Passion for the Prairie

Visions of Great Plains inspire concert

Kirby uses music, painting to revisit small-town America

SANDPOINT - Trying to describe the music and paintings of composer/artist Scott Kirby is like trying to convey an image of the Great Plains to someone who has never been there.

You find yourself grasping for words like vast, or expansive - and find them lacking. You wrestle about with phrases that, in the end, can never depict the way a prairie wind can embrace you when you stand with your eyes closed, or show the way a wheat field can dance you to heaven and back when it is backlit by sun and there is a hint of dust in the air.

The plains have reached out to this artist; whispered in his ear, opened his eyes and pulled him close. And the result has been an outpouring of creativity that celebrates the majestic subtlety of small town America and its importance to the future of society.

Under Kirby's hands, even places where the streets have emptied and the homes have been shuttered spring to back life. They are not populated by long-dead ghosts - his music causes them to teem with spirits who stand clear-eyed and strong, guardians of some eternal truth awaiting rediscovery.

His paintings and drawings turn water towers and grain legs into sacred totems that hug the sky. The townscapes are crafted with an off-kilter perspective that tugs the viewer forward with an invitation to tumble in and walk these streets.

Kirby has married the two mediums in a concert presentation he calls “Main Street Souvenirs” - a program that features both his artwork and music, woven together by a narrative thread.

The first half of the performance combines piano arrangements of things like frontier ballads, Stephen Foster tunes, rags and original works to communicate what Kirby calls “an American traditional language.” The second half concentrates primarily on selections from his original work, “The Prairie Devotionals” - a composition he described as “music from the Great Plains.”

“The theme has more to do with the cultural heritage of small-town America and how that can serve as an inspiration for creating something new,” Kirby said. “Not just in art - in the way we live our lives.”

The fascination with the plains crept up on the artist in a quiet way and in an unexpected place. While on a performing sabbatical in 2005, he traveled to France with his wife, photographer Marie-Dominique Verdier, and their two daughters to compose and spend more time painting - a new artistic direction for him at the time. Consistently, the images that made their way to paper were those of grasslands and fields that made a run for the horizon, unbroken except for the occasional windmill, telephone pole or township.

And always, the sky - acres, oceans, boundless reaches of sky. Sometimes it swirled in oblique homage to Van Gogh; sometimes it stayed in the background, a wash of watercolor. But every time, it was there as a capstone, a compositional framework that led the eye around the world inside each painting.

The same imagery emerged in music Kirby composed while in France. In all, he completed 75 paintings - which make up a collection titled “Visions of the Great Plains” - and 28 musical compositions, including those in “The Prairie Devotionals.”

So, Kirby was asked, did the artwork inform the music?

“Not consciously,” he said. “The connection with the Great Plains is still a mystery to me.”

The closest he has been able to come in terms of finding an explanation has been through exploring the concept of “The Heartland.” Not in the way political candidates refer to the location of a voting block or in relation to any geographical designation, but in search of a heartbeat that pulses beneath the prairie in a rhythmic tempo that says, “slow down; slow down; slow down.”

“In the Great Plains, you're psychically exposed, as well as physically exposed,” Kirby said. “The lack of stimulus forces us to look for something, which forces us outward and inward at the same time. In the end, you have to look at yourself.”

The Sandpoint artist has created a sanctuary to continue his search in an old, one-room schoolhouse in Four Buttes, Mont. - an open space with southern exposure, large windows and plenty of room to paint and compose.

“I bought it before I started painting,” he said. “I just knew I had to have it.”

Don't ask Kirby to make sense of the purchase, or his love affair with the prairie. Through his art and music, he is still working toward that answer for himself.

“The concert program is always evolving,” he said. “I'm constantly trying to get to what I'm trying to say. And I usually come up with more questions than answers.

“This was not planned; it was not expected,” he added. “It was created out of compulsion and inspiration.”

If there is an epiphany within that creative evolution, it is the importance of what Kirby calls “organic culture” - a non-technological relationship between culture and community, a reconnection with face-to-face interaction, sharing ideas, making music - which comes to the fore in a multi-media presentation that looks back as a way to clear one's head preparation for moving forward.

It recalls the joy of friends gathering as amateur, participatory singers and holds it out as an option to remaining a passive consumer on an iPod leash. It points to the fact that a single conversation, conducted in person, can be more enlightening than a hundred hasty cell phone calls about nothing in particular.

“What I'm trying to do is draw from elements from the past that can help our lives,” he said. “Art is intended to elevate us. The goal of art is to enrich our lives and, in some cases, to change our lives. My goal is more than entertaining people for two hours - I want them to take something with them.”

Kirby's presentation of “Main Street Souvenirs” will take place on Friday, May 9, at 7 p.m. in the Panida Theater. Tickets are $12 for adults, $8 for students 18 and under and available at Pack River Potions, Eve's Leaves and Monarch Mountain Coffee. Kirby's set of prairie paintings - “Visions of the Great Plains” - is available in a hardbound, coffee table collection. For more information, visit www.scottkirby.net