Montana: When the Video Changed the Music

A tribute to endurance, expansion, human cost—and the impermanence of grandeur.

An Original Instrumental Work by Marc Soucy

Sometimes making the video changes the composition.

That happened with Montana.

I originally conceived the piece as a tribute to the American spirit—its endurance, adventure, westward expansion, and the extraordinary scale of what was accomplished during that period of American history.

The music begins with a piano motif inspired by my modern interpretation of what Western parlor music might sometimes have sounded like. Melodies and harmonies gradually emerge in the strings and then the orchestra.

Most of that music already existed when I began creating the video.

Visually, I found myself drawn to some of the strongest symbols of nineteenth-century American expansion and modernization: workers driving spikes into a railroad, enormous Western landscapes, and the sun rising and setting over a distant valley.

But as the video developed, I realized something was missing.

The music and imagery were creating an almost uninterrupted flow of American achievement and grandeur. And that wasn't the entire story.

The piece needed a counter-argument.

So the process of making the video sent me back to the music.

About two-thirds of the way through, the musical language changes dramatically. Native American instruments, voices, and percussion take over as the video settles on a simple image: a campfire burning.

The imagery is intentionally symbolic rather than literal. As the music develops, flickering light and sparks gradually overwhelm the screen until the campfire itself disappears.

Then the pianist returns.

But the opening musical world doesn't simply return as though nothing happened. Native American drums remain beneath the piano motif—a small musical suggestion that what has been displaced may remain with us.

The orchestra eventually reaches a moment of fullness and depth. Then, rather than ending triumphantly, the arrangement slowly deconstructs. Instruments disappear one by one during a long fade as the sun sets over the landscape.

Montana remains a tribute to endurance, adventure, achievement, natural beauty, and grandeur. But the process of making the video caused the composition itself to acknowledge something else: achievement can carry a human cost, and even the things we imagine to be permanent may eventually rise and set.

What remains at the end, for me, is beauty.

Watch Montana below: