Portraits of the West: Picturing Utopia Program Notes

Seven Symphonic Portraits: A Weld County Reflection

In the summer of 2021, the Greeley Philharmonic Orchestra commissioned Composer in Residence Dylan Fixmer to write a symphonic work dedicated to the City of Greeley and the people of Weld County, Colorado. Prompted by the question "What brings us here?" Fixmer researched the historical and contemporary, discovering rich stories that make up Greeley and Weld County's past and present. Fixmer traveled city streets, learned the landscape, met colorful characters, and researched the interviews held in the archives of the Greeley Museums to find commonalities experienced by many. Fixmer's resulting music, Seven Symphonic Portraits: A Weld County Reflection, explores the hopes, dreams, struggles, and shortcomings that bind us all together in our search for utopia. In Fixmer's words “When we dream of utopia, what do we find in ourselves and in others? What binds us together? What blinds us to our shortcomings? We may dream of Utopia, yet fall away from grace. Our indifference, greed, distrust and self-righteousness forging inevitable demise. Struggling to stay afloat through hard times we persist in constant flux. Yet generations later still dream the same vision of the future: a better place for the next generation. We’re all here together. What do we need to learn to realize our utopia? At the end of the day, we may only have to examine the people who came here before us, champion their triumphs and learn from their mistakes.” Fixmer also worked with Greeley Museums staff to create a companion exhibit. The display explores each of the seven themes through images and objects held in the Museums’ collections. As visitors flow through the space, they will also move through the music, move through time, and move through the stories that make up our shared history. The exhibit will run at the Greeley Museums starting on October 19, 2023.

Written by Dylan Fixmer

Symphony No. 2, Mysterious Mountain, Op. 132

Mountains are symbols, like pyramids, of man's attempt to know God. Mountains are symbolic meeting places between the mundane and spiritual world. To some, the Mysterious Mountain may be the phantom peak, unmeasured, thought to be higher than Everest as seen from great distances by fliers in Tibet. The first and last movements are hymn-like and lyrical, making use of irregular metrical forms. In the last movement, a chant is played softly by muted horns and trombones. A giant wave rises to a climax and recedes. . . a middle melody is sung by the oboes and clarinets. Muted violins return with the earlier chant, which is then gradually given to the full orchestra.

Adapted from Alan Hovhaness

Symphonic Sketches

George Wakefield Chadwick would eventually come to be regarded as the standard-bearer of the Yankee academic tradition in music. His Rip Van Winkle Overture, composed abroad to an American theme, won him some early notice, and before returning to the States in 1880 he tasted a bit of the Bohemian life by tramping the continent with a group of avant-garde artists and writers called the Duveneck Boys. From 1877 to his appointment to the Directorship of the New England Conservatory in 1897, Chadwick built his career as a Boston teacher, organist, and composer. Chadwick’s compositional style has been dubbed “Boston Classicism.” Though there is a distinct academic foundation to his music, his works also reflect a certain Yankee bluntness and retain the hints of his colorful vagabond days.

Adapted from Thomas Hampson and Carla Maria Verdino-Süllwold