Culture Pony Express (CPE) is excited to feature conversations
Please listen to Aaron Copland's majestic Quiet City (Wynton Marsalis, trumpet) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMiS7VWzsDo (right click link!)
A Musical Pioneer
Like pioneer women of yore, a few decades ago Clare Hoffman, a born and bred New Yorker, headed west to unfamiliar terrain. Inspired by Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark, whose protagonist was a female musician who travels to the Southwest to figure out her life, Clare embarked on a musical quest that happily led to the founding of the Grand Canyon Music Festival!
 © Jack Mitchell |
Clare Hoffman, Artistic Director of the Grand Canyon Music Festival (GCMF)
|
Serendipity may be the true mother of
invention.
Flutist Clare Hoffman and harmonica virtuoso Robert Bonfiglio were hiking through the Grand Canyon in the early 1980s . . .
when the head ranger asked them to perform for a retiring ranger!
© Ron Zac
After an impromptu concert below the North Rim, the local community's enthusiasm led the pair (now happily married!) to launch the Grand Canyon Music Festival (GCMF) in 1983.
The GCMF has been lauded by The New York Times as “a treat for eyes and ears” and has received many honors including . . .
Winner: National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award President’s Committee on the Art and the Humanities
Now celebrating its 29th season, the GCMF has grown into a major annual three-week festival that features internationally-recognized performers, composers, and ensembles.
ETHEL
© The New York Times
ETHEL, America’s leading postclassical string quartet, performed at GCMF on Aug. 24-25, and joined forces with the Catalyst String Quartet on Sept. 1. ETHEL is quartet-in-residence for the Native American Composer Apprentice Program (NACAP).
Perhaps the most striking feature of the festival (and what garnered the First Lady’s hand-delivered honor) is its educational outreach mission and interaction with the surrounding Native American community, including the Navajo, Hopi, Havasupai, and Pima Indian Nations.
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Hogan (traditional Navajo home)
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But I wanted to know more about what the festival meant to Clare, a flutist colleague and longtime friend (our sons were delivered by the same doctor), and how the Grand Canyon has shaped its artistic evolution.
So, Clare and I communicated as she was busily running the festival!
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Photo by Clare Hoffman
As you know Clare, I have first-hand experience
running a summer music festival. For a decade I was artistic director of Summer
Serenades, an outdoor music festival in upper Manhattan. I found it to be an
enriching and often exhilarating experience, but one that required a tremendous
personal commitment throughout the year. Congratulations on nearly 3 decades at
the helm of GCMF!
· What
inspired you to start a festival?
It
was the writing of Willa Cather that first brought me to northern Arizona and
the Grand Canyon. About 30 years ago (good grief!) I was a young musician, just
out of music school, struggling to find my way in the music business, feeling
burned out. My sister-in-law invited me to stay with her at a lake in
Massachusetts. At Penn Station, as I waited for my train to Mass., I wandered
into a bookstore and picked up something to read on the train. That “something
to read” was “The Song of the Lark,” coincidentally, serendipitously the story
of a young musician trying to find her way in the music world and getting
burned out. A friend tells her, “Go to the canyons of Arizona. Don’t think
about music.” I returned home from my trip to Mass. and said to my then-boyfriend Robert Bonfiglio (now husband),
“We’re going to the canyons of northern Arizona!”
· What
did you do when you first arrived in the Grand Canyon?
We
planned about 10 days of exploring, starting with a rim-to-rim-to-rim hike
through the Grand Canyon. I had my flute and Robert had his harmonica in
our backpacks. After the first day of hiking, you find yourself at the bottom
of the Grand Canyon, at the Colorado River. I found someplace where I could put
my aching feet into the freezing cold water of the river, took out my flute and
started to play. I didn’t realize that the sound was echoing throughout the
area.
The next day, we hiked along the floor of the canyon to Cottonwood
campground. I found a large washed out tree trunk where I was able to sit and
play flute. Robert wandered off somewhere and played his harmonica. What
neither of us realized was that there was a park ranger who had been at the
river the night before, and who had also hiked to Cottonwood, had heard the
music both evenings, and was searching for its source.
He finally found me,
inside the old tree, and invited us to join him and the other rangers for
dessert. We did – enjoyed prickly pear cactus juice and jello made with blackberries
picked at Indian Gardens, and played what was to be the first Grand Canyon
Music Festival concert: 2 tired hikers playing flute and harmonica, for 2
rangers at the bottom of the Grand Canyon!
· How has the topography of this
particular natural wonder shaped the way the festival evolved?
We
still had 2 days of hiking in the canyon, and all Robert could talk about
was starting a music festival at the Grand Canyon, like our dear friends Arnold
and Ruth Black had started in the Berkshires, Mohawk Trails Concerts, a place
where musicians could gather, away from the stresses of the music scene, and
make music in a beautiful setting. When we finished out hike, we sought out the
ranger – Joe Quiroz – and broached the subject with him. His eyes lit up… and
the work of founding a music festival started.
Joe
pointed us towards other canyons we needed to visit in northern Arizona, in
particular Canyon de Chelly and Navajo National Monument, both on the Navajo
Nation. We spent the next few days exploring these magnificent sites, where the
ancient ones still live through the pottery and structures they left, and
through their ancestors, the native people who still live on that land.
