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You are purchasing high quality sheet music PDF files suitable for printing or viewing on digital devices."You go south from Fort Davis until you come to the place where rainbows wait for rain, and the big river is kept in a stone box, and water runs uphill. And the mountains float in the air, except at night when they go away to play with other mountains." – attributed to an old cowboy, his name forgotten
The Big Bend Country is a remote and rugged section of the Chihuahuan Desert in West Texas anchored by the Big Bend National Park. Located just north of the Mexican border and tucked into the namesake “big bend” of the Rio Grande, it is a stunningly beautiful yet wild, mysterious, and unforgiving landscape.
The themes and germinal motifs that this new composition is built on are drawn from a chamber ensemble score that I composed and conducted in 1983 to accompany a reading by award-winning poet Sandra Lynn from her book of poetry about the Big Bend region, which also provided the title and epigraph for this composition. The original 25-minute score–for flute, harmonica, guitar, horn, piano, violin, viola, and cello–has lain dormant for several decades, but when the invitation to write a new composition for piano and orchestra came around, I decided to revive and repurpose some of its music. Working with that material again after so many years has brought with it a flood of treasured memories of a time and place long ago and far away!
