When, in 1999, as a high school senior, our daughter enrolled in an Art History course, she was required to purchase a hefty art history book containing hundreds of photos of celebrated paintings and sculptures.

Smack in the middle, pictured on opposite pages, were photos of Stonehenge and Serpent Mound. The blue skies behind them emphasized their commonality, two ancient, mysterious works of architectural art. I thought, how appropriate to display them side by side. Serpent Mound is a North American twin to Stonehenge.

It occurred to me that, “seein’ as how” I am an Ohio composer, I ought to write a piece about Serpent Mound, the most beautiful and best known of Ohio’s many ancient earthworks.

Can music really be “about” something other than itself?

It’s a perennial debate. I’ve written plenty of “program music,” i.e. instrumental works that attempt to render an extra-musical narrative or notion described in the piece's title and program notes, inviting listeners to imagine correlations to the music as they listen.

Where’s the harm in that? A programmatic title may give listeners an entrée to the music which a generic title, such as “Prelude in F sharp minor,” could not provide.

My piece about Serpent Mound is, in fact, in F sharp minor and ‘Prelude’ is just a generic term. Either title would serve. But which title do YOU find more intriguing: “Serpent Mound” or “Prelude in F sharp minor”?

As a composer, I know which title is more inspiring.

Program music works the other way about, too: extra-musical entities can inspire music. I asked myself, “What would a piece of musc that was titled ‘Serpent Mound’ sound like?” Ideas began to flow.

The resulting piece is a soliloquy on a squiggly motif, a slithery, four-note, descending musical shape, a serpentine shape, if you will.

I wanted the music to have a wintry mood, evoking the famous effigy mound as seen during a light snowfall, prompting us to ponder its mystery: we will never know why it was built.

Accordingly, the final cadence is ambiguous: is the final chord major or minor? The ending is a metaphor for our conjectures about the Serpent Mound, which must ever remain … conjectures.

We have a few facts. Archaeologists generally agree that it was constructed around 1066, perhaps in response to the most dramatic appearance of Halley’s comet in recorded History. The striking appearance the comet made in that time around is even depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry, with people looking up at it, pointing and gesturing in wonder or horror. Looking back after William the Conqueror’s invasion and conquest of Anglo-Saxon Britain, the appearance of the comet was understood as a portent.

In America, perhaps because the comet streamed across the night sky with a long tail behind it, the ancient moundbuilders may have taken it to be a giant celestial snake. Given that their cosmology apparently featured a sort of snake-god, they might have felt prompted by the appearance of the comet to build the giant, serpentine mound; it is a quarter mile long.

Perhaps they hoped to honor or appease what might have understood to be a rapidly approaching, possibly menacing, potentially devastating god. Perhaps they believed that, by building the Serpent Mound, they could dissuade the giant serpent from destroying the world they knew; perhaps they thought that they were saving the world from destruction. If that was their intention then, by their lights, the plan worked: as the effigy took shape, the comet faded, the celestial snake-god retreated, and the world was saved.

(Reminded daily that humans are destroying the world, we might envy the moundbuilders’ possible belief that, by building the Serpent Mound in the nick of time, they had saved the world.)

The world-saving notion is my conjecture, but it is certain that astronomy shaped their thinking. The North Star, seen by a viewer standing on the tip of the serpent’s tail, appears directly above the center of the serpent’s open jaw at the opposite end of the mound. No accident, that.

What’s more, the three curves of its tail are aligned with the points on the horizon at which the sun rises on the longest and shortest days of the year … and the days that fall exactly in the middle between those two days.

Thus, the effigy is a tool for astronomical observation, night and day, a kind of calendar, marking the four most important milestone-days of the year: June 21, September 21, December 21 and March 21.

The creature’s jaws are stretched wide as it swallows and/or emits an ovoid ring. Is it an egg? Does it represent the sun? Did the Moundbuilders’ cosmology explain the alternation of day and night as the result of a giant snake alternately swallowing and emitting the ‘egg-sun’ in perpetual repetition?

When, at the opening of the piece, you hear the four-note shape descending, imagine that the serpent is swallowing the egg. Later, when the same shape is heard upside down, ascending (at ms. 26), imagine that the egg is being emitted.

Back and forth, up and down, in and out, night and day, a neverending process, expressed by the ancient Moundbuilders in the shape of their Serpent Mound.

To see and hear my cellist friend Sherill Roberts playing “Serpent Mound” in the recent premier recording of the work, which she kindly made at my request, copy and paste this link into your browser:
https://youtu.be/wah243LmpGI

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.