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50@50 Beatrice NE Part 1

  |   Blog, Exploring

I’m having a wonderful experience as Composer-In-Residence at Homestead National Monument outside of Beatrice Nebraska. Actually, the Parks call it Artist-in-Residence, but this way, people don’t ask me if I paint or sculpt. Composer Alex Shapiro says she believes we hear differently when we are in nature. I think when were are in cities, our ears spend significant effort tuning out unwanted sounds in order to hear whatever we’re trying to listen to.

Here in the midst of the prairie, and surrounded by farmland, my ears feel entirely open.  It’s roughly a mile walk across the restored grassland from the education center to the heritage center (this IS the hiking portion of this blog). I walk there and back every day – sometimes early, and other times in the evening as the orange sun sinks low – the sounds are aren’t the same. Do birds sing different songs in the morning than in the evening? Definitely outside of my area! I hear turkeys, late in the day – left, right, left again. No sight of them in the tall Bluestem grass. One day, I ventured to the 800-acre Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center with its 3½ miles of trails about a half hour northwest of here.

It’s May. The morning insects are all about, but it’s still too early in the season for the hum of the lightening bugs, or the whirring drone of the locusts. Except in the early morning when the air is still, the most predominant sound is the wind. On my first day, a volunteer, Chuck Brinkman told me “There are only two seasons here in Nebraska: hot and windy, and cold and windy”.

I’m composing a three-movement work in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Homestead Act. Abraham Lincoln signed it on May 20th 1862, and the Act became law on January 1, 1863. [1] It was a golden opportunity for hundreds of thousands on a global scale. It precipitated one of the largest migrations in human history. The opening of the land for settlement also represented the final devastation for Indigenous Americans who, for the most part, had been removed from the land they called home for thousands of years.

I want to somehow capture the wind in my piece. As with all of my cultural geographic endeavors, I am immersing myself fully in all aspects of the Homestead Act. Effective in 30 states, the last homestead patent was granted in 1988.[2] The monument is near Beatrice because the earliest time-stamped claim was filed here. Since a majority of homesteaders settled across the Great Plains, prime farmland, I’m focusing my research for my piece to this region of the country.[3]

More to come…part 2 next week…


[1]           http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_documents/emancipation_proclamation/

[2]           http://www.nps.gov/home/historyculture/lasthomesteader.htm

[3]           The most accessible data is by state; some states encompass plains and mountain regions, so some extrapolation is included.