Independent file photo A musical recording of a poem by longtime SMSU English professor Bill Holm has been released.

MARSHALL — Southwest Minnesota State University professor Dan Rieppel and alum Ryan Ross continue to celebrate their late friend and colleague Bill Holm with the release of a recording of Holm’s poem “Playing Haydn For the Angel of Death” as a baritone voice and piano song cycle.

Holm was an essayist, poet, musician and longtime English professor at SMSU. He received a Minnesota book award twice (in 1991 and 1997). His 1985 book “Boxelder Bug Variations: A Meditation on an Idea in Language and Music” gave Minneota’s town festival its name. And now what Rieppel believes to be his “magnum opus” is set to music.

Holm died in 2009, just nine months after he retired.

“That’s when this idea popped into my head, and we held on to it until we finally had time to do it,” said Ross.

Ross was a music education major, a student of Rieppel’s, and got to know Holm while at the university. He graduated from SMSU just a year prior to Holm’s retirement and now is professional baritone singer, living in Wales, UK.

That “time to do it” came, as it did for many, during the COVID shutdown.

“We were just twiddling our thumbs, and we’re both not twiddlers,” Ross said.

The first step was choosing which work to set to music.

Despite Holm playing the piano so loyally and making many references to music and composers in his literary work, Rieppel was skeptical at first about how Holm’s work would translate to music.

“It was about music, but it often wasn’t very musical,” he said.

A lot of Holm’s poems were in long paragraphs that became more like an essay.

“He often did not write in a kind of cadence … and … he didn’t do rhymes for the most part,” he said.

“Playing Hayden for the Angel of Death,” however, is different, and after reading through several options the choice became very clear. As they worked with it, the piece only had to be edited slightly in a couple places to work.

With the generous help from the SMSU Foundation to help finance the project, a search for a composer began, one who ideally, Ross said, would have connections to southwest Minnesota.

“It’s been part of the ethos of this project and future project ideas that has to be… Minnesota centric,” Ross said.

This ethos became important to Ross only after moving away from the area.

“When I was a young, dumb kid in Rock Rapids, (Iowa) I was thinking, ‘I just got to get out of here. There’s no culture. There’s nothing here,'” he said.

But, while pursuing further education and opera training in California, Ross “realized actually, you know, we have this incredible culture of our own, and it’s unlike anything else. And I just wanted to give back to that”

He says it’s important to make music “for us and by us.”

Holm and Rieppel contributed to that southwest Minnesota arts culture for years. When Rieppel first got the job at SMSU, in 1998, he went straight to Bill Holm’s house, who he had first met 20 years earlier at age 17 and never forgot that meeting.

During that first catch-up chat, he ended up staying at Holm’s house until 4 a.m. playing four- handed piano and the music duo “Big Guys with Grand Pianos” was born.

Holm and Rieppel soon began performing piano pieces together, laughing about two big men trying to share one piano bench, often chatting and joking to each other during the performance.

Holm knew classical music well — his work is filled with references to them.

The opening stanza of “Playing Hayden” states: “To understand this language, you must/ sometimes patiently play the same/ piece over and over for years, then/ when you expect nothing, the music/ lets go it’s wisdom.”

In the spring of 2022, Rieppel and Ross premiered the baritone piano song cycle of “Playing Hayden for the Angel of Death” at the SMSU religious center and at Holm’s former publisher, Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis.

That October, accompanied by a film crew from Pioneer PBS, they took the piece to Iceland, Holm’s ancestral homeland and where he spent his breaks from the school year.

The resulting documentary would go on to win an Upper Midwest Emmy for best long form content documentary.

Throughout 2023, Ross and Rieppel toured the work at various places in Minnesota, and after many generous donations, raised enough to record the work in July of 2024.

Finally this fall, it officially released on CD and for digital streaming on Sept. 1.

“It feels really good,” Ross said. “Because, you know, we didn’t foresee the success that it would have. We just wanted a nice piece to perform together and something to honor Bill.”