Symphonic Band

"Sounds of the American Landscape"

Program Notes compiled from www.windrep.org

American Riversongs

About the piece

American Riversongs is based on traditional and composed music of an earlier time, when the rivers and waterways were the lifelines of a growing nation.

American Riversongs begins with a rousing setting of Down the River, followed by an expansive and dramatic treatment of Shenandoah, or Across the Wide Missouri, as it is sometimes called. After a brief transition, a brass band is heard playing a quadrille-like version of Stephen Foster's The Glendy Burk. As the Glendy Burk travels along, a second theme is introduced by piccolo, flutes and tambourine. The second theme is based on a Creole bamboula tune that probably originated in the Louisiana delta region. Other composers have used this melody, including Louis Moreau Gottschalk in his La Bamboula, Op. 2, for piano and his Symphony No. 1, subtitled A Night in the Tropics. The bamboula theme is marked by an incessant syncopated ragtime rhythm and used to good effect in the coda to bring American Riversongs to a rowdy, foot-stomping close!

About the composer

Pierre LaPlante (not La Plante) (b. 25 September 1943, West Allis, Wisc. - 22 May 2024, Oregon, Wisc.) was an American composer of French-Canadian descent.

LaPlante grew up in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. He received his Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he was a composition student of James Christensen. LaPlante plays bassoon with the Beloit-Janesville Symphony Orchestra. He recently retired after teaching general music and beginning band at Pecatonica Elementary School in Blanchardsville, Wisconsin, for 25 years.

LaPlante adjudicated for solo and ensemble contests and played bassoon in regional orchestras, including the Dubuque Symphony Orchestra and the Beloit-Janesville Symphony. He was member of MENC, ASCAP, Wisconsin Music Educators Conference, Wisconsin Youth Band Directors Association, as well as the Madison Wind ensemble. He resided in Oregon, Wisconsin.

Glaciers

About the piece

The wonder of nature is demonstrated through five musical vignettes. The piece opens with sounds that conjure the image of incredible ice formations that build to grandiose proportions. As the work develops, listeners hear the destruction of the massive ice structure as it crashes into the sea, the glacier's survival and the beginning of the cycle once again. A stunning look at a nature's might.

About the composer

Scott Director is an American composer and percussionist.

Mr. Director began his career performing with regional orchestras and other ensembles while still in high school. He studied with Clifton Williams, Frederick Fennell, and Alfred Reed at the University of Miami (Bachelor of Music Education degree). Director is active in the Los Angeles area as a composer, arranger and teacher. As a percussionist, he has played for operas, ballets, orchestras, and in the pit for Broadway musicals. He is a member of ASCAP and has several short film scores to his credit.   

Red Rock Mountain

About the piece

This composition is an episodic work that paints a musical portrait of a beautiful mountain landscape. Brass fanfares and soaring wind lines begin the piece, transitioning into an emotional section depicting the mountains at dusk. As the sun rises and sheds light on its peaks, the music becomes lyrical and rhythmically incisive, culminating in a heroic brass finale that depicts the full grandeur of the mountains. 

About the composer

Rossano Galante (b. 10 January 1967, Buffalo, N.Y.) is an American composer.

Galante earned a degree in trumpet performance from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1992. He then was accepted into the film scoring program at the University of Southern California and studied with film composer Jerry Goldsmith.

Mr. Galante has composed music for the films Bite Marks, The Last Straight Man, Monday Morning and Channels. He has served as orchestrator for over sixty studio films including A Quiet Place, The Mummy, Logan, Big Fat Liar, Scary Movie 2, The Tuxedo, and Tuesdays With Morrie, to name only a few.

For his large-scale wind ensemble compositions, he has been commissioned by the Federation of Gay Games-Paris 2018, Atlanta Freedom Band, Lake Braddock High School Band, Hofstra University Symphonic Band, and the Nebraska Wind Symphony, among many others.  

