GO WEST, MUSE/IQUE

From the open range to Hollywood,
MUSE/IQUE explores the music
that made the West a legend

Just what made the cowboy one of America’s most enduring exports? The hat? The horse? Gary Cooper? Clint Eastwood squinting into the sun? MUSE/IQUE has another answer: the music. For Looking West: How the Myth of the Western Frontier Got Its Start, Artistic & Music Director Rachael Worby and the MUSE/IQUE Orchestra follow the cowboy songbook from tunes born on the range through Broadway, Hollywood, rock and pop, examining how music helped transform a real place—and some very real people—into one of the most romanticized myths in American culture. Performances take place August 25 and 26 at The Huntington and August 30 at the Skirball Cultural Center.

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And if you caught MUSE/IQUE’s recent Defiantly Joni at the Mark Taper Forum, you know that Worby isn’t interested in simply lining up familiar songs and letting them rip. That terrific evening turned the Taper into Joni Mitchell’s Laurel Canyon house, mixing songs, photographs and stories with freshly imagined arrangements. This time, the front door gives way to the open range.

And what a range. Looking West travels from “Home on the Range” and “Happy Trails” to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, the Eagles’ “Desperado” and Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Then Hollywood comes galloping in with Elmer Bernstein’s The Magnificent Seven and Ennio Morricone’s unmistakable The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The trail ultimately stretches from Gene Autry and Roy Rogers all the way to Beyoncé—a pretty persuasive demonstration that the cowboy has never really ridden off into the sunset.

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The guest list makes this particular roundup especially enticing. Tony and Grammy nominee Damon Daunno, who played Curly in Daniel Fish’s radical Broadway revival of Oklahoma!, handles vocals alongside singer-songwriter Raye Zaragoza, whose Mexican and Indigenous heritage informs her own reclamation of the Western songbook: “We were cowboys too!” And Emmy-winning actor Glynn Turman contributes cowboy poetry and spoken word. In a delicious bit of casting that MUSE/IQUE could hardly have invented, Turman is also an actual cowboy.

Behind them is a band built for the territory, including Gabe Witcher on fiddle, Mike Witcher on Dobro, Andrew Synowiec on guitar, Ross Garren on harmonica and Alan Hampton on bass.

But the most intriguing promise of Looking West is that MUSE/IQUE isn’t merely celebrating the myth. The program intends to poke around beneath it. The American West was already home to Indigenous peoples with rich musical traditions long before Americans began pressing westward, while the cowboy songbook itself grew from a far more complicated mixture of cultures than decades of Hollywood Westerns would have us believe. MUSE/IQUE plans to follow that history through folk music, Broadway, television and film while asking why the lonely, difficult life of the cowboy became such an irresistible fantasy of freedom and self-invention.

That sounds right up Worby’s alley. After inviting us into Joni’s house, MUSE/IQUE is taking us out on the trail.

Hi-yo, Rachael. Away!

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photos by Haoyuan Ren

Looking West: How the Myth of the Western Frontier Got Its Start
MUSE/IQUE
The Huntington, 1151 Oxford Road in San Marino
August 25–26, 2026 at 7:30

Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd. in Los Angeles
August 30, 2026 at 3 and 7:30

admission starts at $75
for more info, visit MUSE/IQUE

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