The various purposes of music were expressed in abundance during Utah State's Mountain West Symposium on Song, the first symposium of its kind in the country. As Utah State music professor Elizabeth York said in her presentation on the therapeutic value of music, "We use songs to evoke emotions, to tap into forgotten memories, to socialize and to bond. We use song throughout our lives to connect and inspire, to celebrate and liberate."

The symposium began as a conversation between music department head Bruce Saperston and bestselling cowboy singer Michael Martin Murphey, an adjunct professor in the department. Murphey said he wanted to offer a class in song writing. The idea soon expanded into a university-accredited summer symposium that crossed genres and mixed mediums.

Folklorists shared the stage with professional musicians who have performed regionally and at Carnegie Hall and presidential inaugurations. There were workshops and panel discussions with opera and chamber folk composers, Mormon and Baptist gospel singers, and cowboy and Navajo performers. Speakers broke into song and picked up their fiddles for impromptu jam sessions. Documentary films featured as much toe-tapping, sing-along music as a Broadway musical, demonstrating why cowboy crooners, family bluegrass bands and African songwriters have a worldwide following.

"We wanted to bring in music that people around here don’t ordinarily get to hear and show the cultural influences that inspired it,"said Elaine Thatcher '83MA, associate director of the symposium and the USU Mountain West Center for Regional Studies.

For Utah's Beehive Band, a primary source of material comes from the Mormon pioneer hymns that were derived from Scandinavian and British tunes. Melodies from popular Protestant hymns and drinking songs in the old country acquired new lyrics that sustained isolated converts to a new religion. The Calvary Baptist Church Choir in Salt Lake City sustains the faith of their congregation with spirituals composed by slave ancestors. Awakened to the possibility of freedom by the biblical story of Moses, they composed and sang songs in the cotton fields that became the telegraph system for alerting underground railroad workers to the plight of fleeing slaves.

The high-spirited bluegrass of the Lilly Brothers and their sons and nephews who performed in their absence goes back three generations - to Grandpappy-s musical descriptions of a challenging Appalachian way of life that persists to this day.

Former rocker Phillip Bimstein, a native Chicagoan who adopted Utah as his home, has looked no further than his own backyard for "new" sounds to incorporate into his populist compositions. The mooing of cows in a neighbor's pasture, the drip-drip of a leaking water faucet in his house, recorded conversations with the colorful characters he has come to know as two-time mayor of Springdale, Utah, have all found a place in his widely praised blends of everyday and musical forms of communication.

That the spoken and sung word should come together in the same piece of music only seems natural, given what Bruce Saperston had to say about the relationship between the two. "Babies respond to tones and inflection in adult voices before they understand words. In that sense, you could say that song is older than speech."

After hearing the Calvary Baptist Choir's soulful rendition of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," symposium participant Nora Zambreno '95 '00MS was convinced that music is more powerful than speech. "Everyone can relate to music. Every culture has it. Every culture without it finds its way to it. This conference validated my belief that music can change people. After centuries and centuries of warfare, maybe we should consider a different approach. Maybe we should be playing music in Iraq instead of killing each other."

Encouraged by the enthusiasm of participants like Zambreno, Saperston and Thatcher hope to make the symposium an annual or bi-annual event. -Jane Koerner