Hope on the Hill

Original Instrumentation: Cello, mandolin, bass, vocals (featuring the Mike Block Trio)

Other settings:

Cello Concerto Orchestral Instrumentation: 2222 - 2210 - 2pc - str

Soloist with Strings: violin(s), viola(s), cello(s), bass(es)


The Story: This suite of original music tells the story of Frank Lloyd Wright’s dramatic personal life, while drawing on the principles of his artistic philosophy. In addition to Wright’s inspiring creations as an architect, he showed remarkable resilience through multiple personal tragedies. In 1914, while away from his home, Taliesin, the house was burned to the ground by an employee, who also murdered seven of the inhabitants with an axe — including Wright’s second wife, Mamah, and her two children. Wright rebuilt Taliesin, only for it to burn down again in 1925 after sparks from faulty electric wiring in a telephone caught fire by his bed. Wright and others spent several hours fighting the fire themselves, and Wright was so desperate to save the building that, along with burning the soles of his feet, he burned his eyebrows off. After this, Wright rebuilt Taliesin for a third time, which is the building that stands today.

After the Great Depression (1929), Wright lost all of his work, as high-end clients could no longer afford custom-designed homes. Having been active since 1893, Wright was also considered “washed up” and “out of date” by the architectural community. It was at this time that he started teaching through his Taliesin Fellowship (founded in 1932), through which one of his students convinced his family to hire Wright to design a summer home in Pennsylvania. This became what we now know as Fallingwater (1935), which landed Wright on the cover of TIME magazine (1938) and triggered a massive renewal of his career. In fact, the vast majority of Wright’s output happened in the two decades after Fallingwater, when he was in his 70s and 80s, culminating in the Guggenheim Museum in NYC (1959), created in the year Wright died at the age of 91.

In Mike Block’s composition “Hope on the Hill,” the opening short movements (The Hillside / Construction) meditate on the natural Wisconsin environment on which Wright was inspired to design Taliesin, as well as the construction of the home itself. The first song, Finally Home, explores the forward-looking optimism of building something new, ending with the completion of this utopian site. The second song, Life in the Blue Room, is a celebration of the life that happened inside Taliesin, after which the Fire upon Fire movement laments the recurring destruction of all that had been built. Waterfall is the next movement, representing the resurgence of life after death. This movement is the emotional heart of the suite, and represents both the literal rebuilding of Taliesin, as well as the metaphorical rebuilding of Wright’s life and career after tragedy. The suite ends with the eponymous song Hope on the Hill, meditating on Wright’s incredible resilience and inspiring audiences to find a similar force of will.