected Chris Paul Harman, who accompanied me to Tokyo.

For my own composition I wanted to create something with a distinctly Canadian theme. Manitou is the Algonquin word denoting the ‘mysterious being’ that, for the woodland Indians of North America, represents the unknown power of life and the universe. Sometimes Manitou is associated with the sun to suggest omnipotence, though, like the Christian God, he is unseen. When I discussed native spirituality with a Manitoba Indian he kept using the word ‘monster’ to describe Manitou and mentioned that his people used to believe that lightning was a serpent vomited up by him.

I spent the winter months of 1993-94 in Manitoba, the province of Canada that takes its name from this ‘mysterious’ god. In Manitoba the winters are long and harsh. Sometimes the thermometer remains at twenty degrees or more below zero for weeks on end. But the days are sunny, and over the relatively flat and treeless landscape the skies seem enormous. It was during these times, in the pleasant studio provided by Brandon University, that I sketched out Manitou, and I have no doubt that the climate, the geography and the ‘mysterious being’ contributed strongly to the shape and character of what was written there. R. Murray Schafer