Touring production coming to town Oct. 7

Award winning poet and essayist Gary Holthaus, and internationally acclaimed musician Lauren Pelon, team up to offer a unique new program called “The Story of Music, Stories from Home” on Friday, Oct. 7 at 7 p.m. They will perform at The L. Clark Cushing Heritage Center, 10 East 6150 South, in Murray.

Free and open to the public, the program is sponsored by Murray City Cultural Arts with additional funding support from Utah Division of Arts and Museums, National Endowment for the Arts, and Salt Lake County ZAP.  

Pelon sings in her lovely soprano voice and plays over twenty ancient and modern instruments ranging from lute, lyre, and concertina, to recorders, gemshorn, cornamuse, schreierpfeife, shawm,  pennywhistles, double ocarina, hurdy-gurdy, eagle bone flute, Kiowa courting flute, bowed psaltery, electric wind instrument and MIDI-pedalboard. Holthaus tells real life stories from his boyhood in Iowa and what he has learned working as a commercial fisherman in Alaska, a wheat packer at Quaker Oats and a hoist operator at Iowa Steel and Iron Works, a retail clerk, teacher, professor and non-profit executive in Massachusetts, Alaska, Colorado, Montana, and Minnesota. Both the music and the stories celebrate our sense of place, community, and home.

“We are so pleased that we are able to present this unique program in our community,” said Mary Ann Kirk, Murray City Cultural Arts Director. “Lauren and Gary combine their talents so that this program will remind us of the importance of music and stories in creating community and celebrating home. Kicking off National Arts and Humanities Month in Murray, ‘The Story of Music, Stories from Home’ is sure to be entertaining, thought-provoking, and illuminating.”