New Life Fine Arts presents...
Before the Europeans settled in New England there was a legend among the
Natives living along the Atlantic coast that they had
heard a captivating “Song on the Wind”. The mere melody brought them
a joy beyond telling and a hunger to know the meaning of the
words. One day they would hear the
song again.
“Song on the Wind”
describes the convergence of the English and Native
cultures and the relationships
that formed between them during the first
45 years of the Massachusetts
Bay Colony. It is a story of
love and betrayal, sacrifice and
courage, shared hopes and dreams that
transcend racial and cultural
differences. It is the story of two social
experiments, the Puritan
‘city on a hill’ and
the Indian ‘Praying Villages’, and the war that put all to the test.
“A story held mute too
long” is how Caring Hands, a descendant and sachem of today’s Natick
Praying Indians, described the musical
that tells the story of her tribe’s heroism and suffering that came to a
climax during the King Philip War of 1675.
This musical,
written by David MacAdam, in cooperation with the Praying Indians, is
the result of years of research of both English and
First People histories and theatrically unravels a riveting account of
both the friendships and animosities among the inhabitants of New
England with music that reflects the “two different streams of melody that
form the native harmony” and the “changes in the land”.
In 2004 the first
full production was mounted and premiered at the new theater at the
Littleton High School in Littleton, Massachusetts;
the site of the original Native American Praying Village, Nashoba.
[1]
Musketequid- although the popularized spelling and pronunciation is
often ‘Musketaquid’, prior to 1835 all documents record the spelling
with an ‘e’ rather than an
‘a’ which gives us a hint as to how it was heard by the
English. The name is believed to refer to the place ‘where the river
flows through the meadow grass’.
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