Laura Viklund and her husband Chris Gunn built this “shell” in a month in Cody, Wyoming out of plywood, drove it up to Fishtail in pieces, and put it together in a very frantic week. We’ve since moved it to another gorgeous location closer to the Olivier Music Barn.

We asked the Red Lodge Chamber Players and the Magic City Strings to play the Dvořák American Quartet in it. The result is on the website, tippetrise.org. The American Quartet was the perfect piece, because Dvořák wrote it for the underdogs, for Native Americans, African Americans, immigrants. Dvořák himself, as a Czech, was regarded as a gypsy by the Prague Symphony, and had to fight prejudice all his life to become the legendary composer he suspected he might be. The uniquely American spirituals, hymns, and the sheer freedom of our wide open ranges are evident throughout the piece, as is the Scarlet Tanager in the third movement, a bird which was bothering Dvořák in his studio, so he wrote it into the quartet and it became an asset (a great way of dealing with difficulties).

The musicians were astonished, because they heard the supportive reverberation of a small, wood-paneled concert hall, as did the audience. But you could see everywhere around you, and the presence of the American West on every side of and above the musicians was the final psycho-acoustic contribution of the land to the music, as the Dvořák’s American Quartet, written in 1893 in Spillville, Iowa, has for so many years contributed to the myth of the American West.