Music of Place: Remembering the Genius of Phil Aaberg.

Going local, to address the universal.

The renowned composer and pianist Philip Aaberg, in a kayak on the Marias River near his home in tiny Chester, Montana, when we visited him there. His music expressed the spirit of the place he loved. (Except as noted, all photos by Deborah Fallows.)

Over this past weekend, Deb and I got the sad and unexpected news that our friend Philip Aaberg, a brilliant musician and influential civic and cultural leader, had died of complications from cancer, at age 77.

Readers of this site may recognize Phil’s name from the comments section, where he was an active participant. Barely two weeks ago, I was corresponding with him about the state of the world. Also just this month, we had Phil’s music playing through the evening when friends came to dinner at our house.

There is so much we would like to say about Phil Aaberg, his wife Patty, their family, and their impact on cultural life around the world and civic life in the part of America they called home. For now I’ll devote the rest of this post to a dispatch Deb Fallows, a college classmate of Phil’s, wrote ten years ago for what was then the “American Futures” series in The Atlantic. (This led to the Our Towns book and HBO movie, and the ongoing Our Towns Foundation site.)

For context, in those years Deb and I were traveling in our single-engine propeller plane to small communities around the nation. After visiting Maya Lin’s then-new installation for the Confluence Project along the Columbia River in eastern Washington, and before a multi-day stay at the large nature reserve now known as American Prairie along the Missouri River in northern Montana, we spent time in the remote farming town of Chester, Montana, where Phil and Patty Aaberg lived.

Now, over to Deb.

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Listening to Montana.

In Chester, Montana, a world away from city life inspires an artist’s music.

By Deborah Fallows.

March 16, 2016.

To the north, the first traffic light is 144 miles away.

To the south, the first traffic light is 92 miles away.

There are no traffic lights here in Chester, Montana.

This is how the musician Philip Aaberg introduced his hometown of Chester, Montana, in a short radio commentary he produced for KCRW a while back, along with his wife, Patty, and their son Jake.

Chester lies at the top of the country, 30 miles as the crow flies from the Canadian border. From even farther west [along the Columbia], we flew over the Bitterroot Mountains, which then rolled away into the high plains, with fields of green, yellow, and gold. The rivers below us meandered. The rail tracks looked very important. The roads indeed didn’t need traffic lights. In the skies, there was not another plane in sight for hours….

Our friends Phil and Patty Aaberg live in Chester. Phil is a musician—a pianist and composer with a collection of awards, performances, and collaborations that more than prove his bona fides to anyone who hasn’t had the good fortune yet to hear his music. Windham Hill Records, nominations for Grammies and an Emmy, and some 20 albums with names like From the Ground Up and Live from Montana.

Knowing where you are: Distances from Chester.

After time on the east and west coasts, Phil and Patty moved to Chester, a town of well under 1,000 people, to the house where Aaberg grew up, right across from his old school. Partly, they were looking for such a place to raise their young son and partly because, well, Montana always had a strong pull on Phil.

Back in the late 19th century, Chester was a stop for the steam engines of Great Northern Railroad to replenish coal and water. Homesteaders soon followed. Phil’s family has been there about a century. Already a serious music student as a young teenager, Phil would ride the train every few weeks to meet with his piano teacher in Spokane, a seven-hour trip, or 10 hours if there were lots of stops. From his remote home town he went to college at Harvard on a Leonard Bernstein scholarship.

Great Northern B&B and Aaberg’s music studio in a silo, in downtown Chester.

When the Aabergs opened their Great Northern B&B, where we stayed with them, it doubled the number of lodging options for visitors and those just passing through. And then they opened another on First Street. Sometimes, people biking through the north will stop in Chester. Once, a biker stopped for a day, and ended up staying for a week, waiting to take delivery of some bike parts. It was one of those stories that you could imagine ending with something like, “And then he met my second cousin who runs the pharmacy, they fell in love, and he’s been here ever since.” That didn’t happen, but it was easy to believe it could have. Chester is that kind of town.

Coming in for landing at Chester. The runway we’re heading toward is what looks like an extension of a downtown street, paralleling the highway on the far side of town.

We flew into Chester’s tiny airport. It wasn’t unusual to find an airport there; some 5,000 small airports dot the country, a legacy of airstrips built for military pilot training around World War II, and then for civic and post office growth. Chester’s airport was even more convenient than most. When Phil heard our plane overhead, he could hop in his car with Jake, head the few blocks to the edge of town where the airport lay, and still have plenty of time left over to wait and see us land.

People who are from towns this small, this remote, and this beautiful grow up with a deep imprint of place on their lives, and for artists like Phil, on their work.

View toward the Sweetgrass Hills. Philip Aaberg named his company Sweetgrass Music. (Photo courtesy of Philip Aaberg.)

In a formal interview he once gave, Aaberg talked about how this place—these northern plains and his hometown—has inspired the music he creates.

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Sounds from Montana

Aaberg describes the early days of noticing music, when his mother and grandmother were choir directors at the Catholic Church. He heard a lot of music, including Gregorian chants. He recounts the first time, at 4 years old, when he ran home from church to the family piano to sound out a tune he had heard. He described the thrill of figuring that out all by himself, and recalling it vividly as the moment that he knew what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

When Aaberg is touring on the road, he builds in time to teach a little music to the schoolkids in the towns. He includes listening exercises, having the kids pause to just listen to the sounds around them for a whole minute. “Listening is the most important thing you can do,” he tells them. “If people in the world would listen to each other, the world would be a lot safer place.”

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Time in Montana

Aaberg says, “I love this land. There is something about this country that really opens me up.” He talks about the amount of time and the quality of the time he spent in Chester. “When I was here, I was really here.” He talked about the relationship between his music and seeing the land here, watching the sky change, seeing the Sweetgrass Hills, watching the flights of birds. “All incredibly important to me,” he says, and a source of his inspiration

Phil Aaberg at his piano in his studio.

Phil built his studio, fittingly, from an old grain silo. He invited us in to look and listen a little while. He played some of the songs I knew; now that I had been in Montana, I recognized that they actually sound like Montana.

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We all went kayaking one afternoon on the Marias River, an expedition that began gently, with dreams of even a dip in the water, but turned surprisingly and quickly into a dramatic paddle-for-your-life ordeal as a fierce windy storm blew in. The hills right up to one side of the water’s edge seemed steeper, and the marshy banks on the other seemed farther away and less hospitable. But you know we survived.

After we headed east to the American Prairie, I got an email from Phil. He said he was heading out to go camping in the Sweetgrass Hills. Lucky man. You can’t get to Chester, Montana, today, or probably even tomorrow. But you can bring a bit of Montana into your life through this music. You can listen here and here and here, and find more music here.

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A closing note.

This is Jim Fallows again. Because I have wanted to include many photos from Deb’s original dispatch, some email systems might truncate it part way. If so, you’ll see a “click to read more” button.

One more thing about Philip Aaberg. If you’d like an absolutely brilliant example of his musical gifts and personal bearing, I strongly encourage you to go to his 2024 interview for Five Things I’ve Learned About America—and after you’ve read and heard his comments, please scroll down to the end. When you see the image below, headlined “There’s more!”, please click on it to hear Phil with a three-plus minute lively virtuoso rendition of perhaps his most famous song, High Plains. I promise you won’t regret it.

We send our best wishes to Patty, to Phil’s brother and four sons, and to the many others who felt a connection to him. We are full of gratitude to have known Phil.