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Robert L. Staffanson conducted the Springfield Symphony Orchestra from 1955 to 1969.

(SSO photo)

In the autumn of 2003, Robert Staffanson, conductor of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra from 1955 to 1969, returned to Springfield with his wife and family to help the SSO celebrate its 60th anniversary.

At that time, he recounted many happy memories of his time in Springfield and hinted at the many other aspects of his interesting life, including his boyhood on a Montana horse ranch, and his more recent work as an advocate for Native Americans.

Staffanson, 93, has written an autobiography entitled "Witness to Spirit, My Life with Cowboys, Mozart & Indians," scheduled for publication on Tuesday, Dec. 22. In the book, Staffanson traces his unlikely path from the Montana prairie to the podium of a top-notch New England orchestra to a Blood Indian medicine camp in Alberta, Canada.

The memoir begins in 1921 on an open range horse ranch along the Yellowstone River in Eastern Montana. Staffanson describes "...living conditions right out of the 19th century: a small three-room house, no heat or running water, electricity, radio, telephone, or daily paper. Conditions that today would be intolerable to American Milleniels. To me it was paradise."

He learned early how to handle horses, and describes an occasion in his sixth year when his father entrusted him with the task of returning two hobbled wild colts from the open range across the Yellowstone river by ferry and back to the family's ranch for training. Mounted safely on a saddled horse, with the frisky colts harnessed to a reliable 1700-pound work horse named Diamond for the white star on his forehead, the 6-year-old guided his equine quartet several miles through the treeless grasslands where he felt completely "at home."

Music was a part of life from the first.

"I could sing before I could walk," Staffanson wrote. His mother sang around the house, most often hymns she had learned in the church where her father was the minister. His father played fiddle at country dances as a young man, and filled the house with Scotch/Irish fiddle tunes in the evenings. The boy emulated his father's violin style, refining his technique as he grew and expanding his repertoire to include the classical literature as well.

Engrossed as he became in ranch life and invigorated from birth by the vast freedom of the Montana "Big Sky country," music began to call Staffanson more loudly than horses.

"During my teens music began to dominate my spirit," he wrote, "and I knew somehow that my years in ranching were limited." During high school he played in band, sang in church, and played tenor saxophone in a dance band, arranging big band numbers in the style of swing-era stars Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller and others. The dances began at 9 p.m. and ended between two and three in the morning. There was no liquor in the dance hall, and the patrons, rancher families and business people, came dressed in their Sunday best, and danced through the wee hours, until "Good Night Ladies" signaled the end of the fun. Staffanson packed up his horn and drove home in time to run in the horses for the day's work, eat breakfast, and begin a new work day without sleep!

In 1941, he enrolled in the University of Montana Music School, heard his first real symphony orchestra, and returned to studying the violin seriously. He also took voice lessons, and was cast as the tenor lead in an opera. All of these experiences would inform his later conducting.

When the U.S. entered World War II after the Pearl Harbor attack, complications from hernia surgery kept Staffanson from serving in the military, and he returned to college to complete his undergraduate study, and eventually to marry his high school sweetheart, Frankie Ann Smith.

"We were married in December 1945," he wrote, "...(and) since then we have not only been soul mates, but also partners in my career in music and work on behalf of traditional Native Americans. Our love has continued to grow over more than seven decades."

Ann Staffanson, Kristin Staffanson-Campbell, and Robert Staffanson all of Bozeman, Mont. during a visit to Springfield in October 2003.

Staffanson's first symphony orchestra conducting experience came soon after. As concert-master of the University Symphony, it fell to Staffanson to conduct a concert when the conductor contracted mumps the day before.

"I stepped on the podium without any experience conducting a public performance," he wrote, "...something serendipitous happened. We not only got through the concert, but we played it well, receiving a good response. That single performance, executed under duress, was the genesis of what would become my career as a conductor."

He chronicles his excitement about conducting, his success in founding a symphony orchestra in Billings, Montana, and his participation in 1953 in the first-ever American Conductors Symposium with the Philadelphia Orchestra and its legendary conductor Eugene Ormandy.

After Staffanson led the Philadelphia Orchestra string section in Barber's "Adagio," Ormandy said to him, "I put my faith in you to become a great conductor." Staffanson's near future was thereby ordained.

"It was like receiving an anointment from God. I don't remember any post-symposium activities, or how I returned home. I do remember that receiving 'the best press' catapulted me ultimately into one of the premier conducting positions on the East Coast."

That post was, of course, the Springfield Symphony Orchestra, whose founder, Harold Alexander Leslie, had died suddenly. The 34-year-old Staffanson soon found himself on the podium of one of the finest regional orchestras in the United States, conducting in a hall that his mentor, Ormandy, described as "one of the ten best in the world."

The next third of the book is devoted to Staffanson's adventures in Springfield - his adaptation from the open range to the citified East, and the growth and deepening of his musical spirit.

"I believe great music is a primal force. It takes us beyond the confines of our world into realms of pure spirit: a harbinger of what may be ahead for us."

What was immediately ahead for Staffanson, no one could have predicted. He and his wife returned to their native Montana during the summers off from the symphony. During one of these summers in the late 1960s, two Piegan Blackfoot friends, Nora and Willie Spanish, invited Staffanson to join them at a Blood Indian Medicine Lodge in Alberta, Canada.

He was the only non-Native American in the camp. Willie and Nora had had to arrange special clearance from their hosts Frank Red Crow and Pat Weasel Head to bring him.

"I felt like a child in C. S. Lewis's 'The Chronicles of Narnia' or Dorothy falling out of the sky into Oz. Everything was new; but strangely, I had a feeling of belonging, as if returning to a long forgotten childhood home."

A period of stories, ceremonies, observation and participation followed that dramatically changed the course of Staffanson's life. He returned to Springfield after that momentous summer, knowing that his time in the east was coming to a close.

"Leaving music created trauma with physical ramifications deeper than I had expected; but it was offset by the challenge of addressing a problem as old as America."

His wife Ann's reaction was one of complete support.

"Few, if any, women would have willingly left that life (in Springfield) for a new one in the West for only an idea, with an uncertain future, no prestige, and no security. That she did so was testimony to her commitment and her understanding of the intense inner force that led me to abandon a profession I knew, and in which I was successful, for an idea of addressing America's oldest moral problem: its indefensible treatment of Native Americans."

"Mainstream society did not understand the rich cultures it bulldozed, relegating Native Americans to the bottom of human status and largely forgetting them."

Returning home to Montana, Staffanson went on to co-found the American Indian Institute and become a renowned advocate for Native Americans and indigenous peoples around the world.

"If we remove layers of ego, self-interest, prejudice, greed, hate, and the will to dominate," Staffanson wrote in the concluding third of his memoir, "we find that human beings everywhere have the same fundamental needs and aspirations. The essential aspects of each of us are in all others, and the differences are minor compared to the commonalities. If we could just understand that premise, all the barriers that separate us would fall."

Staffanson's story is an inspiring one, conveying rock-solid values and a depth of feeling sufficient to propel one human being on an amazing and fulfilling trajectory. More than 50 photographs enhance the experience of the book, and some familiar faces may strike a chord in the memories of older SSO patrons.

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"Witness to Spirit" is published by Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, Inc, in Deadwood, Oregon, and is available both in hardcover and paperback. It is available online through amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com