Oregon Experience's Sagebrush Symphony
When:
9 p.m. Monday
Channel:
KOPB (10/PBS)
Web site:
For good and ill, the passion of one person can work wonders. Oregon still benefits from the restless energy of a woman whose name is recalled by few, but whose legacy moves, thrills and sometimes inspires thousand of listeners every year.
Mary V. (for Violin) Dodge founded Harney County's
, which planted the seeds for what is known today as
. The
segment "Sagebrush Symphony" relates Dodge's pioneer effort to create the country's first young people's symphony orchestra.
Producer/writer Nadine Jelsing recounts an adventure that, in the beginning at least, could have sprung from a
tale. Dodge, then Mary Thompson, was deposited in an orphanage at age 5 by a widowed mom. Always cold and hungry, little Mary seriously considered jumping from the roof to break a limb so she could go to the infirmary to get better meals and be warm. But later, in a Catholic orphanage, she met her lifelong love and near constant companion: the violin.
She was a music teacher when she moved to Portland from New York. She met her husband, Mott Dodge, a bass-playing civil engineer who was soon transferred to Harney County. To get to Burns, the couple took a train and a stagecoach. The nearest paving was counties away. All transportation was by horse and wagon. They lived in tents.
Could there be an unlikelier wilderness in which to start an orchestra that would earn bravos on radio and television, and concert tours in America, Asia and Europe? With its oldest members being high school students?
But that is just what Dodge did from 1912-17. Harney County eagerly embraced Dodge's efforts. The youngsters wowed audiences at the 1916 state fair and later conquered Portland.
No, the Sagebrush Symphony did not somehow evolve into the Portland Junior Symphony, which eventually became today's Portland Youth Philharmonic. The Sagebrush Symphony was a casualty of World War I. "Sagebrush" unfolds Dodge's progress from Burns to the Irvington School Orchestra, the Portland Junior Symphony of 1924 and beyond.
Jelsing benefits from a good supply of family and newspaper photographs, and Dodge's grandchildren fill in much of her early history, as do other Harney County descendants and historians.
Jelsing's documentary is a fascinating reminder that none of it would be here today if not for Mary Dodge and her Sagebrush Symphony Orchestra. It all started with her geographical isolation, her driving energy and her missionary-like passion for the violin. That middle initial -- V for Violin -- she gave to herself.
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