Music in the belly of rocks

Preeti Verma Lal

Have you ever heard music booming out of a rock’s heart? In Denver (Colorado), the red sandstone rocks are the world’s best boom boxes. When you drive into the 640-acre Red Rocks Park and amphitheatre, do not crane your neck out looking for push-chairs with velvet seats, shiny wooden doors, handsome white-gloved ushers and gigantic amplifiers. Look for tilted red sandstone rocks that sit 6,450 feet above the sea level. Carved sedulously by nature over millions of years, Red Rocks is the world’s only naturally occurring acoustically perfect amphitheatre. Not surprisingly, Rolling Stones magazine described it as the world’s best concert venue.

Opened in 1941, this natural amphitheatre lies at a unique transitional zone where the Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountains. Two 300-foot monoliths named Ship Rock and Creation Rock provide acoustic perfection; other monoliths slope as much as 90º, while others tilt backwards. It is to these monoliths that the world’s best performers have strummed the perfect riff. Between 1906 and 1910, John Brisben Walker produced a number of concerts on a temporary platform. When the world heard of the acoustic magic of the Red Rocks, singers and performers flocked to the Rocks. Everyone who has been someone in the music arena has stood in sunken well and sang — the Beatles, Bono, Sting, Aretha Franklin, Carole King, Cher, Duran Duran. 

In the belly of the rocks is the museum, its walls embellished with piano keys and guitar lists chronologically the names of performers.  History reminds us that before the singers, gigantic dinosaurs roamed in the park. Today, Red Rocks is no longer about the extinct animals with bony frills, it is about rhythmic do re me fa so.

This is not the only arty artefact in Denver. In Santa Fe Street, walls turn into an open art gallery with bricks and plaster as usable canvas. The Golden Triangle houses the Museum District that includes Clyfford Still Museum, Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art and the must-see Denver Art Museum (DAM), which also has an India section where metal figurines and stone sculptures are neatly stacked. The biggest attraction is a Hayagriva mandala, a 57-inch diameter sand mandala created by three monks from Seraje Monastic University in southern India. Hayagriva is regarded as one of the great protectors of Buddhism and the mandala was gifted by the abbot to DAM “to protect the people and environment from disease and natural calamities and evil elements.” In the Art District, outdoor sculptures stand by the bends and by crossroads. A gigantic broom and dust-pan sculpture often gets talked of. There’s an ‘articulated wall’— a canary yellow staggering (and staggered) 85-foot-tall tower made of concrete bars stacked one on top of another, anchored by a hidden steel mast through the centre. Another famous sculpture is a Lao Tzu, a red ‘drawing in space’, with structural steel beams standing in for pencilled lines.

However, nothing beats the popularity of a 40-foot blue bear that is standing on two and peeping inside the Colorado Convention Centre. Titled I See What You Mean and created by local artist Lawrence Argent, the blue bear is a hidden steel armature covered in blue fibreglass concrete panels. In the city known as Mile High City with an average of more than 300 days of sunshine per year, art and music found the ideal home.