Martha Graham was one of the most tireless arts figures in the middle years of the twentieth century. A leader of modern dance, she directed her own company and commissioned innumerable scores from leading composers, including Alan Hovhaness, Samuel Barber (Medea), David Diamond, George Antheil, Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland (Appalachian Spring), and Paul Hindemith (Herodiade).

In 1948, she created the ballet Night Journey for a performance at Harvard University in 1948. She asked William Schuman, the recently appointed President of the Juilliard School of Music, to compose the music. Schuman, who had already proven himself as a dance composer with the 1945 score to Anthony Tudor's ballet Undertow, accepted the idea of a re-telling of the powerful Oedipus legend from the point of view of Jocasta, the mother of Oedipus.

The modern dance work focuses on the single moment that Jocasta realizes the trap fate has set for her and her son, and that her ultimate fate is suicide. Oedipus, the Daughters of Night, and the blind seer Tiresias pursue each other in frenzy, representing the culmination of the moment of truth, while she stands alone, holding the umbilical cord of Oedipus. Tiresias dashes it from her hand and forces her to relive the events that have brought her to this moment of death by her own hand.

On the birth of their son, Queen Jocasta of Thebes hears the prophecy that this baby will grow up to kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, she consents to the murder of the baby by having it sent out to be exposed to the elements in the mountains. Years later, her husband is murdered by a stranger. At that point, the Sphinx, a monster, waylays visitors to Thebes, asking them a riddle and devouring those who fail to answer, which is everybody. When a young stranger appears, answers the question, and kills the Sphinx, the grateful city agrees that he should marry the widowed Queen and rule as King. Later, as he unwittingly exposes his own crimes in trying to find why the city is afflicted by a pestilence, Jocasta is one of the first to realize that her second husband is the son that had been left to die and that by sending him to that supposed death she herself was complicit in beginning the fateful chain that led to disaster.

The music is for a chamber ensemble of about a dozen strings and a wind quintet, plus piano. The style of the music is tonal and Neo-Classical, with grim twentieth-century harmonies and an appropriately somber mood. It is tough, unconsoling music, and a strong achievement by Schuman. Graham was so satisfied with it that when she was commissioned, a year later, to prepare a solo dance work to be performed on stage at a concert of the Louisville Orchestra she commissioned Schuman to write the score for it, leading him to write Judith, Choreographic Poem for Orchestra, one of his major orchestral works.

© Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide