Rural Symphony -- commissioned by the Blanden Memorial Art Museum and the Fort Dodge Area Symphony in Fort Dodge, Iowa, as part of the Continental Harmony program of the American Composers Forum and the National Endowment for the Arts

Image gallery of people, animals, paintings, and places

"Row Crops and Livestock" grew out of the earthy good humor of a couple near Fort Dodge who raise cash crops and livestock with very little farm-derived income but with an obvious love of what they do. Like their lives, the music is alternately heroic, lyrical, and filled with irony and surprise.

Irvy and Janeen Badger's row crop and livestock farm near Fort Dodge, Iowa:

Irvy and Jeanneen Badger with Jonathan Chenette, March, 2000	Newborn lambs in the Badgers' barn, March, 2000

"Milking Time" was inspired by the rhythms in the life of a visual artist who works at her family's dairy operation and spends time painting each day between the three-hour morning and evening milking sessions. The three-part form is marked off in five-measure groupings in 12/8 time corresponding to the hours of her work day. Percussive evocations of the milking equipment pervade the outer sections.

Sonja Searcy's family dairy, March 2000	Sonja Searcy's painting "Beyond the Gate"

"Becoming Prairie" was inspired by the sights and sounds of the wild prairie remnants still to be found in the Iowa countryside. Many of its musical ideas were notated from insect and bird sounds recorded at Kalsow Prairie near Fort Dodge and drastically slowed down with the aid of a computer. Inspiration for "Becoming Prairie" also came from a conversation with Norma Field in her farmhouse dining room. Norma has lived through decades of transformation at her family farm and is concerned about the direction things have gone in -- expanding farm sizes, diminishing neighborliness, and increasing mechanization and chemical usage. She takes comfort from prairie preservation projects like those of The Nature Conservancy and from prairie restoration projects at places like the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge.

Rattlesnake Master at Kalsow prairie, late August 1999	Norma Field in her dining room, March 2000

created by Jonathan Chenette,11/5/03
last modified, 12/27/08