Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Pianist-composer Phil Aaberg pounds out some Hi-Line sounds Friday at the How It Happens Festival in Livingston.
LIVINGSTON — Two books, sent to him years ago by his brother, showed pianist and composer Phil Aaberg that “art could be created on the Hi-Line and from the Hi-Line.”
The books were “Wolf Willow,” Wallace Stegner’s memoir of growing up in Eastend, Saskatchewan, and “Winter in the Blood,” James Welch’s searing novel that plays out on the Hi-Line’s dusty, sunbaked prairies and small towns.
Aaberg talked about that discovery Friday afternoon during the kickoff event of the How It Happens Festival at the Shane Lalani Center for the Arts in Livingston.
Subtitled “Creativity Under the Big Sky,” the festival brings together artists, musicians, moviemakers and writers to talk about how art happens, specifically how it happens in Montana.
The event was conceived by Montana Quarterly publisher and editor Scott McMillion, who started out wishing to see the film version of “Winter in the Blood.”
“I just wanted to get that movie down here,” he said.
In conversations with Andrew Smith, who made the movie with his twin brother, Alex, the idea expanded and grew until How It Happens was born. McMillion and Smith first talked in April. Somehow, it all came together in this amalgam of performance, lecture and conversation.
Except for a show by Wylie and the Wild West at the Livingston Elks Club on Saturday night, everything is taking place at the Shane Center, formerly the old East Side School. Tonight’s events include readings by Tim Cahill, Tami Haaland and David Quammen, plus a reading and discussion with Tom McGuane.
On Saturday, there will be more readings in the morning, with a screening of “Winter in the Blood” in the afternoon, followed by a discussion of how books become movies, with Livingston novelist and screenwriter William Hjortsberg and the Smith brothers.
Aaberg was the first to take the stage Friday, followed by another Hi-Line artist, landscape painter Clyde Aspevig.
Aaberg, who grew up in Chester, attended Harvard on a music scholarship and built a successful career as a soloist and studio musician, eventually moved his family to Chester, after buying his childhood home from his mother.
Aaberg said the shortgrass prairie of the Hi-Line can seem pretty desolate, but it is also a place of great, subtle beauty.
“The beauty is what gets me, and I tried to capture some of that beauty in my songs,” he said.
What does the Hi-Line sound like? Well, in Chester, it sounds like 47 trains a day passing through town. The wind is a constant aural presence, punctuated by the sound of birds or the sudden appearance of a coyote.
Mostly, Aaberg said, music from the Hi-Line is spare, with lots of room for thinking and listening. He illustrated his remarks with a performance of his “High Plains,” and while it’s possible this listener read too much into it, it did seem to have something of the grandeur of the plains about it.
In “The Big Open,” Aaberg said he tried to capture what he felt on seeing a great storm on the prairie. It featured a hypnotic, repetitive melody, building toward a rocking, boogie-woogie conclusion.
Introducing his last song, whose name we did not catch, Aaberg said, “Picture, if you will, a trainload of Rastafarians rolling across the plains.” This song was a rollicking jaunt with the percussive drive of, yes, a train, ending with a big, dense cluster of hammered bass notes.
He was rewarded with a standing ovation, and much whooping and hollering.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
After his talk Friday, landscape artist Clyde Aspevig chatted with Rolf Groseth, the former chancellor of Montana State University Billings, and former state legislator Dorothy Bradley.
Aspevig, who grew up in Rudyard, and whom McMillion described as perhaps the best landscape painter in the United States, was a bit harder to follow, but your correspondent blames his own dullness. It’s not Aspevig’s fault that he lives on and ponders the world from a higher plane than that on which your correspondent exists.
He talked about painting in terms of music, mathematics, poetry and physics, not in a deliberately highbrow way, but in the manner of an artist honestly grappling with the world and trying to interpret it with the tools at his command.
His presentation was illustrated with slides of his paintings and others’, with photographs, short video clips and even time-lapse photography to show the effect of changing light on a landscape.
Aspevig, by the way, mentioned at the start of his talk that Haaland, a Billings poet, is his cousin, whose father gave him his first painting lessons. We are beginning to envy these Scandinavian Hi-Line artists.
In a little under 35 minutes, Aspevig traced the history of landscape painting — the Mona Lisa owes much of its power, he said, to the “mysterious landscape” behind its subject; just look — and then talked about how he creates his own art.
He had a lot to say about the music of various landscapes, of root notes, syncopation and rhythm. We could not follow him all the way, but his honest, open-hearted discussion of these aspects of his art made us wish we could.
He made more sense when he showed a deceptively simple landscape by Monet, and said it could not have been painted without Monet’s visceral understanding of thermodynamics, of the transfer of heat and energy.
And then he showed his own painting of a lightning strike on the prairie, zooming in closer and closer to the point where the lightning emerges from the cloud. He spoke in detail of how he used his study of Monet to inform his own attempt to paint the movement of energy, “the atmospheric effect of this rain and the explosion of light.”
There was more, much more, but he saved his best advice for last, when he told his listeners how they could deepen their own appreciation of landscapes.
“You go out and you wander and you wonder,” he said. Listen to the sound of wind in the grass, take in the simple elegance of a cloud, learn to appreciate “all the different universes that live on a chokecherry branch.”
“The playground is open,” he said. “Go out and enjoy it.”
Editor’s note: If this all sounds like something you’d like to see for yourself, we’re sorry, but the event is sold out. Look for our coverage tomorrow of the screening and discussion of ”Winter in the Blood.”
