|
Jonathan Chenette |
|
Three movements for orchestra premiered in 2000
-
I. Rows Crops and Livestock (5:37, 3.25 MB)
- II. Milking Time (3:32, 2.07 MB)
- III. Becoming Prairie (3:15, 1.6 MB)
- 1st perf: Fort Dodge Area Symphony, Daniel Kleinknecht, conductor, Phillips Middle School Auditorium, Fort Dodge, IA, 10/15/00
- recorded by the Grinnell Symphony Orchestra, Douglas Diamond, cond., on the CD "Images of Rural America" available from the Grinnell College Bookstore
- II. Milking Time (3:32, 2.07 MB)
- Rural Symphony
was 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.
This collaboration was Iowa's official project in a fifty-state effort
to match composers with communities to create music reflecting on our
life, history, and dreams at the turn of the millennium. The Iowa partners
sought a work that would respond to rural life and the rural landscape,
with the music emerging from the composer's visits to Fort Dodge-area
farmsteads and nature preserves.
- Image
gallery of people, animals, paintings, and places associated with
Rural Symphony
"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.
"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.
"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. The effect is of a vibrant, magical, comforting landscape akin to that imagined by John Peterson in his poem "Becoming Prairie in Dickinson County" (Voices on the Landscape. Parkersburg, IA: Loess Hills Books, 1996, p. 108):
"In my mind I am able to just lie down
on the prairie sod
and be original and indigenous
concealed under butterflies
and nodding seedheads
while the air, thick with life,
moans like a man getting sleepy...
For now in my mind
I have given up my job, my house,
and all my enemies have forgotten me,
now that I have gone to prairie..."
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.
created by Jonathan Chenette,11/5/03
last modified, 12/27/08