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Graphic assembled by Marissa Diercks
History through Music: Meramec Professor brings cultural enrichment to campus Dalila Kahvedzic Editor-In-Chief
A shallow, red rock canyon which spans 10 miles sits in New Mexico’s northwest corner at 6,200 feet. Around AD 850, a people formerly known as the Anasazi, now the Ancestral Pueblo Tribes, began to construct massive stone buildings. These buildings soared four or five stories high and
consisted of up to 700 rooms. Gary Gackstatter, assistant professor and music director at Meramec, has been teaching full time on the campus for nine years. Throughout the months of July through September, he explored Chaco Canyon and put together a musical piece which he will share with the campus and community on Friday, May 6 through Sunday, May 8. “Everything is centered around Chaco Canyon – a thousand years
ago, thousands of people came to this desolate canyon in what is now New Mexico and they built these huge - what they call great houses. They’re just massive and some of them are five stories high with the floor space of the roman colosseum - 600-700 rooms. They built 14 of them, a total of 3,000 rooms in that canyon,” Gackstatter said. “They found out later that all the major walls are lined up with the solar and lunar patterns, so these people had an intelligence
that drove the design of it.” Gackstatter has been out in the four corners area many times, he said. As you walk out, there is something out there and the English language is very poor at conveying these things. “Everybody that goes out there goes ‘man there’s something powerful out there,’” Gackstatter said. “It draws me to it and for me to dedicate this much time to it, it has to have enough power to pull that. I still don’t feel
VOLUME 51, ISSUE 14 | THURSDAY May 5, 2016 | www.meramecmontage.com
like I know enough about it.” Gackstatter wanted to write a piece of music about the ways the Native American culture is connected to the land, sky, each other and the spirit world, he said. “I wanted a deeper connection with nature and Native American Culture and to be able to express that through music,” Gackstatter said. “Words can’t express what’s out there – music can.”
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