Picture-Writing is the title of the fourteenth chapter of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, published in 1855, which depicts the deeds of the fictitious Native-American hero Hiawatha. In Picture-Writing, Hiawatha laments that his peoples’ great traditions and achievements are forgotten over time, so he creates his own pictographic language so they may be written down:
From his pouch he took his colors,
Took his paints of different colors,
On the smooth bark of a birch-tree
Painted many shapes and figures,
Wonderful and mystic figures,
And each figure had a meaning,
Each some word or thought suggested.
– The Song of Hiawatha XIV 49-55
My piece draws heavily on the symbolism inherent in pictography and the inscrutable nature of pictograms and hieroglyphics. The meanings of some graphics are obvious, while others rely upon contextualization to be understood. To convey this in the music, I generated a large quantity of random reorderings of this Longfellow fragment. From these I chose three lines that I felt conveyed the original meaning of the passage, and set them throughout the piece in alternation with long stretches of vocalise.
He painted suggested shapes
Of wonderful many,
From suggested paints he took his colors.