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In 1973, the newest railroad in the United States brought its first cargo into Iowa City. Born from the ashes of the Rock Island, the businessmen and farmers of the Central Iowa Railway Company (CIRC) made a valiant, if futile, attempt to keep the towns in the Amish heartland of Iowa connected to each other and the world beyond. 

Mark Rheaume’s composition, titled That’s the Way the Railroad Went (2023), seeks to rekindle those connections by unearthing and preserving the multiplicitous stories and memories of the CIRC. He weaves together the fields of collective memory studies, oral history, and post-modern minimalism in an effort to ensure that the artist and the canvas—or the composer and their subject—remain intact, or amplified, during the collection and interpretation of aural and oral histories.