Arturo Rodriguez
My love of music has been with me since I first started listening to music at around 4 years old in my hometown of Monterrey, Mexico. While I was attending elementary school, a music teacher moved in on a street that I passed on my walks to school. Every day I would stop and listen to the music she played as I passed her house. When I was 8 years old I convinced my parents to let me take piano lessons. My parents did not have a musical background to guide me, nor a piano for me to practice on outside my weekly lesson. I remember that my mom drew a keyboard on cardboard with a Sharpie and I used to practice on my silent piano every day.
At 18 years old, I received a scholarship to study the piano at Texas Christian University. When I heard the live orchestra there, I started playing the flute so I could play in the orchestra. Through studying orchestration, I got really interested in combining instruments and painting melodies…I wanted to see what it was like behind the podium – as a composer.
In the fall of 1999 while I was still a student at TCU; I met Ginger Head through a mutual friend, Trish Hill who was a teacher at East Handley Elementary school. Trish had been a part of many Imagination Celebration programs. She wanted IC to consider sending me to schools to play the piano for students and to discuss music composition.
Ginger called me and the next day we met at Einstein Bagel across from TCU. Ginger told me that Imagination Celebration had been selected as one of three spotlight sites in the nation for the National Millennium Project under the leadership of First Lady Hillary Clinton. The project was called “The Mars Millennium Project’.
IC would be working with teachers and schools across Fort Worth to create a yearlong celebration where arts and cultural groups, artists, and teachers would work with ICFW to create projects and programs around this theme to ignite learning about the past in preparation for creating a better future on earth.
Students would then also be asked to imagine themselves as the first people to go to Mars in the year 2030. Teachers would create lessons for them to engage them in thinking about such questions as how they would get to Mars; what would they eat, would they need art and music, and what would it feel like to leave earth? IC was looking for someone to interpret the project with a new anthem or better still a new symphony.
That morning at Einstein Bagel, Ginger Head asked me if I could write an anthem. I said I would try and then, she said, “well then, do you think you could write an entire symphony?” When she told about the spirit of Imagination Celebration, how the project would expose kids to specialists from NASA, and how the project was about NASA’s first trip to Mars, I was inspired to write an entire symphony!
This was a challenging task and a leap of a faith from both parties since I had never written a symphony before this one.
I spent 9 months composing the piece and only rehearsed it live with the TCU orchestra three times before Imagination Celebration presented the premier of this work to a packed audience at Ed Landreth Auditorium in December of 2000. It was played with an 80-piece orchestra and a choir, and each movement of “From Earth to Mars…a Symphonic Journey” described a step in that space journey, for instance “The Launch” and the “Journey Afar.”
The premier that night was introduced by the Senior Deputy Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Scott Shanklin Peterson, who also happened to be the co-creator of the “Mars Millennium Project.” Later that week we performed for 8,000 students from FWISD as a part of the project.
The CD made was given to NASA to take on the first trip to Mars and it is also in the Presidential Archives representing the Millennium project. I was invited to play the overture in Washington D.C. for a national meeting of 3,000 educators from across the U.S. hosted by then Secretary of Education, Richard Riley. This was a special moment in my life, which led to a number of other very important moments.
I returned home to Monterrey after graduation and my friends there, Lucy, Linda, and Patricia, heard the story of the music and Imagination Celebration. They were interested in learning more so I invited Ginger to come to Monterrey. This is how they and many more from my city met Ginger and heard the story of Imagination Celebration.
That connection was the start of a beautiful relationship that blossomed into Talentum, a program in Monterrey modeled after IC.
From Earth to Mars has taken me on concert tours for Imagination Celebration and back to my hometown of Monterrey, Mexico as well as to other locations in the U.S.As Ginger puts it, “The bridge of my music has connected IC and myself to an ongoing partnership between Mexico and the United States—with the city of Monterrey and with leadership in the arts from across Mexico, as well as to the leadership in the Mexican Embassy in Washington and the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. It has led ICFW to numerous projects with Orchestras and individual artists from my country.
Reflecting on the project and my current career as a professional composer, I believe that I didn’t consider myself as composer or even that I could dream to become one that time…I don’t think I would ever have taken this path if I hadn’t been commissioned to write this piece. This was the launch of my journey to a career as a successful composer.
I still visit Imagination Celebration and Talentum once or twice a year doing workshops and educational concerts. I love teaching the kids to “paint melodies” and use music as “a language to tell stories,” but “what’s really impacted me is that sense of wonder and openness of mind that the kids have. That’s the one thing that I keep being reminded of every time I get close to Imagination Celebration.”
*Note from Imagination Celebration: From Earth to Mars… a Symphonic Journey has been played with full orchestra for over 40 thousand people in the United States and in Mexico.
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