1845 Pittsburgh, They Stepped Through The Fire
Performed by the Washington, PA Symphony


I initially started this project in thinking about the history of Pittsburgh and in particular the great fire of 1845.  So I set in motion to write a programmatic piece about the event:

Program note written by Dr. Andrew Mulvania Professor of English

The piece is divided into three sections:

I.	Early Morning

The three rivers lay like lead under the red flame of dawn that still cool Thursday morning already growing warm, April 10, 1845. A few ragged clouds hung on the horizon like smoke. All over Pittsburgh, people threw logs in potbelly stoves to chase out the cold or lit harmless cooking fires for a simple breakfast as the city awoke.

By 8 o’clock that morning, the whole vast machinery of the city was in motion—factories for glass, iron, tin, and brass spilling out ribbon after ribbon of their products as steadily as the rivers that fed them the water to cool their coal-fed cauldrons.

II.	The Great Fire


At half past 12 p.m., in a frame building at the corner of Second and Ferry Streets, the tiniest tongue of flame whispered from a stove like a rumor and the air quickly spread it around. Soon, it grew to a roaring cacophony of voices that consumed a thousand houses in the space of five hours. People and animals ran blindly through the thick smoke and heat, their screams and brays piercing the great up-rushing of the flames and the clatter of wheels from carts, drays, wagons, and omnibuses.

By nightfall, the great rivers had swallowed the flames in their silence. A mile and a quarter swath of the city lay smoldering, with only here and there the bricks of a chimney or foundation to mark where a house once stood. The Monongahela Bridge lay in charred splinters at the bottom of the river.


III.	Rebirth


The re-born city rose swiftly from that razed and scorched earth. The fiery heart and arteries of big steel and the many-girdered bridges would borrow their heat from that first blaze as a new day dawned over the city.




1845 Pittsburgh They Stepped Through The Fire

Kyle Simpson, composer, trumpet player, and bandleader, is a graduate from Lawrence Conservatory of Music in Appleton, WI and The University of Montana in Missoula, MT.  His main composition teachers were Fred Sturm at Lawrence and Charles Nichols at The University of Montana.  Simpson has written many works for large jazz groups, chamber jazz groups, solo trumpet, synthesized electronic music, Orchestra, and Wind Ensemble.  Recent compositions were featured at the Buddy DeFranco Jazz Festival in Missoula, where he also performed with Lew Soloff and Paquito D'Rivera. Other compositions have been featured at the Fête de la Musique Ile d'Yeu (2011) and Ostrava Days (2011).  Simpson’s music has been described as, “lively with rhythmic vitality” and also, “lyrical with a brooding elegance.” 

In 2005, he studied with Dave Douglas and other great contemporary jazz artists in Banff, Canada at the Banff Centre for the Arts. In 2006, Simpson was awarded an ASCAP Scholarship to study at the Henry Mancini Institute in Los Angeles, CA, where he worked with Maria Schneider, Vince Mendoza, Jack Smalley, and Bruce Broughton.  Simpson’s work Autumn Fields was scored for chamber orchestra and was premiered in Schoenberg Hall at UCLA and conducted by Vince Mendoza. Kyle Simpson has also worked with the Universal Studio orchestra in creating new library music.

In 2007, Simpson went on tour with the World Famous Glenn Miller Orchestra as a split soloist and arranger under the direction of Larry O’Brien. Simpson also produced and arranged The Very Thought of You, album by the male vocalist, Ryan Garfi, of the same band.

Recently, Simpson was awarded the Michael Iovenko Fellowship to study composition at the Ecole Normale De Musique in Paris, France.  In June 2011, he was also awarded the Film Music Foundation Scholarship for the NYU/ASCAP Film Scoring Workshop in New York. Simpson just finished a recording project with the Czech Radio Symphony Brass Quintet and String Quartet, in recording new pieces written for those ensembles. In August 2011, Simpson conducted his own composition Journey Into Wissameking with the Janaček Philharmonic, in Ostrava, CZ.

1845 Pittsburgh They Stepped Through The Fire

Kyle Simpson Film & Media Composer