Exploring the American idiom

“Wild West” unearths the raw nerve of the American soundscape

UTRGV’s Symphony Orchestra, in its recent program “Wild West,” ventured beyond performance, offering a visceral excavation of the American musical psyche. 

The evening’s offerings, anchored by a world premiere concerto by resident composer and professor in the UTRGV School of Music Justin Writer and performed by piano professor Kenneth Saxon, accompanied by the UTRGV Symphony Orchestra, and Aaron Copland’s iconic “Billy the Kid,” conducted by assistant professor Norman Gamboa, were less a concert and more a dramatic reckoning with the nation’s sonic legacy.

Writer’s new piano concerto, featuring the formidable Saxon, did not court easy listening. 

It arrived as a jagged, uncompromising statement, a musical mirror reflecting the anxieties and tensions that define our current landscape. 

Saxon, with a performance of almost feral intensity, navigated the concerto’s turbulent terrain, his fingers a blur of controlled chaos. 

Writer’s score, far from a pastoral depiction of the West, was a stark, almost brutal evocation of its untamed spirit, an echo of the nation’s own restless, often discordant, journey. 

The symphony, like a colony of ants, moved with a synchronous rhythm, a nonverbal communication that marveled the audience with its uniformity.

The program’s second half turned to Copland’s “Billy the Kid,” a work that, in the hands of the UTRGV Symphony, transcended its familiar narrative. 

Copland, writing in the shadow of the Great Depression, channeled the era’s desperation and yearning into a score that pulses with both menace and longing. The outlaw’s story, in this context, became a metaphor for a nation grappling with its own identity, its own wild contradictions. 

Was Billy the Kid a symbol of lawlessness, or a desperate figure born of desperate times? Copland’s music, with its evocative harmonies and sweeping melodies, offered no easy answers, instead inviting the audience to confront the complex, often unsettling, American experience.

The UTRGV Symphony, under Saxxon, navigated these challenging works with remarkable assurance. The orchestra’s ability to convey the raw emotional power of both Writer and Copland’s scores was particularly noteworthy. 

The percussionists, in particular, delivered moments of searing intensity, while the string section, at times, whispered with a haunting fragility. Although this was a performance of polished refinement it was equally, if not more, a raw, unflinching encounter with the primal forces that lie at the heart of American music. 

The music was not just heard but felt. 

In a moment when the nation seems to be grappling with its own identity, the UTRGV Symphony’s “Wild West” offered a timely and powerful reminder of the enduring power of music to reflect, challenge and ultimately, illuminate the complexities of the human experience.