Cody Criswell-Badillo

The White Shaman (in progress)

for solo multi-percussion and prepared electric guitars

PROGRAM NOTE:

 On the banks of the Pecos River stands the White Shaman mural, a 4,000-year-old panel painted by my Coahuiltecan ancestors. Its figures are stark, enigmatic, and enduring — messages from a people who left nothing else behind.

This piece is not an attempt to decode the panel but to sit with it: to imagine the silence around it, and to ask what it means to inherit an image without a key — a cosmos painted on stone. For me, it is a meditation on absence, survival, and the fragile lines that tie us to a land — and to a people erased.

— Cody Criswell-Badillo