Orpheus was the greatest of all musicians. The son of Apollo, his music had the power to charm animals and control the weather. The title of this piece, When I Walked the Dark Road of Hades (2016), comes from the Orphic Argonautica. Traditionally attributed to Orpheus himself, this Greek epic poem tells the tale of Jason and the Argonauts on the quest for the Golden Fleece. But it also includes Orpheus’s greatest adventure – his katábasis or descent to shadowy Hades to rescue his wife, Eurydice, from death. Through the power of his music he was able to compel the underworld gods to release her, but only on the condition that he would not look at her until they had returned to the land of the living. This one restriction he famously violated, and Eurydice remained in the underworld forever. Distraught, Orpheus was eventually torn apart by Maenads, wandering followers of Dionysus. His head and lyre floated to the island of Lesbos, continuing to utter prophecies without his body. In later generations, the famed musician was known as a religious teacher and initiator as the patron of the Orphic Mysteries.

There are striking similarities between Orpheus and shamans, traditional religious practitioners who have the power to descend (or ascend) to the spirit world to guide souls, heal the sick, and gain secret knowledge. They make these journeys in an ecstatic trance induced through music, often by drumming and singing magic songs. Orpheus reappears in the Renaissance in the work of the philosopher-magus Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499). Best known for making the first complete Latin translation of Plato’s writings, Ficino also translated the Orphic Hymns, sacred texts traditionally attributed to Orpheus. Accompanying himself on the lyra de braccio, Ficino would sing these hymns to induce ecstatic states much like a shaman. The Hymns became part of Ficino’s astrological practice designed to draw down beneficial planetary influences personified as Greek gods. During the Renaissance this was completely compatible with Ficino’s devout Christianity, a period when Italy was teeming with esoteric and occult ideas. It was in this world that opera began, and several early operas were in fact about Orpheus. The most famous of these was Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. One can only wonder to what extent these nascent operas were an elaboration of Ficino’s astrological music.

This piece attempts to unite all of these threads: Orpheus as shaman, initiator, and Renaissance magus. The composition is based on Monteverdi’s aria Possente sprito (Oh, powerful spirits) from L’Orfeo – the point where Orpheus enters into the underworld. Here Monteverdi’s elaborate vocal ornamentation gives the original song an incantational quality, which I have intensified by exaggerating the embellishments and making them microtonal. Here the saxophone becomes an imagined, archaic wind instrument through which the player performs a shamanic invocation to become, like Orpheus, a psychopomp – the guide of the soul.