UCCS' 50th Anniversary Music Festival presents Philip Blackburn and Friends

Award-winning composer Philip Blackburn along with UCCS Music Faculty and students will present a variety of original compositions as well as a screening of his film The Sun Palace, based on the history of  Cragmor Sanatorium.

Philip Blackburn, internationally renowned composer, sound artist, and President of the American Composers Forum and the premiere contemporary music record label Innova, first began his Sun God film project while an artist in residence with the VAPA Music Program where he composed the Sun Palace Hyper Opera.  The UCCS connections are uncanny – Blackburn’s father is a UCCS Emeritus Professor from Math, and at least five direct descendants were patients at the old Cragmor Sanatorium early in the 20th century

Another time, another plague. The Sun Palace is an epic visual and musical homage to the era, not too long ago, when tuberculosis consumed the nation. 80% of the population had been infected and were one bloody cough away from a desperate prognosis. X-Rays were brand new. Antibiotics were four decades in the future. Focusing on the extraordinary story of one TB sanatorium in Colorado, Cragmor, established in 1905 to house wealthy East Coast elites, the film imagines the experience of generations of well-to-do young sufferers when suddenly faced with mortality. Stars of Broadway, founders of the Fed, students from Skull and Bones, future captains of industry, and budding philanthropists (many of them talented artists with plenty of time on their hands to produce work from bed) all came to sample the cure at Cragmor (now a core building of campus of the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs). They came for the only treatments available at the time: rest, more rest, good nutrition, assorted quack placebos, and plenty of (vitamin D-producing) sunshine. Whether they lived or died, many of the patients stayed in the area for the climate and endowed many institutions in the area (60% of the local economy was TB related in the early 1900s). Thus, indirectly, a bacterium led to the establishment of a large city: Colorado Springs. Experimental composer Philip Blackburn discovered at least five of his family members had had connections to the sanitarium, and created a body of archival materials all related closely to the site. The film grew out of a live performance event staged on site at UCCS featuring dozens of students, faculty, and community members coordinated by Jane Rigler through the Visual and Performing Arts department.