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American composer and author (The Mayan Cycle, The Interstellar Diocese) Jeremy Haladyna recently retired as professor of composition and Artistic Director/Conductor of the University of California Santa Barbara’s Ensemble for Contemporary Music (ECM), a post he held from 2003 to 2019, succeeding his venerable mentor, William Craft.

During that busy time, teaching while also presenting cutting edge ECM performances of avant-garde contemporary repertoire by colleagues from around the world, Haladyna quietly nurtured his own project, The Mayan Cycle, a monumentally imagined constellation of works using his own original musical ideas, tuning systems and compositional structures, to illuminate as best he could from his perspective in modern times, this long vanished but highly advanced Mesoamerican civilization that originated in the Yucatán around 1500 BCE and reached its intellectual, cultural, and military peak around 700 or 800 CE in present-day southern Mexico, Guatemala, northern Belize and western Honduras.

By 900 CE, while Europeans were wresting themselves from the Dark Ages, the Maya, one of the most advanced civilizations in the history of the planet - hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ahead of what we euphemistically call western culture - imploded, not through military conquest by rivals, but climate change. A lesson for us all.

Masters of the universe, literally, the Maya invented the idea of zero, without which mathematical calculations are impossible. Mayan priest astronomers charted the passage of planets and galaxies circling above them in the night sky with pinpoint accuracy. The Maya invented the 365-day yearly calendar, and carved in stone the passing of time, thousands of years before and after them. They were scientists before the word existed.

Beginning in 1519, the complete destruction of all but a handful of Mayan artifacts was assured by the Spanish Conquest of south and central America. Unique among ancient cultures, particularly in this part of the world, the Maya enjoyed a written language, with archives of documents. All but a few scattered fragments of Mayan written texts were destroyed by the priests of the Spanish King and Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Were it not for the jungles, which mercifully swallowed and thus preserved what was left of the physical record of Mayan culture including a 26,000 year-plus calendar stela in what is now Belize, together with other messages, legends and solar observations carved in stone, modern man would know nothing of this sophisticated civilization.

History is both a fascinating and necessary backstory for composer Jeremy Haladyna’s Mayan journey. Immersing himself in Pre-Columbian culture and thought for over 38 years, while also visiting Mayan archeological sites on ten occasions (so far), Haladyna’s quest to gain more than intellectual satisfaction from the majesty of this extraordinary people has been epic. The Maya, whose systems and symbolism obsessed on mathematical equations, cycles and seasons, represented a stunning challenge to the composer. Taking on The Mayan Project, which will no doubt be his magnum opus as a composer, Haladyna has faced a paucity of ephemera - partial stories on stone fragments lost to time until recent decades. No hint left of sound, or pulse, or inflection.

Using musical intellect and vivid imagination, Haladyna has devised his own series of tuning systems (an attempt to break at least partially with modern sound temperament) and has created live and memory fragments, electronic sounds and recorded realities, to make convincing soundscapes of Mayan origin stories, legends, and folk tales. He has composed 38 original works so far (2021) for this enormous and mind-bending project, releasing three CDs of some of that compositional output, including his most recent 2021 Centaur release, Pok-ta-Pok: Sky Games from the Mayan Cycle, a compilation of performances recorded by UC Santa Barbara faculty and guest artists between 1994 and 2008.

Tracks with titles like Monster Owls, Stingray Spine Cadenza, The Vision Serpent, and 8000 Gods Half Diminished, allow the listener to take the composer’s own advice; lay out on the grass of an evening, face the universe above that so fascinated the Maya, and daydream as Pok-ta-Pok the first track on the CD, takes hold of the imagination. In this version of the piece from 2000 for rival piano/clavichord “teams” and live percussion, the message is in the sounds - literally the title of the piece - of a popular stadium game involving competing teams, giant rings, and rubber balls. Never mind what happened to the losers.

8000 Gods Half Diminished (Tikal Stela 31) composed in 2018, tells the tale of King Stormy Sky (more on that fable some other lifetime) and is a wondrous cacophony of earthbound sounds including human and aviary atmospherics, scrapings, tapping, blowing and watery sound mysteries recorded during Haladyna’s several trips, paired nicely with electronic sound manifestations that remind the listener of present day magic realism in Latin American cinema and literature. Every note original to Haladyna, the piece is a prayer to some atavistic human memory. Fascinating. So too, Stingray Spine Cadenza for harpsichord (1999), inspired by a magnificently detailed carved lintel stone image of a stingray skeleton discovered at the jungle site of Yaxchilán.

The Vision Serpent for Piano (1999) concerns one of the central figures of Mayan ritual art. Rightly obsessed with mathematics, considered the key to all structures earthbound and terrestrial, Mayan mythology describes serpents as being the vehicles by which celestial bodies, such as the sun and stars cross the heavens. The shedding of their skin made snakes even more potent as symbols of birth and renewal for the Maya. Haladyna describes, in quite accessible pianistic manner for western ears, the various characteristics - slithery, mesmeric, messianic - of serpents.

The last track on the Pok-ta-Pok CD, Maya Zodiac, is also the longest at just under 15 minutes, and caps Haladyna’s compositional effort to fathom musically, the Mayan “timeclock” stela, which clearly ended in 2012 causing much apocalyptic angst and wringing of hands among westerners. Because they were fixated on mathematics, the Maya figured out hundreds of years before Copernicus, the rotation of our constellations was one degree every 72 years. This procession of equinoxes, the mathematical structure of all Maya thinking, has been described by the composer as the key that unlocked his musical path as a contemporary composer, into the uncharted ether of Mayan cosmology.

The Mayan zodiac contains 13 signs compared to our 12. All are animals, anchoring the Maya firmly in their natural environment. Moreover, the mathematical substructures of the Mayan Zodiac include an understanding, many hundreds of years before westerners had a clue, that earth's rotational axis takes approximately 26,000 years to make one complete revolution. Through each 26,000-year cycle, the direction in the sky to which the Earth's axis points moves in a big circle. The Mayan calendar stela does not represent a beginning and ending of history, as westerners have imagined. Rather, the stela represents just one of an eternity of cyclical progressions of 26,000 years.

If your head feels like exploding, you’re in good company. Coming to grips in recent decades with what Mayan astronomers knew about the universe, re-configures the intellectual history of humans. The Maya figured out the mathematically correct movements of objects in the universe by discovering the idea and abstract usefulness of zero, centuries before Europeans.

Quoth the Jade Mask for Cello and Piano (1986), with cellist Virginia Kron; two movements from the 2017 Organ Sonata (Maximón); En la Estera del Chilam Balam for amplified solo flute (1992), featuring UCSB faculty artist Jill Felber, and Monster Owls (2003) with narration by the composer, round out, excuse the mathematical expression, this intriguing and incredibly complex but worth the hallucinatory experience, compositional Pico de Orizaba; a meditation-driven, structure-focused, and whimsically imaginative conjuring of a time and place forgotten to history until recently. A stunning creative achievement.

Daniel Kepl: Performing Arts Review