The first two CDs of Jeremy Haladyna’s epic “Mayan Cycle” — Selections from the Mayan Cycle (Innova 754) ” 2009 and “Mayan Time Mayan Tales (Innova 818)” 2012 — created a steadily growing cadre of admirers, including this writer, all waiting eagerly for the next installment.

It is with considerable pleasure, therefore, that I am able to affirm that the next installment (surely not the last) has now been completed and is on the brink of release.

Like the previous two disks, “Pok-ta-Pok: Sky Games from the Mayan Cycle” consists of a number of short pieces for a soloist and/or a very small ensemble. As with prior installments, the music is strange and wondrous, unclassifiable, mostly pleasant, occasionally startling, never abrasive or offensive, and always coherent.

That is not an objective judgment, by the way, but a personal reaction. It is as heartfelt and magnificent a tribute to the Mayans as, in another medium, Rebecca West‘s “Black Lamb and Gray Falcon” honors the people and lands of the Balkans.

The disk contains, moreover, a number of astonishing virtuoso performances: by the great Jill Felber on amplified flute, by Virginia Kron on cello, by soprano Allison Bernal, and by Jeremy himself on several different keyboards, but especially on the piano for the dazzling “The Vision Serpent.”

“Pok-ta-Pok” (Centaur CRC-3832), will officially release by Naxos distribution on April 2 (https://naxosusa.com/nrg/2021_04_02_09/html5.html#page/50). It will be available as a CD, as a download, and as a streaming audio.

(April 2 this year being Good Friday, you will probably have better luck getting “Pok-ta-Pok” if you start your Mayan quest on Monday, April 5.

For the CD, the publisher (Centaur) recommends: HBDIRECT: go to https://www.hbdirect.com/new_menus.php?what=classical_composers and type “Haladyna” in the Search box.

For direct downloads, Centaur likes iTUNES/APPLE MUSIC  (Newest computers with Catalina OS will have Apple Music, not iTunes. To get Apple music: on your Mac or PC, open iTunes. In the upper-left corner, select Music, then, click For You at the top of the iTunes window.

If you’re joining Apple Music for the first time or previously used a trial, click the trial offer. If you already subscribe to Apple Music, click Sign In, then change to a Student subscription.) For streaming, it’s Spotify: https://www.spotify.com/us/.

I couldn’t pass up the opportunity of this release to grill Jeremy on the origins and progress of the Mayan Cycle. My questions and his answers follow.

GC: I want to start with the process of release, inspired by this remark — almost an aside — “With April 2 the date for Naxos streaming …  ” Are main releases now on line, streaming? Is the CD bound for obsolescence, like the DVD, like the printed page on paper?

In the foreseeable future, no more “hard copy”? How will it work? How will your fans purchase access to the stream?

JH: Gerald, the multiple delivery methods work in our favor, I think. You could consider the CD like a hardback book. Some CD titles are no longer issued in “hardback,” but only in virtual (soft) form. I suspect there’s some merit to us all being “up there” in the cloud somewhere, as our collective vapor has a longer half-life there.

Physical CDs delaminate, just as a hardback’s binding comes unglued, but the new cloud vapor suffers no such punishment over time. Against the “plus” of multiple forms of access, you can place two large demerits.

First, as to what winds up in the artist’s pocket, it’s very hard to track the infinitude of streaming from all these nodal points, all happening at once. So, lacking the sure stats of CD sales a bookkeeper can “touch,” artist income has suffered. But a still larger demerit, if you ask me, is the inability to wed the CD booklet to an audio download or track-stream.

Centaur has given me the OK to post the booklet for “Pok-ta-Pok” on my website (mayancycle.com) and of course, anyone purchasing the jewel case CD from the online shops will have it. But many won’t have this, and for them all the valuable background on the tracks is lost.

I grew up reading — and learning — from LP album jackets. Now the CD booklet serves the same function. Here with “Pok-ta-Pok,” it’s a richer musical experience knowing why things are as they are, via that booklet. Into even the booklet, went a lot of thought.

GC: Writing about one of the earlier disks, I praised your uncanny ability to evoke Mexico. This facility is even more forcefully in evidence in “Pok-ta-Pok.” Yet, you achieve this without any obvious recourse to folk music. (Does “Pre-Columbian” also imply “Pre-Mariachi”?)