Symphonic Winds

"Forged from Stardust: Hidden Forces in Creation"

Splitting Light

About the piece

When composing the piece, Joni Greene wrote: 

I love writing about the cosmos not only because of exciting scientific developments, but also for my father (a physicist) who passed away in 2021. He and I spent many years looking through his telescope and learning about the universe. I am particularly thrilled to write about Vera C. Rubin who was a tremendously influential woman in physics and crucial to the advanced findings of dark matter.

What if the universe is mostly invisible?

That’s not a philosophical question — it’s a scientific one. Astronomers now believe that roughly eighty-five percent of all matter in the universe is what they call dark matter: a substance that emits no light, reflects no light, and yet exerts a gravitational pull so powerful that without it, galaxies as we know them could not exist. We cannot see it. We cannot touch it. And yet the evidence for its presence is overwhelming. It is, in every sense, a hidden force in creation.

For several years, Greene has composed works inspired by images from the James Webb Space Telescope, building a series of pieces that translate the breathtaking discoveries of modern astrophysics into sound. Tonight's work adds a new chapter to that journey — one inspired by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a revolutionary telescope whose central mission is to map dark matter across the night sky. Originally named The Dark Matter Telescope, the Rubin Observatory will survey the cosmos in extraordinary detail, hunting for the invisible architecture that holds the universe together.

“Splitting Light” received its world premiere just a month ago, on March 23rd, performed by the Hartwick College Wind Ensemble. Tonight, you are among the first audiences in the country to experience it — made possible in part through a commissioning consortium of which the University of Texas at Arlington is a proud member.

About the composer

Joni Greene is described as "a master of sonic color," drawing on her synesthesia, where sound appears as shifting hues and auras. Through a process she calls organized color, her music centers on vivid imagery shaped by a hierarchy of instrumental color. She has a particular interest in space, physics, and nature, and many of her pieces incorporate outside sources—including images from the James Webb Space Telescope and the Vera Rubin Observatory, as well as photography, science, and poetry—offering performers and audiences a window into her sensory perspective.

Her music has been performed throughout the world, including the United States, Canada, Europe, China, Japan, and Australia. Her diverse catalog includes works for band, choir, orchestra, chamber ensemble, and chamber opera. Notable awards include the 2nd and 3rd Frank Ticheli competitions, the ASCAP/Lotte Lehman "Damien Top" Prize, and the ACC Band Directors Association Emerging Artist Grant. Recordings of her works, Glow and The Moon Glistens, are available through Klavier Music Productions, featuring the University of Kansas Wind Ensemble with conductor Paul W. Popiel.

Ms. Greene is frequently commissioned by universities and school districts. She is currently working on a piece for concert band inspired by the findings of the Vera Rubin Observatory on dark matter, which will be premiered at Carnegie Hall this spring. She recently completed a collaboration with Professor Emeritus and librettist, Robert Hatten, on a libretto for her upcoming work The White Rose for Wind Ensemble and Soprano Voice, inspired by her ancestors Sophie and Hans Scholl. She continues to lead The Next Music Project with educator, Michael Kasper, which commissions works for young band from diverse perspectives. Exciting future works include an Alto Saxophone concerto for Otis Murphy, and a work for Solo Cello and Wind Ensemble for Hyerim Mapp.

Ms. Greene's music is widely performed at conferences and festivals including: the Midwest Clinic, Texas Bandmasters Association (TBA), American Bandmasters Association (ABA), College Band Directors National Association (CBDNA), Nebraska State Bandmasters Association (NSBA), the International Tuba Euphonium Conference, the World Association for Symphonic Bands and Ensembles conference in Taiwan (WASBE), the Las Americas en Concierto/Composers in New York, the Albert Roussel International Festival in France, Essentially Choral Reading Sessions, and the North American Saxophone Alliance (NASA) Conference. Additionally, her music can be heard by U.S. military bands, All-State bands, and honor bands.

