KILLAPATA/CHASKAPATA

Composer's note:  Killapata/Chaskapata was written in 1983 for the High School Flute Choir of the National Flute Association (NFA) and Judith Bentley, its director at that time. It received its premiere at the NFA’s convention in Philadelphia in August of that year, with the composer as soloist. Sollberger explains the origin of the piece: “Killapata and Chaskapata are recently-discovered Inca ritual sites located on the approaches to Machu Pichu, their Andean ritual center. Literally translated, the words mean, respectively, ‘above the moon’ and ‘above the stars.’ These words, coupled with images of imperial splendor now decayed and eroded amidst the seemingly eternal high wind and snow-swept peaks of the Andes, were catalysts in the work’s generation.”

“Killapata/Chaskapata,” Sollberger continues, “is in what I call my ‘invented tradition’ mode. It is not folk music, nor is it based on folk music. Rather, it grows out of my idea of a music appropriate to this distant culture, this distant place that I have never visited except in my imagination. It is music for a society in which ritual, tied to the measured rhythms of sun, moon, stars, and seasons, meant much. My ‘meta-Incan’ music evokes ritual through repetition and cyclic restatement of simple period rhythms, melodic shapes, and the charms or talismans. Here and there the astute listener may even discern traces of ‘Incan jazz’—before New Orleans!—as the work proceeds to a conclusion that evokes the desolation and remorseless winds of the highest altitudes.”