How much is known about Mayan music? How much, if any, has survived? Instruments? Notation? Lyrics?

JH: “Not much!” exclaimed Dolores Hsu as a rejoinder to your very question, when I posed it to her in the 1990s. I’ve found her assessment correct on that, as to how much music survives that hasn’t been smelted into a proper mestizo alloy, how much could really be pre-Hispanic.

I can relate the full extent of what I’ve uncovered in one paragraph:

In the 1940s Nicolas Slonimsky printed a pic of what he thought might be pre-Columbian musical notation, a series of inscribed dots on a stone in up-and-down courses. An image of a bird, he thought, might have inspired the notation. But how to interpret this? Then in 2004, I returned from Campeche with a Mexican book I had purchased, “Art and Prayer in the Indigenous Languages of Mexico” (esteemed author: Carlos Montemayor). In it, I eventually tripped over two pages of standard music notation.

Montemayor had commissioned transcriptions of three sound recordings, and here written out were the opening “bars” of chants done for Mayan agricultural ceremonies by their native shamans. Composer Francisco Nuñez did this work; I knew him from his visit to UCSB, which I had helped to arrange for one of William Kraft’s New Music Festivals.

The texts, Nuñez points out, use some archaic Mayan words; this could well argue for the pre-Spanish origins of both chants and texts. No instruments are involved, only the shaman chanting “solo” in each case.

What he chants is mostly pentatonic, but due to issues of range and the imprecise nature of voice alone, not to mention the religious transport of the shaman, “pentatonic” didn’t tell the entire story. Nuñez had to signal the presence of microtones, too

He also had to admit that — we can’t be sure how old it is. The method of delivery, however, is like nothing else contemporary.

So, Gerald, when I travel I have taken to always carrying a sound recording aid, but why? It’s not to capture tunes; no, I record the birds (true authors, I’m convinced, of tropical rhythmic flair). I record the insects and frogs (unsung “electronic” masters).

And I can’t miss recording the howler monkeys, real soundstage-stealers, wherever they appear. I’ll even record dripping moisture inside a Belizean cave as a surrogate for the Underworld. All of these provide me welcome context and atmosphere for the hard work on the notes later.

GC: To what extent have you incorporated Mayan folk culture into your scores?

In what must now be pushing eight hours of music (if I’m not there already), music written over 35 years, all the notes are mine. I think that’s really important if it’s to be tagged original work.

Any true answer to your query has to bemoan the great fervor with which the Conquest erased Mayan musical sources. Some of the textual sources remain, but most of those too — in the case of the Maya — were burned.

There is a particular collection of ancient poems, “The Songs of Dzitbalché,” I would especially mention, since it’s perfectly clear they were sung to music. The texts of Los Cantares were transferred to Latin letters, in Maya, during Colonial times.

These are clearly very old, and the strophic and verse structure says plainly: there was once music here. (As is typical, these poems are today better known in Spanish than in Maya.)

Ask modern Mexicans about Mayan music native to the Yucatán, and they will instantly come back with “La trova Yucateca.” This is a grand old voice/guitar tradition of the 19th and early 20th centuries, with strong ties to a similar musical strain in Cuba.

The song titles of the trova, however, and the instruments (guitars of varying sizes), owe an enormous debt to things Spanish. My own favorite trova song, a choice I share with thousands, I’m sure, is “Peregrina.” They’ve even made a movie about the factual love story behind it, which stars a heroic Mexican politician, martyred for his devotion to reform in 1924.

One night in a Campechan restaurant, it was sung and played with great artistry at my table by a strolling trio. (I’d requested it.) “It’s been a while,” one of the trio said, with a knowing smile. Then he adjusted the capo on his guitar, and instantly they set off. Pure guitar/vocal magic.

You can be sure that I tipped mightily. But you see, that song has a known composer, Ricardo Palmerín (words by L.R. Vega), so it’s hard to judge it “folk.” I would say it’s closer to classical.

Likewise, the fantastic Mexicanal TV channel, emanating from San Luis Potosí, has a regular show called “A Zapatear.” It features dance bands recorded live in pueblos all over the Yucatán. (Even tiny municipal spots.)

I love to watch the stylized dancing of Maya couples in spotless white, the men holding so frequently their hands behind them as they negotiate intricate steps. But the guys behind the bandstands are playing music you could readily associate with other parts of the country, too, not just the Yucatán.

