Creative Team's American Project
Librettist John Shoptaw and composer Eric Sawyer share an affinity for projects based on American history and myth. Our American Cousin is the largest of these, but each of the two have been drawn to other projects centering on modern representations of old American stories.

Fall 2006 saw the premiere of their collaborative work Itasca, based on the 1832 exploration of the headwaters of the Mississippi. Scored for four voices and live electronics, the work offers a poetic dramatization of the journals kept by Henry Schoolcraft during his journey up the river, and a rethinking of the world of Longfellow's epic Hiawatha. In this work, the surge and ebb of water sounds

accompanies an unusual text setting technique mixing speech and song, with movement
for the

Fall 2006 also brought the premiere performances in Boston and Western MA of another Sawyer piece drawn from American history, the cantata The Humble Heart, based on texts from the American Shakers. Commissioned by New England Voices, the work dramatizes two contrasting aspects of the religious sect that spread widely westward from New England during the nineteenth century - the immersion of selfhood in the discipline of community and rites of ecstatic experience. The work was recently recorded for release on the Albany Records label.

Music inspired by North America's first poet, Anne Bradstreet, premiered in 2009. "Earthly Store: Two Anne Bradstreet Songs for Soprano, Flute, Cello and Piano" by Eric Sawyer was commissioned by the Essex Chamber Players.
John Shoptaw
John Shoptaw
singers created by choreographer Wendy Woodson. The work was performed at UC Berkeley's Center for New Music and Acoustic Technologies, where it was created, as well as in Buckley Recital Hall at Amherst College.

Shoptaw's poem Itasca is one from an ongoing series of poems based on the history and people of the Mississippi River, ranging from the earliest recorded American history to the present day.