Photo: Matthew Lanning
Mathew Lanning grew up in Prescott Valley and attended schools in both Prescott and Prescott Valley. Now he’s finishing his doctorate at the New England Conservatory—one of the world’s most prestigious music schools—and bringing his music back home for the first time on an Arizona Philharmonic season concert.
On February 15, the Arizona Philharmonic String Quartet presents Lanning’s On the Inside I’m Hootin’ On the Outside I’m Hollerin’ (2023) as part of the Singing From the Heart program.
The piece pulses with hoedown energy—fiddle-inspired melodies, driving rhythms, and the kind of joyful momentum that makes you want to move. It is music rooted in American folk tradition but shaped by sophisticated compositional craft, the kind of work that can only come from someone who knows both worlds intimately.
Before leaving for the University of Arizona to pursue composition, Lanning was an active participant in the Prescott-area arts scene—performing, writing plays, and composing. By high school, he’d already had five orchestral works premiered by local ensembles including Prescott Pops, Prescott Chamber Orchestra, Tri-City College Prep Orchestra, Yavapai College Symphony, and the Chaparral Chamber Music Workshop orchestra. He even conducted two of them from the keyboard. Prescott’s network of school and community ensembles gave him repeated chances to write, rehearse, and hear new music in public, which is exactly the kind of local opportunity that helps creative talent take root.
The hoedown language Lanning is using is one facet of his broader musical vocabulary. He leans into this deliberately, the way William Bolcom treated ragtime as a doorway into vernacular American styles alongside his concert works. Composers have long drawn on the sounds of everyday life and reshaped them for the concert hall: Béla Bartók collected village melodies that later surfaced in his quartets, and Aaron Copland recast Appalachian hymns and Western balladry into orchestral music. Lanning’s source is the hoedown, a dance tradition where community, rhythm, and courtship have long met on the same floor.
The placement of Lanning’s work on this Valentine’s weekend program makes sense when you consider the social function of dance. The hoedown wasn’t just entertainment—it was where communities gathered, where young people met, where courtship happened through movement and music. Lanning captures that vitality: love expressed not through tender confession but through physical energy and communal celebration.
While Arizona Philharmonic has previously commissioned arrangements from Lanning for past concerts, this marks the first time the orchestra presents an original composition by him. The string quartet format itself presents unique challenges—with just four instruments and no conductor, every note is exposed. Lanning’s hoedown-inspired quartet balances the folk tradition’s directness with the structural sophistication audiences expect from concert music.
For more information on the Sing From the Heart program and to buy tickets, go HERE
