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My name is Jacob Banks and this is another Augie Minute.
I have wrote a piece in 2009 that was based
on some prophecies, some bad omens that appeared
in Aztec society in the decade before
they were invaded by the Spanish. These texts are absolutely amazing
really evocitive and mysterious and
scary, so I knew I had to set them to music. They were commissioned by
a mezzo-soprano named Julia Bentley
and were premiered at Southern Illinois University in 2010. I was living
in Chicago at the time
and the field museum had an amazing exhibit
on Aztec cultures so before I wrote the piece I walked through there and
it was brilliantly done and had a lot of
artifacts and excellent
exhibit. So I felt
when I wrote the piece that I could, as much as possible,
live inside that society only temporarily and really only right before
things really came down. When something astronomically bad happens or
something bad happens in society
I think we have a tendency once the apocalypse is over
to look back and wonder if we could have seen it coming.
We do that in modern society all the time and
it was amazing to me that, for the Aztects, they were all these mysterious
things that were happening
that were recorded and they saw all those is
as premonitions of something to come. So well really in my music I don't
deal with the Spanish conquest at all.
I was
various, deeply moved by the Aztec imagination that actually,
in hindsight, put all these things that happened
in context.