On his new album Choctaw Places, composer Charles Shadle uses music to transport listeners to meaningful locations from his childhood, places like Limestone Gap.
Shadle is a member of the Choctaw Nation and also a prolific composer and a professor of composition, music theory and music history at MIT. He joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to talk more about the album. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: When discussing Choctaw Places, I think we should start by discussing a little history. The Choctaw Nation is in Southeastern Oklahoma now, but that’s not where the nation originally was. The Choctaw people, approximately 20,000, were forcibly relocated there.
Charles Shadle: That is correct. We made a long and arduous journey beginning in the very early 1830s from our ancestral homelands in Mississippi as part of a removal project by the U.S. federal government that’s usually referred to as the Trail of Tears.
Rath: So when you’re thinking about Choctaw places, what are the places that you’re thinking of?
Shadle: Part of that mix is certainly that ancestral homeland. But for me, it’s particularly centered in that quadrant of Oklahoma that you were mentioning. I think modern Choctaws have an enormous connection to that land, right? Having lost one homeland, I think we feel it’s incredibly important to hang onto the place we are now.
Rath: So this piece we were hearing about coming into this, “Limestone Gap” — tell us about that place.
Shadle: Well, this is a little community north of my sort of family’s ancestral ranch. We no longer own it, but we did during all of my childhood. And it’s a kind of remarkable landscape in that it’s limestone hills, small mountains with oak trees, cedar trees that surround this lush valley. There was, at one point, an important Choctaw rancher who had a vernacular Southern plantation–style house in this region. It doesn’t survive anymore, but it’s a place that feels to me sort of magical, both from its history and from the sort of natural beauty of the region. And I certainly hope in the music I evoke both of those qualities.
Rath: Evocative is the word for it. It takes you somewhere.
About your Choctaw tradition and music, I understand that there was a gift from your grandmother that was a big part of that. I was hoping you could tell that story.
Shadle: Right, it’s from actually a very distant grandmother, and it was given to me actually by my great aunt, but it does stem back basically five generations.
A copy of the Sacred Harp Hymnal, the shape note hymnal that was such an important element of sort of Southern folk polyphony, was something this distant ancestor brought with her on the Trail of Tears. And that’s been something that’s been treasured in the family. And it became sort of, I think, clear to family members when I was 11 or 12 that I was the person in my generation for whom music was going to be most meaningful. So that volume was given to me.
And it remains, to this day, a sort of talisman for the value of art, right? Because if you think about it: You’re forced to leave your home, you’re essentially a refugee. And what do you decide to bring? You bring a book of music, right? I mean, and that sort of touches me, and I think it’s had a huge impact on my work.
Rath: I was just thinking about that and thinking about your work because this album is all chamber music, but you probably say you’re mainly known as composing as a vocal composer, right?
Shadle: Probably. I’ve written a lot of vocal music, but I really enjoy the challenge of writing for all kinds of sort of mediums. So, you know, it’s all important. But I think a vocal song-like quality is important in almost all of my work.
Rath: That’s a great setup for one of the pieces that I wanted to play right now. This is Chahta Aiasha. This is a suite, I imagine, in five parts. Let’s hear just the start of the second movement, and we’ll talk about it.
When I first heard this, it reminded me a little of the composer Messiaen, not because of the bird-like quality, but because there’s this way it sort of lifts you out of time, like that music of eternity kind of feeling.
Shadle: Well, I’m delighted to hear that because it feels to me that that music should do that. It can play with our sense of time, and I think especially our sense of past and present. And I treasure that in the music I listen to — and I do love Messiaen — but I also sort of want that to be a part of the music I write as well.
Rath: How do you get that across to the musician? Because there’s rhythm in there, but I can’t quite find a meter. Is there like a time signature? Or how do you notate what you’re doing?
Shadle: Well, actually, I’m really specific about that, right? Everything metrically is quite carefully notated, and all of that, because if you have an absolute vision of what you want the music to sound like, you sort of have a responsibility to the performer to make that possible.
I find that if I just sort of write something very freely and say, “Play it in this very free or flexible manner,” it’s not quite how I imagined it would be. And while I treasure the sort of things that each performer brings to the piece, I tend to be very specific about notation.
Rath: And in this piece, where are we here?
Shadle: This is the first of two essentially kinds of solo pieces for the oboe and later the English horn. They’re a little bit like cadenzas. The piece itself is a five-movement piece where there are no breaks between the movements.
And I think this was kind of my post-pandemic response to the fact that suddenly, during the pandemic, late Beethoven became important to me. I don’t think I was alone in that. The idea of how these sorts of small sectional forms could be made to add up to something that felt more important than that.
Rath: Like the late quartets, you mean? Where you can have these so simple-seeming lines.
Shadle: Yeah, absolutely, and that was just sort of deeply inspiring to me, and it was sort of an interesting thing as a composer. I mean, I’ve always admired Beethoven, but it hadn’t taken on that kind of importance.
And then to also start looking at how that music works, but through a Choctaw lens. What would it be like through different kinds of melodies? What would it be like with a different rhythmic sensibility? A different harmonic world? That became important for me in this piece.
Rath: And this whole suite of five pieces, where do we go over the course of it?
Shadle: It’s trying to evoke the Oklahoma countryside where Choctaw people live. Small towns, farms, occasionally an abandoned cemetery, all of those kinds of things.
But I also felt like: It was written at this moment where I wanted to be, but it was still very difficult to travel, and I couldn’t go there. So I decided I would make it this sort of imaginative kind of internal journey with sort of descriptions of what I remember these places to be like.
Rath: It’s an interesting image, thinking of you holed up during the pandemic and conjuring these big skies.
Shadle: Right, right. Because you imagine anything but the closed-in and contained world that we were in. So it’s a good thing we have imaginations.
Rath: Tell us a bit about the ensemble that is playing on this record.
Shadle: Lontano is a UK-based ensemble, mostly centered in London. And its artistic director is Odaline de la Martinez, who is a Cuban-American-British composer-conductor sort of force of nature. She and I both went to Tulane University, but not at the same time. While I was there as a graduate student, we performed one of her operas, and I was the rehearsal piano for that opera, so I got to know her that way.
And then later on, we had friends in common, and my colleague at MIT — Professor Peter Child — sort of arranged a contact, and then the commission for “Limestone Gap” came out of that. Then “Red Cedar” and “The Old Place” as well.
It’s been an incredibly productive relationship for me, and the sort of attention and the care and the beauty that these people who — what would they know about Choctaw culture? But the way they’ve sort of embraced the whole project is utterly remarkable and, really, quite touching to me.
Rath: What do you think your grandmother — or your grandmothers — would think of Choctaw Places?
Shadle: That’s a really interesting question. I wonder if they would even recognize it as music. I hope that there would be things that sounded familiar, that sounded right. But the world of today and the world of 1830 were very different, right? But I would like to think that there would be little melodic fragments, things like that, that feel part of the same tradition.
At the same time, I might be entirely wrong. Musicians are such magpies. We hear something, and we love it and we use it. So it might be that people from the past would be intrigued with what we’re doing now.
