HAPTADAMA- The Seven Creations May 7, 2010

In collaboration with Seattle Art Museum (SAM), The Esoterics presents HAPTADAMA, or The seven creations, on 7 and 8 May 2010, in the PACCAR Pavilion at SAM’s Olympic Sculpture Park. A concert-length, a cappella opera that celebrates and recounts the creation story of ancient Zoroastrians, The seven creations is the work of The Esoterics’ Founding Director Eric Banks, springing from the composer’s two separate journeys to Bombay, India, to research musical culture. Banks’ travels yielded much exposure to and inspiration from the Zoroastrian culture,
and ultimately led to his study of the ancient Zoroastrian scripture called the Avesta. While exploring this text, he was particularly fascinated with the songs known as the Gathas, a group of rote-memorized hymns handed down in the oral tradition from father to son by priests of this religion, since the prophet Zoroaster first uttered them. The Gathas are most likely the oldest songs in recorded music history. Banks was also captivated by the ancient Persian cosmological myth known as the Bundahishn, and its relationship to the Avesta, and he took up the idea of this connection as the basis for his opera. Performed in Avestan and Pahlavi, the respective languages of the Gathas and the Bundahisn, The seven creations illuminates the relationship of these two artifacts: the hymns of Zarathustra that ask so many questions about the origins of the universe, and the cosmological text from two millennia later that answers them in great and beautiful detail, always acknowledging the cosmic balance between good and evil, and emphasizing the human choice between the two that is so essential to Zoroastrian faith.