A graceful goodbye for Symphony in the Flint Hills
The organization orchestrated its final pop-up party on the prairie this summer.
Held Saturday, June 14, on the Evans family ranch in Chase County, the theme of the 20th Symphony in the Flint Hills signature event was “Prairie Sunset.” Yet it seemed, for much of the day, as though there might not be much of a sunset to speak of. The weather was cloudy, which kept temperatures pleasantly cool. Rain threatened, but never fell, leaving around 8,000 umbrellas and ponchos tucked away unused in satchels and strollers.
Then – just a few minutes after the conclusion of the performance by the Kansas City Symphony and country artist Logan Mize – the sun ducked below the stubborn deck of clouds, lighting everyone and everything up with a flood of livid pink and orange.
Beautiful sunsets are old-hat for Kansans. The kind of aerial display that would make someone from elsewhere stop and remark is an every-week occurrence around here.
But a sunset in the Flint Hills can be something else again. When the sun broke through on the 14th, the sky seemed to be pulled right down into the Evans Ranch’s endless grass. Enormous rays traced the hills’ crests and threw the hollows into shadow. Those who hadn’t already started the hike back to their vehicles instead hiked in the other direction, seeking a view across the green hills that would be uninterrupted by tents and port-a-potties.
I didn’t follow, since my party was content to watch the spectacle from the middle of the encampment. That view was impressive enough. Each walker was sharply silhouetted: moving motes of black against the brilliant light. The dust stirred up by the people, ATVs, and golf carts added to the glow.
This was the final installment of the signature event, a Kansas tradition launched in 2006 with the goal of raising awareness of the tallgrass prairie and bringing people – many for the first time – into direct contact with a landscape that once covered 375,000 square miles of North America. After two decades of mounting large-scale concerts in remote locations, the logistical, financial, and physical toll had become too great to wisely sustain. Each year’s event required transforming a patch of empty prairie into a temporary city of tents, stages, roads, and shuttle routes, all while respecting the land and restoring it afterward.
That temporary city came into dramatic view after a slow, dusty few miles of driving on seldom-used country roads. I arrived soon after the site opened, around 1 p.m., so the fields that would later serve as “parking lots” still just looked like fields, barring a scattering of battery-powered flood lights ready for deployment come evening. The walking path out of the parking area was lined with “outriders” – horse-mounted cowboys and cowgirls who had volunteered to provide hospitality, basic security, and cattle-wrangling knowhow. Each offered a kind word for my group as we passed, so that by the time we got to the event site, we felt thoroughly welcome.
An afternoon of educational and artistic presentations began at 2, and I was glad to have arrived in time to take some of them in. I gravitated toward the “Butterfly Milkweed Tent,” where talks focused on art and artists. Mark Feiden told an appreciative audience about “Emil Redmon’s Cow,” an oral history project that has collected more than 300 “Stories from the Farm and Ranch,” told by 86 elders of the Flint Hills community. Next, four painters took part in a panel discussion about their artistic practices and the inspiration they draw from the Flint Hills landscape and people. Finally, Traci Brimhall, the current Poet Laureate of Kansas, gave a talk that included a reading of a poem she had written that very morning, during a walk through some patches of wildflowers.
As the six o’ clock hour approached, the “parking lot” began to fill up, and those who had been attending the talks migrated back toward the natural amphitheater where the Kansas City Symphony would soon perform beneath the lights of a huge white bandshell tent.
My usual habit when attending a symphony concert is to maintain a sharp focus on the music; on the wordless storytelling of classical works that can be an hour or more in length. But this setting did not support that kind of listening. What the audience heard was complemented by the beauty of the landscape and the inherent spectacle of such a large gathering. When the outriders showed up to drive a herd of cattle across the field behind the bandshell, all bets were, understandably, off. A live performance of Aaron Copland’s “Rodeo” just couldn’t compete.
Kansas City Symphony assistant conductor Daniel Wiley’s other choices for the musical program added up to a smartly expansive view of what counts as “Americana.” He included arrangements of the traditional songs “John Henry,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” and “Shenandoah”; an original work by a contemporary Native American composer, Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate; and “Summertime,” the opening aria from George Gershwin’s great American opera, “Porgy and Bess.”
The concert ended, as it had during each previous Signature Event, with a mass sing-along of the Kansas state song, “Home on the Range.” But for me, the event’s true culmination came just before that, during an arrangement of the graceful fiddle tune “Ashokan Farewell.”
The “Farewell” gained its current, iconic status after it was used to underscore the most emotional moments in Ken Burns’ “The Civil War.” It sounds utterly timeless, yet it was composed not by an anonymous folk artist in the misty past, but by a living musician, Jay Ungar. He wrote it to express his love for a place of great natural beauty – and for a temporary community that came together there.
The beginning of something beautiful always points toward its end, toward the moment when that beauty will survive only in memory. We’d like to think the memory will hold, but won’t that, too, fade in time? Parts of the Flint Hills are burned every spring, and every summer, green shoots of grass spring up.
“Ashokan Farewell” is usually heard as a wordless melody, but after the Kansas City Symphony’s performance, I learned that Ungar did write words for it:
“Will every song we’ve sung stay with us forever? … Under the moon, the mountains lie sleeping./Over the lake, the stars shine./They wonder if you and I will be keeping/The magic and music, or leave them behind.”
This story appears in the July issue of East Wichita News and WestSide Story, available free at Wichita Dillons stores. It is reprinted here with permission.
Sam Jack is a poet, a classical tenor, and the adult services librarian at Newton Public Library. He performs with several local groups, including Wichita Chamber Chorale, Wichita Grand Opera, and Opera Kansas. He received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Montana.
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