Analyses of Ms. Greene's music for wind band may be found in the School Band and Orchestra (SBO) magazine and Manhattan Beach Times issues 5-7. Additionally, conductor Chad Simons has published a dissertation on the topic of Ms. Greene's life and music. Ms. Greene holds MM and BM degrees from Indiana University. Past and current mentors who inspire her music include Sven-David Sandstrom, Michael Colgrass, and Michael Gandolfi.

When she is not composing, Ms. Greene enjoys working in residence with all levels of concert band, orchestra, choir and chamber groups. She currently resides in Driftwood, Texas with her husband and two sons. She is also a proud marching band parent and baseball coach! 

The Coppersmiths

About the piece

If you drive out of Phoenix, Arizona, you’ll find the mysterious Superstition Mountains hovering along the eastern horizon. Cut around and head south along scenic Highway 177 toward the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation and you’ll soon pass the White Canyon Wilderness. When you start to spot patches of rusty orange silt on the landscape, you’ll have reached the small mining town of Ray, named for the Ray Copper Company. Founded in 1882 (and, remarkably, still in operation today), the Ray open-pit mine is home to one of the largest copper reserves in the United States, earning Arizona its affectionate nickname, “The Copper State.”

Keep driving past the mine and you’ll find the Gila River suddenly guiding you toward another small mining town, Kearny, the home of Ray High School. This is where—for over 30 years—Mr. Mark Muñoz taught music to hundreds and hundreds of young people. It’s where he taught clarinet to a young Jon Gomez. Mr. Jon Gomez, of course, would eventually go on to teach music himself at Dobson High School in Mesa, Arizona, where a young rough, ready, and rather unrefined Michael Markowski was eager to play saxophone and study scores.

In August of 2025, right as I was beginning work on this piece, Mr. Muñoz passed away. Remembering him, Jon wrote, “I will forever be profoundly grateful for the potential Mr. Muñoz saw in me, long before I realized it myself. With patience, positivity, and encouragement, he helped me develop and cultivate what would eventually become my passion.”

I kept thinking about how grateful I am for my own Mr. Muñoz: Mr. Gomez— grateful to him and to all the people in my life I’ve been lucky to call teachers and mentors. Like Mr. Muñoz before him, Jon can see something precious deep inside his students. He can sense unrealized potential waiting to be extracted—our hunger to express our true selves and our hope to shine brightly for him.

Copper—being one of the softer metals—is easily malleable. It doesn’t require heavy force or excessive heat to bend or change its shape into a useful, beautiful thing. As many great Coppersmiths will tell you, all it needs is a little warmth, a soft wooden hammer, and perhaps a little “patience, positivity, and encouragement.”

Michael Markowski
November 30, 2025 

About the composer

Michael Markowski (b. 14 November 1986, Mesa, Ariz.) is fully qualified to watch movies and cartoons. In 2010, he successfully graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Film from Arizona State University.

While Markowski has never studied music at a university, he has studied privately with his mentors Jon Gomez and Dr. Karl Schindler. However, he has continued his education by participating in a number of programs including "the art of orchestration" with television and film orchestrator Steven Scott Smalley, and in 2008, was invited to be a part of the National Band Association's Young Composer and Conductor Mentorship program.

In 2006, his work for concert band, Shadow Rituals, was honored with first prize in the first Frank Ticheli Composition Contest, sponsored by Manhattan Beach Music. The work is now published by Manhattan Beach Music and is on several state lists including the Texas Prescribed Music List. The piece has received a number of prestigious performances since its premiere by the Arizona State University Wind Symphony, some of which include the Midwest Clinic in Chicago by the VanderCook College of Music and by the 4A Honor Band at the 2008 Texas Music Educators Association Conference, Poteet High School.

