Why You Shouldn't Miss It
We open with a collaboration with one of the other artistic giants in our community: the C.M. Russell Museum. The Museum will be lending a visual flair to our Western-themed concert.
The performance includes the colorful orchestration of Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite, Libby Larsen’s meditative and occasionally mysterious Deep Summer Music, and two of Aaron Copland’s most celebrated works: Rodeo and Fanfare for the Common Man.
Grand Canyon Suite
1931
Ferde Grofé | 1892 – 1972
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Sunrise
Painted Desert
On the Trail
Sunset
Cloudburst
Ferde Grofé was another New Yorker whose fame rests primarily on a Western-themed work, the five-movement Grand Canyon Suite. That said, his more substantial contribution to the American music scene was as a prolific arranger and conductor, reflecting his proficiency on a remarkable range of instruments. His most-often heard notes come from his various orchestrations of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.
Grand Canyon Suite was one of several of what might be called Grofé’s “American icon” suites. These include both natural icons: the Hudson River, Death Valley, the Mississippi River, Niagara Falls; and cultural: the Kentucky Derby, Hollywood, the World’s Fair. Never afraid of mass media, he had his own eponymous radio show and was nominated for an Academy Award for his score to the 1944 film Minstrel Man. Grand Canyon Suite itself received the film treatment from Disney in 1958, with Grand Canyon – what we might call a music video, though at 29 minutes rather longer than the sort MTV used to show – and this time it in fact won the Oscar, in the Best Short Subject category. That someone might be inspired to pair Grofé’s music with visuals is no surprise: Grofé’s colorful orchestration and evocative movement titles all but beg audiences to imagine the scenes as the music plays.
PROGRAM NOTES
BY GRANT HARVILLE
Not being immersed in the world of Western art, I admit that I had never heard of Charlie Russell before I came to Great Falls, but the introductions came quickly, from simply learning the name of CMR High School, to seeing the big statue outside the Symphony office, to visiting the C.M. Russell Museum. In fact, the first performance in Great Falls I heard as Music Director was in the Russell Museum basement as part of our Chamber Music Series. As we open our season with a program focused on the West and the great outdoors, we are privileged to have the Museum as our collaborators.
33 MINUTES
Fanfare for the Common Man
1943
Aaron Copland | 1900 – 1990
3 MINUTES
Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes
1943
Copland
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Buckaroo Holiday
Corral Nocturne
Saturday Night Waltz
Hoe-Down
19 MINUTES
Unlike Russell, Aaron Copland was not a Westerner, growing up in Brooklyn as the son of Ukrainian and Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. When Copland was approached to compose the score for the 1938 ballet Billy the Kid, he was sympathetic to the effort to create an American, less Russian-centered ballet aesthetic, but as a lifelong city-dweller, doubted his ability to pull it off. But by combining traditional cowboy songs with a blocky, wide-open approach to harmony and orchestration, he created what for many is the definitive American classical sound.
When choreographer and dancer Agnes de Mille needed a composer for another Western-themed ballet, Rodeo, where a lonely cowgirl tries to stand out amongst an influx of city girls, Copland was the obvious choice. Again incorporating folk songs like “Old Paint” and “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” Copland’s vision of Americana grabbed listeners immediately upon the premiere in 1942 and Rodeo became his most popular composition. Copland would later take four sequences from the ballet, calling them Four Dance Episodes, and arrange them in a traditional symphonic structure: fast (the rambunctious “Buckaroo Holiday,” with its cheeky trombone solo), slow (the dreamy “Corral Nocturne”), minuet (the gently flowing “Saturday Night Waltz”), and fast (the famous fiddle tune “Hoe-down”).
The same year, Copland was approached to contribute to the Cincinnati Symphony’s fanfares project, which brought in various composers to write patriotic fanfares during the war years following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Premiered in March 1943, Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man has become by far the most iconic of these. Copland was inspired to choose the name by a speech from then-vice president Henry Wallace: “The century on which we are entering—the century which will come out of this war—can be and must be the century of the common man.”
Deep Summer Music
1982
Libby Larsen | b. 1950
8 MINUTES
Minnesota-based Grammy-winning composer Libby Larsen may not be a true Westerner as such things are defined, but her connection to flyover country is perhaps more personally felt than that of New Yorkers Copland or Grofé.
The year before she became the first woman to be composer-in-residence for a major orchestra (the Minnesota Orchestra) in 1982, she wrote the meditative, occasionally mysterious Deep Summer Music. About it she says:
Panorama and horizon are part of the natural culture of the plains states. On the plains, one cannot help but be affected by the sweep of the horizon and depth of color as the eye adjusts from the nearest to the farthest view. The glory of this phenomenon is particularly evident at harvest time, in the deep summer, when acres of ripened wheat, sunflowers, corn, rye, and oats blaze with color. In the deep summer, winds create wave after wave of harvest ripeness which, when beheld by the human eye, creates a kind of emotional peace and awe: a feeling of abundance combined with the knowledge that his abundance is only as bountiful as nature will allow.