Along the Way

long the Way Grand Music for the Grandest Canyon Lives in the Artistry of Ferde Grofé

During my youth in western South Dakota, I was always aware of Arizona because my family subscribed to Arizona Highways. My mother waxed poetic over the 1940s' stateof-the-art photography published in the magazine; as her son subconsciously felt an urge to live in a place where berms of prairie dirt around houses' foundations were unnecessary to keep them warm in winter. I cannot forget the first time I "saw" faraway Arizona in color. It was not a polychromatic Arizona Highways cover, rather it was Ferde Grofés Grand Canyon Suite. My ears observed color impaled on muscular orchestral thrusts of sounds, melody, and heroic evocations.

Then came the acid test. Idecades later - stood with my wife and baby son on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon gawking into its depth, which bore a miniature river far below. And, just as in the music, there were the dark purples and blues of the clarinets, the ferrous pinks of oboes, and throbbing trumpets sounding like the pumping of one's blood when alone in utter silence.

The laws of time prevent me from standing next to Ferde Grofé as he initially peered into the Canyon in 1921. Surely he tasted the same sweet air I did, where, surrounded by such atmosphere, people gather to succor the pain of life. He comprehended music in the Canyon and distant mesas. To Grofé, here breathed the robust vermilion of an English horn and the shimmering azure of high massed violins. He wanted to document his emotions in a personal way.

Immediately he sketched two musical movements, "Sunrise" and "Sunset," which he laid aside perhaps to serve as future inspiration.

A decade later, Grofé's former employer, bandleader Paul Whiteman, was planning a concert at Chicago's Studebaker Theater. Whiteman approached Grofé, who had won praise with his 1924 orchestration of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" for an original composition. The Grand Canyon Suite was premiered by Whiteman's 20piece orchestra on November 22, 1931, to critical and popular raves.

But 20 instruments failed to carry the emotional effect the composer sought. When in 1933 Grofé was appointed conductor of the New York Capitol Theater Orchestra, he wrote, "I was at last to draw upon the full resources of a modern symphony orchestra and make use of all the orchestra colors I needed to describe my . . . subject in musicalterms." His new orchestration proved a sensation. And today the music is still performed internationally.

The most impressive of the Suite's five movements ("Sunrise," "Painted Desert," "On the Trail," "Sunset," and "Cloudburst") has to be the finale, "Cloudburst." When I first heard this music, I pictured my father's tense face as he stood on the porch watching a Dakota hailstorm capriciously dance from section to section ordaining the family's financial success or failure. After the storm passed and damage proved light, his eyes sparkled. And I, too, celebrated salvation from the cruel blue lightning bolting away safely to eastward.

The music in "Cloudburst" is as intense as was my father's face. Grofé makes use of a grand piano to simulate visual forks of lightning and crashes of thunder, demonstrating that he could orchestrate with the finest classical masters. The score to "Cloudburst" seems solid black with ink, instructing the strings to mimic driving rain, the woodwinds to toss like angry thunderclouds, the brass to squeal and bark, and the percussion section to chime, glissando, and bang itself into a fury. Certainly the Canyon has not mirrored such sounds since the stalled Spanish conquistadores screamed epithets of anger into the vast multihued pit. They had reached a chasm their might and will could not conquer.

Although Grofé captured the musical spirit of the Grand Canyon, it is still a place that calls to us to reflect, consider, and try to comprehend.

Editor's Note: Jim Schreier, a former research consultant and a writer for Arizona Highways, died in May, 1994. His unpublished articles will continue to appear in the magazine.