Other notable performances include The Phoenix Symphony Orchestra, the U.S. Air Force Band of the Golden West, the U.S. Air Force Band of Mid-America, Arizona State University, California State University-Fullerton, Rutgers University, San Jose State University, The University of North Texas, Arrowhead Union High School, The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Youth Wind Ensembles, and the Austin Symphonic Band.

Markowski has received commissions for new works from a number of organizations including CBDNA, The Consortium for the Advancement of Wind Band Literature, The Lesbian and Gay Band Association, Arrowhead Union High School, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Youth Wind Ensembles, Bethel High School, and other consortiums of schools.

A brief insight into Markowski's creative process can be found in a contributing chapter of Composers on Composing for Band, Vol. IV: Young Emerging Composers, published by GIA Music. His work has also been analyzed in the Teaching Music Through Performance in Band series (Volume 7).

For the last several years, he has arranged, co-composed, and been music director for an original musical celebrating the life of Judy Garland aptly titled Judy: The Musical. He is a member of ASCAP and currently lives in Astoria, New York.  

Aurora Awakes

About the Piece

Aurora now had left her saffron bed,
And beams of early light the heav'ns o'erspread,
When, from a tow'r, the queen, with wakeful eyes,
Saw day point upward from the rosy skies.

- Virgil, The Aeneid, Book IV, Lines 584-587

Aurora – the Roman goddess of the dawn – is a mythological figure frequently associated with beauty and light. Also known as Eos (her Greek analogue), Aurora would rise each morning and stream across the sky, heralding the coming of her brother Sol, the sun. Though she is herself among the lesser deities of Roman and Greek mythologies, her cultural influence has persevered, most notably in the naming of the vibrant flashes of light that occur in Arctic and Antarctic regions – the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis.

John Mackey’s Aurora Awakes is, thus, a piece about the heralding of the coming of light. Built in two substantial sections, the piece moves over the course of eleven minutes from a place of remarkable stillness to an unbridled explosion of energy – from darkness to light, placid grey to startling rainbows of color. The work is almost entirely in the key of E-flat major (a choice made to create a unique effect at the work’s conclusion, as mentioned below), although it journeys through G-flat and F as the work progresses. Despite the harmonic shifts, however, the piece always maintains a – pun intended – bright optimism.

Though Mackey is known to use stylistic imitation, it is less common for him to utilize outright quotation. As such, the presence of two more-or-less direct quotations of other musical compositions is particularly noteworthy in Aurora Awakes. The first, which appears at the beginning of the second section, is an ostinato based on the familiar guitar introduction to U2’s Where The Streets Have No Name. Though the strains of The Edge’s guitar have been metamorphosed into the insistent repetitions of keyboard percussion, the aesthetic is similar – a distant proclamation that grows steadily in fervor. The difference between U2’s presentation and Mackey’s, however, is that the guitar riff disappears for the majority of the song, while in Aurora Awakes, the motive persists for nearly the entirety of the remainder of the piece:

“When I heard that song on the radio last winter, I thought it was kind of a shame that he only uses that little motive almost as a throwaway bookend. That's my favorite part of the song, so why not try to write an entire piece that uses that little hint of minimalism as its basis?”

The other quotation is a sly reference to Gustav Holst’s First Suite in E-flat for Military Band. The brilliant E-flat chord that closes the Chaconne of that work is orchestrated (nearly) identically as the final sonority of Aurora Awakes – producing an unmistakably vibrant timbre that won’t be missed by aficionados of the repertoire. This same effect was, somewhat ironically, suggested by Mackey for the ending of composer Jonathan Newman’s My Hands Are a City. Mackey adds an even brighter element, however, by including instruments not in Holst’s original.

“That has always been one of my favorite chords because it's just so damn bright. In a piece that's about the awaking of the goddess of dawn, you need a damn bright ending -- and there was no topping Holst. Well... except to add crotales.”

- Program Note by Jake Wallace 

About the Composer

 John Mackey (b. 1 October 1973, New Philadelphia, Ohio) is an American composer.

