Summer Sun, Winter Moon

Commemorating the Bicentennial of the Lewis & Clark expedition
World Premiere: Fall 2004

Rob Kapilow and Darrell Kipp Photo © Hugo Perez

Commissioned by the Carlsen Center (for the Kansas City Symphony), the Saint Louis Symphony, and the Louisiana Philharmonic, this large-scale choral/orchestral work features a libretto by Darrell Kipp, a writer from the Blackfoot tribe. The work commemorates the bicentennial of the Lewis & Clark expedition from a multicultural perspective to “cross the divide” that separates Native America and mainstream America.

Summer Sun, Winter Moon pairs an innovative composer with a writer fighting to save the Blackfeet language from extinction. Through conversations and town hall meetings from the head of the Missouri river in St. Louis to the Rocky Mountains along the Continental Divide to the mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific Coast of Oregon, Rob Kapilow and Darrell Kipp follow the footsteps of Lewis and Clark to discover the explorers’ legacy and the impact and meaning the expedition had both then and in our lives today.

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