Season Opener: Rodeo

From the C.M. Russell Museum to CMR High School and the huge statue of him outside the Great Falls Symphony Association’s office, legendary Western artist Charlie Russell’s imprint on the Great Falls area is everywhere. On Saturday, Oct. 5, Russell will also be “present” at the Symphony’s season-opener Rodeo when selections of his art will be on display. 

Symphony Music Director and Conductor Grant Harville has a special memory of the artist. “The first performance in Great Falls that I heard was in the Russell Museum basement as part of our Chamber Music Series. (Now) we are privileged to have the Museum as our collaborators,” said Grant.

Unlike Russell, Aaron Copland was not a Westerner, having grown up in Brooklyn. As a life-long city-dweller, he doubted his ability when he was approached to compose the 1938 ballet Billy the Kid. But, by combining traditional cowboy songs with a wide-open approach to harmony and orchestration, he created what for many is the definitive American classical sound. When choreographer Agnes de Mille needed a composer for another Western-themed ballet, Rodeo, Copland again incorporated folk songs like “Old Paint” and “Bonaparte’s Retreat.” Debuting in 1942, Rodeo became his most popular composition. 

It was also in 1942, that he was approached to contribute to the Cincinnati Symphony’s fanfares project, consisting of patriotic selections from a variety of composers during the war years following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man was inspired 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.”

Ferde Grofe was another New Yorker whose fame rests primarily on a Western-themed work, the five-movement Grand Canyon Suite. In 1958, it received the film treatment from Walt Disney with Grand Canyon, a kind of 29-minute “music video” that won the Oscar in the Best Short Subject category. Grofe’s more substantial contribution to the American music scene was as a prolific arranger and composer, reflecting his proficiency on a remarkable range of instruments. His most-often notes come from his various orchestrations of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

In 1982, the year before Libby Larsen (also not a Westerner) became the first women to be composer-in-residence for a major orchestra—the Minnesota Orchestra—she wrote the meditative and occasionally mysterious Deep Summer Music. It’s a composition, she says where “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 the depth of the color as the eye adjusts from the nearest to the farthest view…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.”

New amenities for this season’s concerts include the availability of beer and wine, a free coat check run by the GFSA’s Youth Orchestra, and a Maestro Lounge reception after each concert.  

Tickets for Rodeo start at $45.00  and are available online at gfsymphony.org or by calling the Symphony office at 406-453-4102. This performance of Rodeo is sponsored by TDS Telecom.