Zion National Park: The Musical
Canyon Community Center, 126 Lion Blvd., Springdale, UT
September 27th, 2023 – 7 to 8:30 PM
Join award-winning scholar Jared Farmer for Zion Canyon Mesa’s “Community Conversations,” a lecture on music in Zion Canyon in the National Park era. From Easter pageants to Mormon Tabernacle Choir appearances to the recent performance of Messiaen’s From the Canyons to the Stars at the O.C. Tanner Amphitheater, Zion National Park has a surprising musical history. Farmer, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of four books will be in Springdale as the inaugural writer-in-residence at Zion Canyon Mesa.
Jared Farmer is the Walter H. Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, focused on the nineteenth century and the American West. His recent work has turned to global environmental history.
Originally from Provo, Utah, Farmer earned his degrees from Utah State University, the University of Montana, and Stanford University. His book On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard, 2008) won the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians for the best-written non-fiction book on an American theme, a literary award that honors the “union of the historian and the artist.” His subsequent book, Trees in Paradise: A California History (Norton, 2013), won the Ray Allen Billington Prize from the Organization of American Historians for the best book on the history of Native and/or settler peoples in frontier, border, and borderland zones of intercultural contact in any century to the present.
His new book, Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees (Basic Books, 2022; Picador UK, 2023), has been reviewed in Nature, Science, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Review of Books, among other outlets. Elderflora won the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History from the American Philosophical Society.
His three long-term book projects are “God View: How Seeing Earth Changed Humanity” (a meditation on aerial technologies of seeing); “Vicarious Works” (a metahistory of family); and “The Everlasting Stone Age” (a cultural history of rocks).
In October 2023, Farmer will be delivering the 28th annual Leonard J. Arrington Lecture in Logan, Utah; his presentation will be titled “Music & the Unspoken Truth. Visit zioncanyonmesa.org for more information.