In “The
Song of the Lark” Willa Cather speaks about a “promise” to live up to the
standards set long ago by the ancient ones. The main character in the book is
inspired to return to music with new commitment and understanding of why we make music, or any art – the
connection to life.
· Do
you ever imagine how the festival might have developed if it were held in
a very different type of location – for instance in the mountains or by the
ocean?
I
love Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. They feed my soul, and will always be a part of
anything I do. But I think it is the work we have done with the Native artists
that has been the most inspiring and distinctive aspect of the Grand Canyon
Music Festival. The land and the people are inseparable. And their
understanding of their culture – “culture” as not separate from their daily
lives, but wholly a part of life – is a way of thinking we need to return to.
Ivory towers are fine: I love the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA, symphony
halls. But we have built too many walls between the art and… ourselves!
When we are at the
Grand Canyon Music Festival, it’s about the art as shared experience.
· How
do you keep the festival fresh and come up with new directions after all these
years?
Musicians
inspire me! For instance, this year mezzo soprano Cabiria Jacobsen will be
performing “Vignettes: Ellis Island,” a song cycle by Alan Louis Smith using text from the Ellis Island Oral History
Project. I want to start a Grand Canyon Oral History Project and set it to
music. We also are working with a young composer, Trevor Reed (a member of the
Hopi Nation) and traditional singer Hopi Clark Tenokhongva… We had a read
through last year at Clark’s village. How can you not be inspired?!
· What
gives you the most joy and makes you proudest about what you’ve achieved with
the GCMF?
Probably
our 28 years of outreach to Navajo and Hopi Nation schools, in particular the
Native America Composer Apprentice Project. This is NACAP’s 11th
season. In November we were award the National Arts and Humanities Youth
Program Award from the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities
from First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House. Since its founding, over 200
new works for string quartet have been written by students at high schools on
the Navajo and Hopi Reservations, and, performed and recorded at the Grand
Canyon Music Festival by professional ensembles, including the Miro, Calder
String Quartets and since 2005 our NACAP Ensemble-in-residence, ETHEL.
· How
do you see the festival evolving in the future (near-term/long-term, harnessing
new technologies & ways of communicating with audiences, etc.)?
We
will continue to develop our projects with Native youth and artists, and hope
to have more commissions, like a Grand Canyon Oral History Project song cycle,
and the project with Clark Tenokhongva. We are slowly advancing into social
media, and will be building a new website in 2013 to accommodate music and
video.
· What’s
it like dividing your time between two such contrasting parts of the country (NYC
& the GC)?
I
love it. I am a 2nd generation New
Yorker. I have a huge family there and I can’t imagine living anywhere else.
But being able to spend time in and around the canyons of northern Arizona,
Utah and New Mexico is a huge gift.
· Do
you find that you are two different people when you are in NYC versus the GC?
People
sometimes say, “You must enjoy escaping the rat race of New York,” but the
truth is the festival is completely absorbing while we are here… and after the
season is over I can’t wait to get back to my quiet life in New York City!
· What
is your relationship to the Grand Canyon after all these years – (do you ever
think I wish I could go somewhere else in August)?
Yes,
I do! As I said earlier I am a Native New Yorker. I love the weather in New
York! The dryness in Arizona actually gets to me. I can’t wait to get back to
the humidity! My son is starting high school in September, and I really wanted
this to be a summer where we could just be together and find some family time.
But the timing of the festival meant I was nose to the grindstone all summer!
But
the festival dates used to be later, after Labor Day, which meant for years I
missed September in New York. Now, with the festival season earlier, I can
enjoy September in New York – so it all works out!
Clare’s Personal Picks in the Grand Canyon
It
is always great to be on the Navajo and Hopi lands. You can really be off the
grid for a while. But that is changing – an internet café opened in Tuba City
last year!
There
are a few hikes I love: Canton de Chelly to White House ruin – paradise!. And
the Grandview trail in the Grand Canyon is a favorite.
· What are your favorite places that
you’d recommend to someone who has never been to the Grand Canyon – or the hidden
gems that someone who is returning might not know about?
Look
for fossils on the Hermits Trail (you can’t miss them!), on the hike down to
Dripping Springs, a waterfall. There are fabulous oases throughout the Grand
Canyon, and on the reservations. The Havasupai Reservation, west of Grand
Canyon National Park, has fabulous hikes, water falls, swimming. It is worth
the hike down.
And
while driving on the reservation, keep your eyes open for stands of Cottonwood
trees - that’s where there’s water, and you’ll find settlements and lovely,
shady places to hike.
· What
piece of music most captures the feeling you have when you’re at the Grand
Canyon?
Something
I play? The Sarabande from Bach's solo flute Partita. It is spiritual, yet
has an expansive quality – an openness.
· Oh, that's perfect –one of
my favorite pieces as well. Thanks Clare!
Shrine of the Ages, Grand Canyon National Park, where GCMF concerts are held
The GCMF has a 28-year partnership with artist Ed Mell, whose stunning Grand Canyon paintings are the image of the GCMF.
