The occasion, as stated on the Varsity Cinema marquee, was the Des Moines premiere of Killers of the Flower Moon, another hefty, late-period offering from Martin Scorsese. Yet the night, and each of the 235 seats in the sold-out theater, belonged to Geneviève Gros-Louis, a Huron-Wendat Nation composer who played violin in the Des Moines Symphony for more than a decade under the last name Salamone.
On Oct. 20, Gros-Louis stood before the still-blank screen at 7 p.m., her NS Design CR5 electric violin in hand. The solid-body violin (with a “flame maple face” that could be seen at a distance) was the same instrument she recently used to score season three of National Geographic’s Life Below Zero: First Alaskans.
Her role in a parallel telling of the Reign of Terror — which is what the Osage people call the tragic period of the 1920s in which Scorsese’s film is set — started with an Instagram DM from Dante Biss-Grayson, a multi-hyphenate from the Osage Nation known for his fashion brand Sky-Eagle Collection.
Of the at least 60 Osage people who were murdered or went missing during the Reign of Terror, Biss-Grayson’s great-great-grandfather Henry Roan was one of the relatively few depicted in Killers of the Flower Moon.
When Biss-Grayson arrived on the set of the $200 million motion-picture recreation of the Reign of Terror, it brought to mind a poem he had written a couple years before production began. He sent a spoken-word performance of the poem to Gros-Louis who, over the course of three months, composed music set to the poem that would become their collaborative EP, Flower Moon: Honoring the Osage.
For the violin parts alone, Gros-Louis ended up scoring and sampling herself 200 times.
“The reason why I wanted to do that was because I wanted to have the strength of a village,” Gros-Louis said in an interview before the event. “I wanted to feel the weight of this story.”
She also sampled Biss-Grayson’s Osage regalia bells, traditionally worn during ceremonies, to create the percussion library for the EP. (You can hear another member of the Des Moines Symphony on the record, Jesse Nummelin, who laid all the cello parts.)
Gros-Louis shared this background with the audience at the Varsity, same as she did at the Cannes Film Festival in May and the Santa Fe Indian Market in August. Her compositions, cinematic in style and ambition, simply make sense in a theater setting.
After she performed on Oct. 20, Biss-Grayson’s voice addressed the Des Moines crowd through the monitors. “The greed is in the air,” he said, setting the stage for the film and punctuating the musical performance that preceded it.
“This is how an Osage member actually sees it, through my lens, then you’re seeing it through the lens of Martin Scorsese as well,” Biss-Grayson said of Flower Moon: Honoring the Osage.
Gros-Louis’ work can be found at genevievegroslouis.com. Multiple showings of Killers of the Flower Moon — based on the book of the same name by David Grann — occur through next week at the Varsity Cinema in Des Moines and FilmScene in Iowa City.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s November 2023 issue.