Mackey holds a Master of Music degree from The Juilliard School and a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he studied with John Corigliano and Donald Erb, respectively. Mr. Mackey particularly enjoys writing music for dance and for symphonic winds, and he has focused on those media for the past few years.

His works have been performed at the Sydney Opera House; the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Carnegie Hall; the Kennedy Center; Weill Recital Hall; Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival; Italy's Spoleto Festival; Alice Tully Hall; the Joyce Theater; Dance Theater Workshop; and throughout Italy, Chile, Japan, Colombia, Austria, Brazil, Germany, England, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.

John has received numerous commissions from the Parsons Dance Company, as well as commissions from the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra, New York City Ballet’s Choreographic Institute, the Dallas Theater Center, the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, the New York Youth Symphony, Ailey 2, Concert Artists Guild, Peridance Ensemble, and Jeanne Ruddy Dance, among many others. Recent and upcoming commissions include works for the concert bands of the SEC Athletic Conference, the American Bandmasters Association, and the Dallas Wind Symphony.

As a frequent collaborator, John has worked with a diverse range of artists, from Doug Varone to David Parsons, from Robert Battle to the U.S. Olympic Synchronized Swim Team. (The team won a bronze medal in the 2004 Athens Olympics performing to Mackey's score Damn.)

John has been recognized with numerous grants and awards from organizations including ASCAP (Concert Music Awards, 1999 through 2006; Morton Gould Young Composer Award, 2002 and 2003), the American Music Center (Margaret Jory Fairbanks Copying Assistance Grant, 2000, 2002), and the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust (Live Music for Dance commissioning grants, 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2005). He was a CalArts/Alpert Award nominee in 2000.

In February 2003, the Brooklyn Philharmonic premiered John’s work Redline Tango at the BAM Opera House, with Kristjan Jarvi conducting. John made a new version of the work for wind ensemble in 2004 -- Mackey's first work for wind band -- and that version has since received over 100 performances worldwide. The wind version won the 2004 Walter Beeler Memorial Composition Prize, and in 2005, the ABA/Ostwald Award from the American Bandmasters Association, making John the youngest composer to receive the honor.

In 2009, John's work Aurora Awakes received both the ABA/Ostwald Award and the NBA William D. Revelli Composition Contest.

John served as a Meet-The-Composer/American Symphony Orchestra League "Music Alive!" Composer In Residence with the Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphony in 2002-2003, and with the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra in 2004-2005. He was Composer In Residence at the Vail Valley Music Festival in Vail, Colorado, in the summer of 2004, Composer In Residence at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in August 2005. He has held college residencies at Florida State, University of Michigan, Ohio State, Arizona State, University of Southern California, University of Texas, among many others. Mr. Mackey served as music director of the Parsons Dance Company from 1999-2003.

To entertain himself while procrastinating on commissions, John is a photography enthusiast.

 

About our Artist-In-Residence

Michael Haithcock became director of bands and professor of music (conducting) at the University of Michigan in the fall of 2001 following twenty-three years on the faculty of Baylor University. Following in the footsteps of William D. Revelli and H. Robert Reynolds, Professor Haithcock conducted the internationally renowned University of Michigan Symphony Band, guided the acclaimed graduate band and wind ensemble conducting program, and provided administrative leadership for all aspects of the University of Michigan’s diverse and historic band program.

Ensembles under Haithcock’s guidance have received a wide array of critical acclaim for their high artistic standards of performance and repertoire. These accolades have come through concerts at national and state conventions, performances in major concert venues, and recordings on the Albany, Arsis, and Equilibrium labels. Haithcock was selected to conduct the world premiere of Daron Hagen’s Bandanna, an opera for voice and wind band, commissioned by the College Band Directors’ National Association. He is a leader in commissioning and premiering new works for concert band.

