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Homer Grunn: On the Mesa, Op.7 No.3

383 views · Published 28 September 2015 · 3:00 · Indexed 8 November 2026

Channel: PSearPianist · 2015 · Music

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Phillip Sear plays an evocation of a desert tableland by the American composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist Homer Grunn (1880–1944).
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#3 from 'Desert Suite—5 tone pictures for piano' (1913)
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Homer Grunn studied in Chicago and Berlin.  After teaching at music schools in Chicago and Phoenix, Arizona in the early 1900s, he moved to Los Angeles, and visited indigenous communities in New Mexico from there.  Grunn collected their melodies and used them in his own compositions (with late-romantic and impressionist harmonies applied to them).   For more information on Grunn, see http://tinyurl.com/p7kdfej .  Each piece in this suite is prefaced by a poem from the New Jersey poet and sometime newspaper editor, William Hooper Howells (1844-1918).  Here is the poem that precedes this piece:

“A strange consolatory land, 
So solemn, yet so kind. 
The sibilation of the sand, 
Through sifting fingers of the wind. 
Makes silence more defined. 
And when the veil of evening falls, 
With insect nocturnes dry, 
And voices wierd (sic) and cadent calls, 
While stars bedew the sky. 
The mesa phantoms, pattering tread 
Along the trails of races dead..”

The accompanying art by W.E. Rolling shows a Native American standing by a clay pot, and looking out across the plain from a pueblo.  Note that in the middle of the piece is a brief evocation of a Native American dance.  “"mesa” is a geological term used to describe a flat-topped hill with steep sides, and there are many mesas throughout New Mexico” (Perplexity AI, 22/3/23).

Thumbnail image created with Wombo Dream ( t.ly/zhJa ).
#americanmusic #mesa 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- Played by Phillip Sear
http://www.psear.co.uk (Email:  [email protected]  
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