We Need to Dream All This Again
Jerome Kitzke
About this work: Published by: PEER INTERNATIONAL CORP. (BMI)
The composer’s epigraph running through the score of this work reads:
“In an unfriendly winter a storm takes hold, and snow falls and the brittle cold accentuates the loneliness of humans. But a strong dream, a peace dream, a hope dream comes a-flaming from the heart of an insistent tireless soul that says: Remember when the people sang of life with guts and verve, with tenderness and love which kept up the dance so that even in cold and silence the heart sang with a great warm bloodiness and purpose that kept the circle whole and ever-turning. Let’s dance and call it praying.”
The title of this work was respectfully borrowed from the Bernard Pomerance narrative, of which the author Barry Lopez says, “This story of sacrilege and duplicity in the Black Hills cannot be told often enough, for the modern dilemma reverberates exquisitely within it.” The sacrilege and duplicity Mr. Lopez refers to is the U.S. government’s behavior in their efforts to steal the Black Hills from the Lakota, Tsistisistas, and Arapaho people in the late 19th century. In 1975 the U.S. Court of Claims called the government’s conduct toward the Lakota in all probability “the most ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings” in U.S. history. Mr. Pomerance’s book is an account told in modern perspective of Crazy Horse, Custer, and the battle for the Black Hills in the 1870’s. He says, “There are many many sources and firsthand accounts of this period. That is history, it is called, and has its value. In sum I think it needs to be redreamed. Hence the title. It is an experiment, an exercise. What it is not is history.” The composer also believes that history is not static and must constantly be rethought and redreamed. His short quintet comes from imagery suggested in Mr. Pomerance’s writing, particularly the section called “Interlude: The First Snows.” In it, the surrender-or-die ultimatums given by Washington to the Lakota people in the hard winter after the Little Big Horn battle are compared to the smothering effect of a strong, steady, long and quietly falling snow.
The story in We Need to Dream All This Again resonates in modern times to the extent that perceptions of history too are not static, and that when, in 1992, a law is proposed prohibiting the use of Crazy Horse’s name to sell a beer, and the name Custer is replaced by Little Big Horn in the Battlefield National Monument’s designation, we can view these not as acts of dreaded political correctness, but as signs of hope. Mr. Kitzke’s work is a prayer.
We Need to Dream All This Again was commissioned by Present Music and is the second main section from Kitzke’s theater work The Paha Sapa Give-Back.
- Jerome Kitzke
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Peermusic Classical
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Contact: Todd Vunderink, Director
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Year composed: 1993
Duration: 00:11:15
Ensemble type: Chamber or Jazz Ensemble, Without Voice:Other Combinations, 6-9 players
Instrumentation: 1 Clarinet, 1 Bass Clarinet, 1 Trumpet, 1 Percussion (General), 1 Violin, 1 Cello
Instrumentation notes: This piece calls for a whistler as well. All musicians participate on vocals.