Haithcock has earned the praise of both composers and conductors for his innovative approaches to developing the wind ensemble repertoire and programming. Haithcock is in constant demand as a guest conductor and as a resource person for symposiums and workshops in a variety of instructional settings as well as festival and all-state appearances throughout the country.

A graduate of East Carolina University – where he received the 1996 Outstanding Alumni Award from the School of Music – and Baylor University, Haithcock has done additional study at a variety of conducting workshops including the Herbert Blomstedt Orchestral Conducting Institute. The Instrumentalist, the Michigan School Band and Orchestra Association, the School Musician, the Southwest Music Educator, and WINDS magazine have published his articles on conducting and wind literature.

Program and composer notes taken from www.windrep.org unless otherwise indicated.

Cuban Overture
George Gershwin
Arr. R. Mark Rogers

About the piece

In mid-1932. George Gershwin left New York with several friends to take a vacation in Havana, Cuba. He had just presented a successful show on Broadway – Of Thee I sing –- and the premiere of his Second Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra. While there, he became fascinated with the native music of Cuba and returned to New York armed with Cuban percussion instruments and musical ideas.

These ideas culminated in a symphonic work entitled Rumba; its first performance was presented in an all-Gershwin concert in Levisohn Stadium on August 16, 1932, conducted by Albert Coates. Later, on November 1 of the same year, it was presented at the Metropolitan Opera under the title Cuban Overture. Gershwin provided these program thoughts:

In my composition I have endeavored to combine the Cuban rhythms with my own thematic material. The result is a symphonic overture, which embodies the essence of the Cuban dance.

It has three main parts. The first part, Moderator e Molto Ritmato, is preceded by a [forte] introduction featuring some of the thematic material. Then comes a three-part contrapunctual episode leading to a second theme. The first part finishes with a recurrence of the first theme combined with fragments of the second.

A solo clarinet cadenza leads to the middle part, which is in a plaintive mood. It is a gradual developing canon in a polytonal manner. This part concludes with a climax based on an ostinato of the theme in the canon, after which a sudden change in tempo brings us back to the rumba dance rhythms.

The final is a development of the preceding material in a stretto-like manner. This leads us back once again to the main theme.

The conclusion of the work is a coda featuring the Cuban instruments of the percussion.

As is the case with Second Rhapsody, Cuban Overture portrays a composer in transition –- trying out new ideas in harmony and counterpoint and streamlining his orchestration. Doubtless a major source of this change –- and historians will argue how much or how little –- was due to Gershwin's studies with Joseph Schillinger, which started in 1932.

Certainly, Gershwin's musical interests were widening at this point since his music library now included Bach's The Art of the Fugue, Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms and the then-avant-garde works of Berg and Schoenberg. For many years he had been an irregular student of music, and now he surprised his friends with this knowledge of the inner workings of the classics. While linear aspects of his music revealed a growing influence, Gershwin's orchestral technique was making even greater strides. It may very well be that this is the area in which Schillinger influenced Gershwin the most. Cuban Overture has the fewest examples of the excessive instrumental doublings that Gershwin overused in his orchestration of the Concerto in F, An American in Paris, and Second Rhapsody. However, Gershwin, remaining true to his own spirit, continued his orchestral palette and sound in addition to his bad habits in orchestration.

Gershwin also highlighted the formal aspects of his music since he was obviously aware that even critics praising his work were not happy with the sometimes awkward construction of some of his orchestral music. This was an aspect of his creative effort that he constantly sought to improve. This, Second Rhapsody and Cuban Overture were opportunities to experiment in form, imitative counterpoint and more effective transitions.

In Cuban Overture, Gershwin was thus able to demonstrate a great leap forward in musical maturity as well as to show how his interest in new and different musical cultures could affect his own creativity.

- Program Note by Mark Rogers

About the composer

George Gershwin (26 September 1898, Brooklyn, N.Y. – 11 July 1937, Los Angeles, Calif.) was an American composer and pianist.

