Year composed: 2024, in progress
Duration: 90′
Instrumentation: four singers, narrator, 2 dancers, chorus, field recordings, electronics, and large ensemble (flute, clarinet, keyboard sampler, 2 percussion, prepared piano, violin, viola, cello, double bass
Concept and Libretto: John Campion
Funded with support from the Guggenheim and Mellon Foundations
Eco Ensemble, Music of Cindy Cox – Photo credit: Grant Kerber
Notes:
The Road to Xibalba’s story is drawn from the great ancient Maya text, The Popol Vuh. Poet John Campion developed the English libretto for The Road from his own translation of the larger work. The Popol Vuh is a creation myth according to the K’iche’ Maya people in what is now Guatemala. The text is an ancient account of their origins and cosmology in a world before the coming of Westerners and Christianity. In the early 1700s, a Dominican friar named Francisco Ximénez recorded a transliterated K’iche’ text (in a phonetic script with Latin characters) parallel to a Spanish translation (considered the oldest known version of The Popol Vuh).
The Road to Xibalba outlines the exploits of Maya “hero twins” who go down to the underworld to play a ball game with the Lords of Death, and in defeating them affirm the eternal cycle of life. It is a tale full of whimsy, pathos, and timely ecological reflections. There is a humorous cast of animal characters and charmed figures that ultimately point to a higher relation of cosmological order and spiritual connectedness.
In the 1970s, Campion worked with the great interpreter of Maya epigraphy and iconography Linda Schele. In preparation for this piece, Campion and Cox researched the written materials and visited scores of Maya archeology sites and museums in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. Among many others, these included Chichen Itza, Tulum, Palenque, Uxmal, Tikal, and Copan.
Preview Performance
Cal Performances, “The Music of Cindy Cox” performed a concert preview of eight scenes, with the Eco Ensemble conducted by David Milnes on February 3, 2024
Reviews
The Road to Xibalba is at times haunting, funny, wry, magical, and touching. Like Hishuk ish ts’awalk, it’s strongly connected to the natural world in all its manifestations: animals, the passing of time, reproduction, and life and death…These scenes are so good — so dramatic and set to such excellent music — that the audience gave the performers and creators a well-deserved standing ovation. Let’s hope for a future staging of the complete Road to Xibalba.
— Lisa Hirsch, San Francisco Classical Voice
Full review: Cindy Cox Composes the Beauty and Excitement of Nature, by Lisa Hirsch in the San Francisco Classical Voice (February 6, 2024)