To those microtones I mentioned, I hold fast. I can’t do otherwise after hearing the ancient Maya triple-chambered flutes early on. When blown, these flutes produce three fundamentals so minutely close to one another as to perfectly recall the whine of the equatorial tree frogs whipping up at sunset, which can last most of the night, and which can only be technically termed, “microtonal.”

So, whether they were sanctioned in a “system” or not, the Maya had microtones. As your question correctly discovers, it’s really in a choice of instrumentation that I can get closer to what might be called “authentic” here.

For one, there are detailed pictures of music being made. We have flamboyant pictures on the walls of Bonampak, in the Chiapas jungle, of ancient Mayan bands playing for kings. We have found their very instruments in the tombs, and many ceramic ones are playable.

Of these, I have purchased several copies, and have by now employed every last one at some point. In fact, on this new disc, the five solos in “8000 Gods Half Diminished” feature them.

GC: Why Mayan, not Aztec or Zapotec or …?

JH: I challenge anyone to walk through the Aztec pavilion at the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, and to not have your sensibilities shaken. It’s a dark space, and the often huge stone statuary of steely deities is dramatically lit.

The pitiless nature of those faces staring back at you, with their often exposed fangs and tongues … the experience is frightening.

But I was feeling attraction already, as a teenager, to very different visuals. I spirited away each and every issue of National Geographic that showed up at the house with a cover photo of Mayan glyphs, or a jade mosaic mask, in order to fully probe into it.

I also was instantly drawn to Mayan art, which is florid to the nth degree, as if it were wrong to leave any empty, unused space. (I am not now, nor will I ever be, a minimalist.)

Then came my first trip to the Mayan area in 1985, to Beliz — a country that not many people were visiting yet. On one blisteringly hot day I donned my baseball cap and hiked the short distance from the guest lodge to a significant ruin right on the Belizean border with Guatemala: Xunantunich (“woman’s-face-on-stone:”

Here, a queen’s carved portrait was found early-on in the excavations). At the archaeological park, to access the ruin, you have to cross a small river via a tiny ferry tied to a cable, hand-operated by a crank. (It can take just one vehicle at a time.)

After I crossed on foot, I witnessed a party of East Coasters, all winningly fit out in well-creased exploration gear, rolling their rented Land Rover right off the ferry and head first into the river! How they laughed! (I wonder if the rental company laughed.)

As is so often the case, you must climb to really see the largest structure here, the Castillo. I love to crawl all over these things, and so I eventually made it all the way around to the back, and it was right then (I can pinpoint the moment), that I was “captured” by the Maya.

Before me, for all 270 degrees, spread a carpet of nothing but luscious green vegetation as far as the eye could see, or even imagine. So vast was it, it was impossible to imagine further. There was no sign of humanity anywhere.

I was looking into Guatemala, but more importantly, this was my first appreciation of the Petén. This rainforest region that now had me spellbound, I would later learn, had been the birth cradle of the Maya Pre-Classic.

And later trips would take me well into its reaches. So I went home with that vision and wrote the first piece (cello and piano), to fulfill a commission. And that “number 1” is on this new CD … “Quoth the Jade Mask.” (I play it with Ojai cellist Virginia Kron.)

In those early years, I was also lucky to read Sir J. Eric S. Thompson, who reads like no other Mayanist. He’s lampooned now for holding back the decipherment of the Mayan script, single-handedly by his stubbornness, for several decades. And he’s also mocked (given what we now know), for portraying the learned class of Mayans as something like Episcopal priests and astronomers.

Sir Eric was fascinated by the wild complexity of Mayan calendrics and astronomical math. He was not one to talk much about warfare or sacrifice.

I’m Episcopalian myself, so it could be I was receiving on the same wavelength as Sir Eric … I dunno. But even today, having new knowledge that the Maya were a fully fractured lot, with constant warfare plaguing rival political polities — their staggering advancement remains.

Warlike or not, doesn’t it still confound how they could predict solar eclipses centuries ahead — with absolute accuracy?

“Maya Zodiac,” on this new disc, touches on how they likely were also aware (that’s now the consensus) of the 26,000-year precession of the equinoxes, which takes in a “full rotational tour” of constellations around the night sky. That’s how attentive and patient were their starry observations.

