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Sculpture in the Wild Composer-in-Residence Adele O'Dwyer debuts original music inspired by native poetry and pathways

Composer Adele O'Dwyer wrapped up her 2018 stint as Blackfoot Pathways: Sculpture in the Wild Composer in Residence with a final concert Friday, Sept 28.

The concert at the Lincoln Community Hall featured original musical compositions by O'Dwyer performed by internationally renowned musicians in front of a backdrop of artwork by local students and was attended by more than 100 community members and BPSW supporters.

O'Dwyer said she spent several months in preparation for the concert.

"It was quite a lengthy process for me," she said. "It's very difficult to take song out of your head, and put the dots and things on the page, and have what you have in your ears be so clear on the page that any given musician will reproduce out of their instrument precisely what you have in your mind."

The night's program started out with a piece by composer Frank Bridge, followed by a collection of four original songs written by O'Dwyer and performed by O'Dwyer on cello, her daughter Aoise O'Dwyer on viola, violinist Marvin Suson, Cullen Bryant on the grand piano, and singer Pan Morigan, whose vocals showcased the verse of two Native American poets.

"I...was able to select my team of musicians, and I feel very lucky that I had that opportunity because I selected people that I knew really, really well and had worked with many times before in other contexts, and I knew that they would treat my music with the utmost of respect," O'Dwyer said of the group of performers.

O'Dwyer said she first chose the poems, then constructed the musical composition around them.

"The initial inspiration was that there was a sort of pathway of native peoples through this area," O'Dwyer said. "The collection of poems which I used have a beautiful nature theme celebrating various aspects of the geographical and natural habitat and environment in which the native people would have lived, which still remains in grandeur in this area. "My hope [was that] I could capture some of the beauty of the spiritual way they think about nature and encapsulate that, somehow, in the music, maybe I could offer an experience...which may contain some of those ways of life."

Two of the four poems, Wasp and Elk Thirst, were by Pend d'Oreille poet Heather Cahoon, whose verse is also featured on `A Gateway of Change,' Jorn Ronnau's 2014 installation at Sculpture in the Wild. Cahoon's poems served to bookend the two poems, Buffalo and Goose, by Bitterroot Salish tribal elder Victor Charlo.

"She's a younger poet...and Victor Charlo is actually a Chief, and he's 81 years of age. So, I felt there was a sort of spiritual wrapping-around, of her poetry wrapping around that of one of her elders in the tribal community. There was an element of wisdom being passed down from one generation to another," O'Dwyer said of her choice of verse and its placement in the program.

O'Dwyer's greatest challenge in setting verse to music, she said, was figuring out how to translate the poetry's free-form style into lyrics.

"It's almost like stream of consciousness poetic imagery," O'Dwyer said of the poems. "There's very little in the line of rhyme, there's very little in the line of a regular sort of syllabic structure, so I asked myself at the beginning of the process, how was I going to be able to make these into songs that would be coherent, musically speaking? It took me about six weeks to figure out that process."

The final product included a spoken-word introduction taken from Cahoon's poem, Wasp, followed by a collection of songs without any clear stopping and starting points between songs, called a through-composed collection, featuring sung vocals taken from Wasp, Goose, Buffalo and Elk Thirst.

"All of the songs in the performance run together like one big, long journey," O'Dwyer said.

Friday night's concert was the end-note to a residency that included a Montana/Ireland song exchange in cooperation with local school students and music teacher Melissa Gilbert, and several live concerts, including a lunchtime concert series designed to celebrate and commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the Hall.

"One of the things that really caught Adele's imagination was the 100-year anniversary of the Community Hall, so a lot of what she's doing is celebrating the Hall and showing it off...showing off, really, another layer of the Community Hall's cake, which is to be a venue for fine music," said BPSW President Becky Garland.

"I enjoyed being a part of the one-hundredth anniversary celebration of that beautiful Community Hall. It's an absolutely glorious place to play," said O'Dwyer. "It was my little home for three weeks – I worked there every single morning for hours...and it's just a dream – it's beautiful to play in, beautiful to perform in, central in the community where people can walk to it, very accessible...it's really a great place."

Although Park organizers are not certain whether there will be a Composer-in-Residence in coming years, BPSW president Becky Garland assured the BVD that the Board intends to continue to advocate and explore music as an intrinsic part of the park's program of events and attractions.

"It probably won't always be the same, and we probably won't always have the Composer-in-Residence program," Garland said. "With that said, we do want to have music as part of the Education Program."

For O'Dwyer, the highlight of her residency was the way in which the community embraced the music, her presence and that of the other artists and performers.

"In the space of three weeks we did seven live concerts and much of the music we played was...not the type of music they would have ever heard in Lincoln. And, yet, we got huge support," she said. "There were really generous audiences...we got lots of positive feedback and people were very thankful. I think that it's a very courageous community, embracing totally new and strange experiences."

 

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