This is a strong, exuberant, and attractive tone poem that presents the composer's intense personal reaction to the northern New Mexico area where he lives. True to the title, the 13-minute, single-movement composition concerns the moment of an important shift in viewpoint the composer experienced at Fajada Butte after living in the Albuquerque area for several years.

Michael Mauldin (b. 1947) first felt a spiritual connection to the area when his father, a Presbyterian minister from Dallas, TX, often took the family there for religious retreats. Interrupting his work on a Master of Music degree (which he ultimately finished at the University of New Mexico), Mauldin moved permanently to New Mexico in 1971.

Almost immediately he began visiting wilderness areas in the vicinity, including locations that had special importance to the present-day and past Native American inhabitants. One of them was Fajada Butte, a column of rock at Chaco Canyon. The Anasazi, a people who lived there and developed a civilization that built cities, was strongly agricultural, and included complex trading relationships, maintained a sun temple on its top during their highest days. The civilization apparently crashed following a climatic shift that included 40 years of drought conditions.

Fajada Butte was one of several places in New Mexico that made a strong initial impression on Mauldin, due to its striking aesthetic impact. Mauldin says in his autobiographical essay Beyond the Four Hills that he continued to react to it in a Western (European) manner, separating sacred and secular, and when he went there he studied the artifacts and regarded the culture that had lived there with scientific interest.

But in 1982 archaeologists discovered what is known as the "Sun-Dagger," a solstice-shrine and solstice-marker of ingenious design. Mauldin realized that to the Chacoan people who lived in the area the movements of the cosmos represented order, rightness. Being able to predict movements of heavenly bodies, on which the cycle of seasons seemed to depend, was reassuring, and represented an attempt to grasp divinity. This realization provided the epiphany to which the title of Fajada Butte refers.

From then on, it seems, Mauldin has remained alert to the spiritual harmony of the landscapes. Soon afterwards, also in 1982, The New Mexico Symphony Orchestra commissioned an orchestral work. Mauldin wrote this composition, vibrating with this new alertness to the spirituality of the land.

Mauldin points out that what he has called the "harmony" of this spirituality has its dissonances as well as its consonances, which he attempts to suggest in this composition. The epiphany he presents discards the "idealistic myth" of a people living in goodness, recognizing that like other people the Chacoan Anasazi struggled with the effort to find balance in existence; they practiced violence and perhaps even cannibalism. Fajada Butte portrays Mauldin's own realization that like all cultures the departed Anasazi had their own unique insights into the nature of things, "all things, including ourselves and the Cosmos," which can contribute to our own understanding and ideals.

© Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide