Second Performance Project part of Harville’s symphony legacy
By Madison Medved, C.M. Russell High School, 2024 intern for The Electric
In the world of music, the journey of a composition often ends after a piece’s grand debut.
To foster the global music community and provide a beacon of hope for composers, Grant Harville, music director of the Great Falls Symphony, created the Second Performance Project, in which they play arrangements that have only ever been performed once.
“This does not exist anywhere else in the composing world,” Harville told The Electric, with C.M. Russell High School intern Madison Medved, during a March 2024 interview.
Being a composer himself, Harville knows some of the struggles that come with creating music. Not many pieces get a chance to be played again after their first debut.
Large symphonies specialize in performing the pieces first, but there aren’t nearly as many that are willing to play the second.
Harville said that they are, “trying to — in a small way — fill that gap.”
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Composers are excited to have the chance to play their pieces again, giving it a second life after the debut.
As of March 2024, more than 160 pieces had been submitted with 157 from unknown composers, allowing the Great Falls Symphony to play more music they aren’t familiar with.
“We want to do new music. We want to do pieces we don’t know from composers we don’t know,” Harville said.
Music is written all over the world, but there is no good way for it to be distributed.
Having composers submit their own works, they can find music that they know has been played.
Many of these pieces, though, were created uniquely for the orchestras that commissioned them.
By playing this music, Harville said that they are, “taking it out of the situation it was written for.”
This helps give the musicians more of a challenge, especially since many of the pieces haven’t gone through professional correcting.
If the music made gives rewarding sound and the piece comes together well, the musicians will enjoy playing it, Harville said, as “we’ve played so much stuff in our life…it’s hard to surprise a musician.”
When musicians enjoy their music, it always sounds better, an important consideration as music directors develop season programming.
Different themes are selected for different concerts, which makes the music appeal to a wider variety of audiences, Harville said. The narrative of the pieces helps craft the story broadcasted to the audience.
“When we’re putting together a season, it’s a lot of moving parts,” Harville said.
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The 2023-2024 season was the symphony’s first with the project, but Harville said he hopes it continues after he leaves and that the new music director will keep it as a component of the symphony.
The selected pieces so far are:
- Hansol Choi, [OUT]cry (2023-24)
- Avik Sarkar, From Voices (2023-24)
- Zack Gulaboff Davis, Twirl (2024-25)
- Nancy Hill Cobb, Shades and Illumination (2025-26)
- Gregory Wanamaker, Still Life in Motion (2025-26)
“It’s something I take seriously great pride in,” he said. “The amount of music under the project is small, but it occupies an outsized place in my heart. Saving pieces will stay important to me, so I imagine I will continue some version of the project no matter where I go.”
In additional to playing the piece selected, Harville publishes a list online of other shortlisted pieces to allow other music groups to play these pieces, helping them be rediscovered down the road.
The project is value of the project extends beyond Great Falls to the larger composer community, he said, and knows of a few pieces that had been played since the symphony played a piece as part of the Second Performance series.
One of the main orchestral music catalogs asked Harville to send information about the Second Performance pieces to include in their catalogs, meaning those pieces will stay in those resources for years to come, so perhaps 30 years from now, a piece is played because it was a part of this project.
Harville uses music as a way of connecting people, which he said was important to preserving community. By implementing the Second Performance Project, he is connecting people from all over the world.
“Orchestras exist…as a way of bringing people of one location together,” he said.
Live symphony performances are also valuable to communities as there are fewer and fewer opportunities daily for people to be in the same room as their neighbors.
“We provide one of them,” Harville said. “That kind of community building around an event is something that we’re in danger of losing, and some people would argue that we have lost that, so we’re fighting to make sure that geographic proximate community still has meaning.”
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