“Cowboy Overtures,” performed at Casper College on Saturday night by members of a local brass works company and other Wyoming musicians, is a testament to the power of kitchen table conversations. Talking over the table in their Casper home one evening, Steven Trinkle and his wife, and Genie Burkett, decided that instead of playing abroad again, they should stay in Wyoming and celebrate the music of the West. So they arrived at “Cowboy Overtures.
” The idea was born long before the performance could be planned. Burkett applied for grants months in advance. The endeavors were successful.
Thanks to funding from the Wyoming Cultural Trust Fund, National Endowment for the Arts and the Wyoming Arts Council, among others, the performance was free to the public. Trinkle built the program with seven songs, each a nod in some way to midwestern and western culture — the rise of the railroad, the exhaustion of the midwestern soil that led to the Dust Bowl, the open spaces and rolling hills that Wyoming is known for. In an interview before the performance, he likened it to storytelling.
“It’s assembling a story, much like writing an essay,” he said. His brass company, Trinkle Brass Works, and musicians from around the state gathered Saturday evening to tell the story. Trinkle started with The Plow That Broke the Plains by Virgil Thomson, a piece written for a government film about the Dust Bowl and its catastrophic effects.
He thought it fit Wyoming’s dryness and windine.