Even in the matter of the warfare and captives, thanks to the decipherment of the 1990s — which is still ongoing — we now know the details. We can cite the contesting cities by name, read the exact years in which they fell or conquered … and then do a conversion to western “years” effortlessly.

These kings and lords of the “dark ages” now speak clearly to us through their inscriptions and actions … they have recorded veritable time-messages in stone — why, we have objects in museums labeled as belonging to them, labeled as their personal property.

Such speech from back ages is the predicate, on this new disc, for “8000 Gods Half Diminished.”

GC: At the Treaty of Versailles, on the naive urging of President Wilson promoting “self-determination,” the pre-WWI multinational empires — Hohenzollern, Hapsburg, Romanov, Ottoman — were broken up into successor states.

This created perhaps as many problems as it solved, with the former dominant cultures piling up grievances about loss of territory and remnant populations stranded within the new states where they used to be lords, and the new states griping about mis-drawn boundaries, mis-allotted resources, and other unaddressed injustices.

The process seems to be going on, with the Czechs and Slovaks going their separate ways, the Basques, Armenians, Slovenes, and others still agitating for their own sovereignties.

So, the reference in the liner notes of the first Mayan CD to “contemporary Mayan political struggles” makes me wonder if you favor the break-up of the Mexican sovereignty into states defined by Native American populations, and whether you believe such a rearrangement of territories is possible.

JH: You’ve made a great case there, Gerald, for why globalism is such a tough sell, and for why I’m not buying it. There is, indeed, an item in this cycle I’ve done on the Zapatista story, which is of course a Mayan story.

I wrote it much closer to the heyday of Subcomandante Marcos, laying it aside, 90% done, at the moment UCSB lost its guitar program. You see, it’s in eight vocal parts and requires two guitar parts, along with marimba, maracas, and castanets; this was an ensemble the revolutionary Marcos himself sketched out in one of his writings.

Today the piece is 100% done; the texts are all by Marcos, writing in his manifesto vein, all from the period. Hopefully, one day it will be recorded and make its own appearance in a release.

You know, it’s really not about what I favor politically; I see my role here as that of a musical chronicler. And in that role, there were no ready-made tunes for me to access; everything musical had to come from my own head.

The new president of Mexico, Lopez-Obrador, recently came to power wanting only a policy of “live and let live” with the impressive Zapatista autonomous zone. It has only been consolidated further since the 1990s in Chiapas.

With a population now of 360,000 strong, this area today manages its own schools and its own health care system.

Now, whether this solution could apply for Mexico’s indigenous groups across the board, I cannot say. But on this past celebration of the Day of the Dead, I happened to catch live, on Mexican television, the president walking through a collection of temporary shrines, each one a unique expression of an Indian tribe of Mexico.

It was noteworthy that some of the tribes welcomed him with open arms, as a great hope for change. Others were more wary, saying openly, as he arrived at their shrine, that they hope he will follow through on his promises.

How prickly, then, the issue of AMLO’s push for the Maya Train. This train, which is now on the drawing board, would theoretically whiz moneyed tourists in a loop from one first-rate Mayan archaeological site to another. Among the thousands of sites, the big ones, you see, are separated by some distance.

Unless you are rich enough to fly in, Palenque — in particular — is a bit awkward to reach. The indigenous see the train as yet another case of their own interests being bypassed for a lucrative return going into other pockets.

Personally, I think these rich people should have to sweat to see these ruins, just like I did, as well as calculate how to get their own tuchuses from one ruin to the next. And I can’t help but think back to the railroad story of the Caste War.

I wonder if the government is mindful of how the Mexican army struggled to keep operational any at all of the track they were laying in Quintana Roo during the last years of that long war! Routinely ferocious floods, hurricanes, and jungle growth don’t allow any railroad there long life.

GC: Do you envision a “complete” Mayan Cycle — a musical equivalent of Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu” or Anthony Powell’s “Dance to the Music of Time”? Or will the cycle only end when you do, like Robert Musil’s vast, sprawling and unfinished masterpiece, “Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften”?

JH: I suppose it’s complete when the flame burns out. There is an opera I’m dying to do, though, on one of those stories of (sobering) irony that seem practically to fingerprint the Mayans and their history. (That’s the only clue I’ll give now.) You may find the rest of this paragraph eccentric, but I’ll write it anyway.

