“Seven Symphonic Portraits: A Weld County Reflection” opens Nov. 16 at the Greeley History Museum. The exhibit features music by Dylan Fixmer, Greeley Philharmonic Orchestra’s composer-in-residence. Fixmer’s work premiered Oct. 14 at the orchestra’s performance of “Portraits of the West: Picturing Utopia.”
To compose “Seven Symphonic Portraits,” Fixmer spent hours exploring Greeley and Weld County stories. He traveled the area, met colorful characters and found inspiration in the Greeley Museums’ archives. The seven movements that resulted convey the hopes, dreams and struggles of the people who lived and worked here. In a recent Weld Found podcast with Tim Coons of the Weld Community Foundation, Fixmer explained how he researched the stories that shaped the movements.
A page from Fixmer’s handwritten composition notebook. Photo courtesy of the Greeley History Museum.
“I tried to collect as much information from as many different people as possible, and the museum made that very easy for me. They have this collection of oral histories in these giant file cabinets in the basement—just file after file of people talking about their experiences living in Greeley and in Weld County,” Fixmer says. “I read through so many of them looking for commonalities, and when I found something I really liked, I would go ask if I could have access to the audio files.”
Fixmer says that process of sifting through oral histories helped him start to find common threads that he wove into seven themes.
“So the seven movements…are representative of common experiences within people in Weld County,” Fixmer says. “I tried to distill all of those oral histories and all of those photographs that go with them into these movements. Each movement represents some shared experience of the people.” To listen to the two-part podcast, visit weldfound.podbean.com.
For the exhibit at the Greeley History Museum, Fixmer collaborated with the Greeley Museums staff as they used images and objects from the museums’ collections to create the exhibit. Visitors can use QR codes in the exhibit to hear recordings of the music as performed by the Greeley Philharmonic.
The Greeley History Museum, 714 8th Street, is open Thursday to Saturday. For more information, contact the Greeley History Museum at 970.350.9220 or by emailing museums@greeleygov.com.