Underground Music
Mike Smith
1 Comment
Share this: del.icio.us | Digg | Google | Ma.gnolia | Reddit | Stumble Upon | Technorati
A portrait of darkness framed in railroad ties, the entrance to the San Pedro Mine hangs against the stony desert swells of a gray-brown rise of mountains, about thirty miles northeast of Albuquerque. For more than a century, sounds have carried up from deep within the mine—sounds of picks and clattering rock, of metal wheels on steel tracks, miners’ voices, black-powder blasts and, in 1940, the classical strains of a symphony orchestra.
The San Pedro Mountains in which the old mine is located may have been worked as far back as the early-1600s, and most certainly were by 1713, the year a Spanish captain registered a mine there. In 1828, gold was discovered in the nearby Ortiz Mountains, and in 1832, it was found in the San Pedros—sparking the first major gold rush west of the Mississippi, predating California’s by two decades. A mining camp, San Pedro, sprang up to the west, and another strike in 1839 brought additional miners—first for placer mining—sifting through rocks and sand in streams and arroyos—and then for tunneling. It may have been around that time that the San Pedro Mine itself was first developed, but recorded ownership of the mine didn’t start until 1880. The mine passed from one owner to another, experienced alternating periods of lucrative activity and frustrating silence, turned out sporadic but notable amounts of copper as well as silver and gold, and in 1938 was bought by Raskob Mining Interests, Inc., of New York.
John Jakob Raskob, the company’s millionaire owner, served as a Vice President for both General Motors and DuPont, yet is primarily remembered as the man who built the Empire State Building. Raskob seemed to attract attention with nearly everything he did—speaking out against Prohibition and the New Deal, publishing an article entitled “Everybody Ought to Be Rich” on the eve of the Great Depression, and, of course, competing against car magnate Walter Chrysler in a race to build the world’s tallest building. (Less well-known but even more amazing was what Raskob did in 1933, when he and several other wealthy businessmen organized a secret and ultimately unsuccessful military coup with the aim of forcing President Franklin D. Roosevelt—and his ideas about the redistribution of wealth—out of office, before installing a fascist dictator in his place. That conspiracy was well-documented in Jules Archer’s 1973 book, The Plot to Seize the White House.)
After Raskob bought the San Pedro Mine in 1938, he appointed his son, Robert “R. P.” Raskob, to help oversee the mine’s reopening. Robert Raskob and his wife Dolores were patrons and board members of the Albuquerque Civic Symphony Orchestra, later renamed the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, and sometime before May of 1940, the junior Raskob approached the orchestra’s conductor, Grace Thompson, about a unique idea he had for the reopening of the mine—a symphonic concert, performed half-a-mile underground.
This would be no ordinary concert, and Grace Thompson was no ordinary conductor. Born in 1890, raised in Ohio, and diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1918, Thompson headed west, to Albuquerque, hoping the warm desert climate would help dry the disease from her lungs. Upon arriving in Albuquerque, she required an ambulance to take her from the train station to a sanitarium, but by 1925 she had recovered enough to head the music department at the University of New Mexico. In 1932, she became the first woman in American history—and perhaps in the world—to found and direct a symphony orchestra—the Albuquerque Civic Symphony Orchestra—a more-than-sixty-member, all-volunteer group of UNM students and recovering TB patients.
Thompson agreed to Raskob’s unusual request, announcements were sent out to the press, and invitations were mailed out to prominent politicians, writers, and businessmen, urging everyone to attend “dressed either as miners, in a Spanish costume, or anything that suits your fancy.” Thompson and a small entourage made a trip out to the mine to examine where the show would take place—an enormous underground room or “stope,” with ceilings thirty-three feet high—and to determine how best to set up a full orchestra inside a working mine. Miners strung lights down into the chamber, and leveled off the great room’s floor.
The day of the show, Sunday, May 19, 1940, was a day to remember at the old San Pedro Mine. An all-day fiesta, with food and entertainment, buzzed around the mine entrance, celebrating the mine’s reopening, the mine’s supposed 100th anniversary, and the so-called Coronado Cuarto Centennial Celebration—the much-hyped 400th anniversary of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s entry into New Mexico. Guests arrived from Albuquerque, and all were greeted by headlamp-wearing miners who accompanied them on a 1,500-foot ride in ore dump carts down into the ground. At the end of the tracks, the guests were led another several hundred feet, ultimately arriving in the enormous high-ceilinged chamber, an accidental auditorium big enough for 300 people.
The orchestra sat on an elevated rock platform about fifteen feet above the rest of the chamber, illuminated by massive floodlights, and at 3:30 p.m., Grace Thompson stood behind a podium said to have been made of heaped gold-bearing ore, and raised her baton. She wore a blue velvet dress, reminiscent of 16th century Spain, while the rest of the orchestra played dressed as old-time Spanish peasants. The concert season had just ended five days before, so for the musicians, the event was a party.
The May 20, 1940 Albuquerque Journal called the performance “An eerie scene that might have been a fantastic episode from the pen of Jules Verne,” and the Albuquerque Tribune that same day remarked, “Whether the strains disturbed the shades of ancient Indian and Spanish miners, none could say.”
More than 600 people attended the event, though not all at one time, due to limited space. Seated on rocky outcroppings, empty dynamite boxes, and a few chairs, the concertgoers included the more than 100 miners employed by Raskob’s San Pedro Mining Company, most of them from the nearby pueblos of Santo Domingo and San Felipe. Also in attendance were area locals, politicians and patrons from Albuquerque, businessmen from the East Coast, a group of Catholic catechists from the San Pedro Mission, and John Jakob Raskob himself, who noted to the press his enjoyment of “the acoustical perfection of the music.”
In the tall darkness beyond the rocky stage, the miners’ headlamps bobbed like luminous insects, moving in time to the music of the orchestra, guitarist Eduardo Sandoval, and Native American dancers. When the concert ended after two hours, the audience demanded more, applauding wildly in the subterranean darkness.
New Mexico, it often seems, is a place of abundant culture and inimitable quirkiness, a home to both the artistic and the otherworldly, the refined and the remarkable. Here, we have the Taos Society of Artists and the Taos Hum, the Santa Fe Institute and the Roswell Incident and—symbolic of both—we have a symphony orchestra, performing live, underground, in a mineshaft.
***
This article first appeared in the May 2008 issue of New Mexico Magazine, accompanied by original artwork by Darlene McElroy. If you don't already subscribe, you should! And be sure to let them know "My Strange New Mexico" sent you.
View Printer Friendly Version
Email Article to Friend
Reader Comments (1)
A Hopi friend once told me, that if a seeker wished to summon certain earth spirits for help, he would go into a particular cave, and sing, or play a specific song as a prayer. I wonder what pieces were on Grace Thompson's program that night. And - could she be even more personally responsible for the high level of spiritual activity here in this Land Of Enchantment than is realized?
And, on that "note", what should be on the program if an underground concert was held?
Offhand, I would suggest something with the word "wisdom" in the title.