The Mayans were a vigesimal, rather than decimal, culture; they counted in packets of 20s. I’ve now begun piece #36, which I hope to finish as: “Turtle Heart.” If I were hit by a bus tomorrow, and matters were left at only 36, that would be a ragged numerical end to things. But, if I’d managed 40, I’d have attained some sense of completion.

To complete a time period, for the Maya, is to observe a spate of momentary cosmic rest. Even more perfect would be managing 52 pieces, to mirror the 52 years in a Mesoamerican calendar round. (So fundamental a span, that the Aztecs kept track of no larger span.)

But I’m getting too old — will I really make it to 52? I may have to settle for 40.

The question I think any composer would rather answer concerns the work “of the moment,” as that is what we have a clearer idea of, and are fired-up about. In answering that question, Gerald, I hope you’ll allow me to run a bit long and fold in an anecdote.

In my home library here are all sorts of books in English, Spanish, and Maya. Many were obviously birthed as dissertations in archaeology; these are all referenced and footnoted to the hilt, and predictably–some easily allow eyelids to droop.

But I soldier on, because almost always there is a nugget or two somewhere that fires my imagination beyond belief. Most recently, I finished such a bleak tome on Maya funeral practices of the Pre-Columbian era. And buried within I found my nugget: at one excavated tomb in Guatemala, they disinterred an ancient king named after the Alligator.

Next to the king’s skeleton was an actual skeleton of an alligator, minus its head. And behind them both was a collection of funerary ceramics, and just above those — “a turtle shell marimba.” When I read that, I started awake, knowing instantly “I would make that,” or die trying. Because … I happen to have turtle shell samples that could easily serve as its virtual basis.

This dry dissertation, then, had just provided the impetus for “Turtle Heart.” I hope to make the instrument and to make it “speak again,” and speak on the notes of my very own time-period scale. It is important here to add that the ancient Mayans would not just inter such a king once, and forget him.

Frequently, they would re-enter such tombs on temporally meaningful dates, smoking them with fragrant incense and doing honorific ritual. This was precious veneration of an ancestor: perhaps even … tribute to the progenitor of a bloodline.

It finds its modern mirror directly in the ongoing celebrations of The Day of the Dead by all Mexicans, something we know well. And the “heart?” This was how the Mayans felt about the earth’s bosom — the dead were put into its Heart. And the turtle has a starring role in foundational Mayan cosmology: it stands for the Earth.

Fast forward to my last trip to the Maya world in September 2017, a second visit to Campeche. I have done hundreds of kilometers alone in rental cars, or as tour guide to friends, on Mexican roads. But this time the destinations were just too remote to risk getting lost.

A guide was advisable, especially as the arch-quest of the entire trip was to see the remarkable three-story Palacio at Santa Rosa Xtampak, in the far-flung eastern part of the state.

Other remote ruins we would take in, too, it turned out. But as the tour neared its end our little van diverted to an unassuming small town … Pomuch, only a modest distance north of the capital. This was a town with a largely Mayan heritage. We paused for a traditional pastry snack before the van sidled over next to a cemetery.

“I want Jeremy to see this,” said the guide, one fluent in Maya who had been brought along to my great delight. He offered to escort the only other clients that day as well, a middle-aged Mexican couple, but they declined. (I would soon find out why.)

After a few scant words, the guide began leading me up and down the aisles of aboveground sepulchers, much like those in New Orleans, only with a pronounced difference. These tombs had glass windows. Skull after skull stared back at us, many sprouting a full head of hair, or — almost.

There were other bones, too, carefully arranged inside. There were flowers and also written notes left outside the tomb windows. The guide explained how each year, in advance of The Day of Dead, the people of Pomuch opened these graves to clean and polish the bones of their ancestors in preparation for the appointed day.

I wasn’t repulsed; I was awestruck. It is hard not to feel the presence of the departed when they are literally staring you back. Pomuch, the guide explained, was practically the only place left on the Yucatán peninsula whose townsfolk continued firmly in this practice.

The connection to “Turtle Heart,” to revisiting the ancient alligator king in his deep-earth resting place, is obvious, no? I hope I may finish “Turtle Heart,” then, Gerald, if only to “explain” why I so often feel a stranger in the here and now.

Working this way, “Turtle Heart,” by its very existence (as protest) might even “explain” mightily for me. For, what prospect remains of a future, without a reverence for what, and who, has gone before?

This, the Maya have always powerfully understood.

— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.

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