Gershwin was the son of Russian immigrants. Fueled by a passion for music, George Gershwin began studying the piano at the age of 12. Not being academically inclined, he convinced his parents to let him quit school at 15, and he became a pianist in Tin Pan Alley, demonstrating songs for the Remick Publishing Company. He began to compose popular songs while still a teenager and produced a succession of musicals, including Strike Up the Band (1927), with his brother Ira as lyricist. Gershwin was a sensitive songwriter of great melodic gifts and blended jazz, folk, and classical styles into a uniquely American musical form.

About the arranger

R. Mark Rogers (b. 20 January 1955) is an American composer, arranger and conductor.

Dr. Rogers has degrees from Texas Tech University and the University of Texas.

As managing editor for Southern Music Company, he is the author of editions of the music of Percy Aldridge Grainger and John Philip Sousa that have entered band repertory worldwide. He is also widely published as an arranger and transcriber, with performances by all five of the Washington, D.C. service bands.

Dr. Rogers is on the adjunct faculty of San Antonio College, Texas Lutheran University, and Trinity University. Prior to coming to San Antonio, Dr. Rogers was on the faculty of the University of South Alabama and a staff member of the University of Texas Longhorn Band. He has guest conducted numerous community and professional bands, regional honor bands and orchestras, and is an active clinician for area high school and middle school bands and orchestras.

A bassoonist, he performs with the Corpus Christi Symphony Orchestra, the Victoria Symphony Orchestra, the Laredo Philharmonic, the Mid-Texas Symphony, the Austin Symphony Orchestra and the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra.

Rogers is the conductor of the Heart of Texas Concert Band in San Antonio. He was elected to the American Bandmasters Association in 2022.

Dona Nobis Pacem
Michael Daugherty

About the piece

Dona Nobis Pacem (“Grant Us Peace”) for Wind Ensemble (2025) was commissioned by the ASPIRE consortium and is dedicated to the memory of Glen Adsit (1964-2024). I had the privilege of working with Glen numerous times during his 24 years as director of bands at the Hartt School of Music located in Hartford, Connecticut. Like countless other composers, music educators, and band conductors across the country, I admired Glen's energy, commitment, and passion for performing and commissioning new music for primary, secondary, and professional wind ensembles.

Promoting peace was on the mind of presidential candidate John F. Kennedy when he arrived on the University of Michigan campus in the early morning hours of October 14, 1960. Speaking to a crowd of 10,000 students from the steps of the Michigan Union, he asked if they "would be willing to volunteer in underdeveloped countries around the world". This impromptu speech is widely regarded as the catalyst for what would become the Peace Corps. After taking office in 1961, President Kennedy signed an executive order officially creating the organization. Still active today, the Peace Corps “promotes peace and friendship through community-based development and intercultural understanding,” sending thousands of volunteers each year on two-year assignments to share their skills and live alongside community members in developing nations worldwide.

Dona Nobis Pacem is a short prayer for peace from the Agnus Dei section of the Latin Mass. My composition for wind ensemble is a hopeful expression for peace and harmony in the world, integrating the 17th-century folksong traditionally associated with "Dona Nobis Pacem" with original music I have composed.

About the composer

Multiple GRAMMY Award-winning composer Michael Daugherty (b. 28 April 1954, Cedar Rapids, Iowa) achieved international recognition as one of the ten most performed American composers of concert music, according to the League of American Orchestras. His orchestral music, recorded by Naxos over the last two decades, has received six GRAMMY Awards, including Best Contemporary Classical Composition in 2011 for Deus ex Machina for piano and orchestra and in 2017 for Tales of Hemingway for cello and orchestra.

During his developmental years, Daugherty's mother encouraged him to paint, draw cartoons, tap dance, and play basketball. His father taught him how to play rock and jazz drums. From 1963-67 Daugherty played bass drum in the Emerald Knights and tom-toms in the Grenadier Drum and Bugle Corps where he competed against other drum and bugle corps throughout small Midwestern towns. During these years, Daugherty was employed as an early morning paper boy for The Des Moines Register.

