Wisconsin’s rural life inspires a classical composition

When Martha Glowacki asked rural sociologist Michael Bell to offer commentary about "Wisconsin's People on the Land," the art exhibition she co-curated for the Wisconsin Academy's James Watrous Gallery, she thought he might say something about the state's rural roots or its long history with agriculture.

She didn't expect that Bell would say nothing.

But that's exactly what happened. After seeing the exhibition, which is on display in the Watrous Gallery until May 20, Bell suggested that he respond to its depictions of rural life with music instead of words. He then wrote a three-part classical composition titled "The Wick of the Land," which will be performed by the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society on May 13, as part of a concert that kicks off the Academy's two-day conference, "The Future of Farming and Rural Life in Wisconsin."

"It's really a wonderful idea," says Glowacki. "I thought Mike would be perfect to look at the artwork from the perspective of a rural sociologist, but I didn't know that he wrote music, as well. That was a pleasant surprise."

Bell's second life as a composer is indeed surprising, especially when one considers the productivity of his first. As an environmental sociologist, he has written and edited seven books on topics related to sustainability and rural sociology. He also directs the College of Agricultural and Life Science's agroecology master's degree program, which trains students to be leaders in weighing the social and environmental issues associated with agriculture.

Music, however, has been Bell's avocation since childhood. Growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, he learned to play banjo and mandolin while performing in a family band called the Outhouse Shouters and began writing folk songs while in his teens. A self-described "weekend composer," he has written several dozen reels, jigs and waltzes, many of which have been recorded by the Iowa-based Barn Owl Band, for which Bell was a semi-regular on mandolin before joining the UW–Madison faculty in 2002. The band has three CDs and twice played on Garrison Keillor's "Prairie Home Companion."

Lately, Bell has traded twangy tunes for scoring sonatas, something he dabbled at in high school and vowed to pursue more faithfully when he had time. "I always promised myself that when I turned 40 or when I got tenure, whichever came first — and hopefully they were both going to come — I would get back to classical composition," he says. Having recently eclipsed both hurdles, he has become a prolific hobbyist, crafting more than 20 pieces for piano, string quartet and other instrumental combinations in the past five years.

"Music is my play," Bell says. "It's always running through my head, when I'm bicycling to work or looking a little dazed in a faculty meeting."

While classical music is typically more complex in structure and meaning than folk music, Bell says its depth does not need to come at the cost of accessibility. "A lot of classical composition these days is more for a specialist listenership, and I try not to write music in that way," he says. "The best classical music, I think, is very much like what we need to be doing in academe, in that you can get a good part of its meaning on the very first hearing. There may be a whole bunch more meaning below that repeated hearings will give to someone. But we as academics need to learn to communicate immediately with our audiences."

Such is the case with "The Wick of the Land," which Bell describes as a piece about "the rural spirit of sustainability and the sustainability of the rural spirit." Inspired by the Academy's "Wisconsin's People on the Land" exhibition – which features paintings and photographs by artists such as David Lenz and UW–Madison art professor Tom Jones – Bell says he wanted to create a sense of place in his composition, capturing the traditions that have shaped and continue to transform Wisconsin's landscape.

"Mike essentially is doing the same thing as a musician that the artists have done visually," says Glowacki. "He's trying to encapsulate feelings about our landscape and how the way we define ourselves through the land."

"I just fell in love with this project," says Bell. He was struck, for example, by a Jones photograph of his Ho-Chunk mother and a young relative gathering milkweed, a plant important to Ho-Chunk ceremonial traditions. As she harvests the plant, the girl in the picture, who appears to be in her teens, wears earphones, tuned in to music from a Discman portable CD player.

"She is a teenager in the 21st century, but she is still gathering traditional herbs," says Bell. To him, it signifies that traditions never really die, but are constantly being challenged and redefined by new generations and new societal pressures.

To evoke those sentiments musically, Bell drew upon field recordings made by Helene Stratman-Thomas, a UW–Madison music professor who traveled throughout Wisconsin in the 1940s to document folk music among the state's rural residents. The collection, available online through the Mills Music Library, gave Bell an acoustical road map of Wisconsin's diverse cultures, from Native American drums to Irish jigs to Norwegian fiddle tunes. Many of those sounds are echoed in Bell's piece, both as tribute and as a way to draw the traditions of the past into the present — and project them into the future.

"It was important to me to have a positive message in the piece, because that is how I feel about the rural," says Bell. "There are reasons to be concerned, for sure. But there are also reasons to be hopeful and optimistic, and I hope people will hear that."

The May 13 concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art lecture hall, following a pre-concert reception. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased at the James Watrous Gallery, on the third floor of the Overture Center, or by calling (608) 265-2500. The Academy's Future of Farming and Rural Life in Wisconsin conference runs May 14-15.