Traveling was an important pastime for the Daugherty family. They often took long summer road trips down two-lane highways to tourist locations, including Mount Rushmore, Niagara Falls and Miami Beach. In 1964, the entire Daugherty family took a two-week vacation to London where The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix were at the height of their fame and Carnaby Street was the cutting edge of pop culture and fashion – this was in the heart of the Swinging Sixties.

The sixties in America were a time of great political unrest and social change. This made a great impact on the teenage Daugherty. Civil Rights demonstrations for racial equality and integration and demonstrations against the Vietnam War were becoming common day occurrences in Iowa, especially at the nearby University of Iowa, in Iowa City.

From 1968-72, Daugherty was the leader, arranger, and organist for his high school rock, soul, and funk band, The Soul Company. This band performed a variety of Motown charts and music by James Brown, Blood Sweat & Tears, and Sly and the Family Stone. Because accessing sheet music was almost impossible, Daugherty learned to hand-transcribe the music by listening to vinyl recordings. With the help of his father, who drove the band across the state, The Soul Company became a locally popular group that performed at high school proms, dances, and other events.

During the same years, Daugherty was a piano accompanist for the Washington High School Concert Choir, a solo jazz piano performer in nightclubs and lounges, and he appeared on local television as the pianist for the country and western Dale Thomas Show. Daugherty interviewed jazz artists who performed in Iowa, including Buddy Rich, Stan Kenton, George Shearing, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and he wrote articles on their music for the high school newspaper. During the summers of 1972-77, Daugherty played Hammond organ at county fairs across the Midwest for various popular music stars such as Bobby Vinton, Boots Randolph, Pee Wee King, and members of The Lawrence Welk Show.

As a young man, Daugherty studied composition with many of the preeminent composers of the 20th century including Pierre Boulez at IRCAM in Paris and Betsy Jolas the Paris Conservatory of Music (1979), Jacob Druckman, Earle Brown, Bernard Rands and Roger Reynolds at Yale (1980-82), and György Ligeti in Hamburg (1982-84). Daugherty was also an assistant to jazz arranger Gil Evans in New York from 1980-82. After teaching from 1986-1991 at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Daugherty joined the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre and Dance in 1991 as Professor of Composition, where he is a mentor to many of today’s most talented young composers. He is also a frequent guest of professional orchestras, festivals, universities and conservatories around the world.

Daugherty has been the composer-in-residence with the Louisville Symphony Orchestra (2000), Detroit Symphony Orchestra (1999-2003), Colorado Symphony Orchestra (2001-02), Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music (2001-04, 2006-11), Westshore Symphony Orchestra (2005-06), Eugene Symphony (2006), the Henry Mancini Summer Institute (2006), the Music from Angel Fire Chamber Music Festival (2006), Pacific Symphony (2010-11), Chattanooga Symphony Orchestra (2012) and New Century Orchestra (2013).

Daugherty has received numerous awards, distinctions, and fellowships for his music, these include: a Fulbright Fellowship (1977), the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award (1989) for his compositions Snap! and Blue Like an Orange, the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1991), fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1992) and the Guggenheim Foundation (1996), and the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (2000). In 2005, Daugherty received the Lancaster Symphony Orchestra Composer’s Award, and in 2007, the Delaware Symphony Orchestra selected Daugherty as the winner of the A.I. DuPont Award. Also in 2007, Daugherty was named “Outstanding Classical Composer” at the Detroit Music Awards and received the American Bandmasters Association Ostwald Award for his composition Raise the Roof for timpani and symphonic band.

Code 404
Dennis Llinas

About the piece

Code 404 is not a programmatic work but it is influenced by programmatic elements. This piece represents AI essentially taking over until everything is destroyed. This is not meant to be a statement to personal beliefs - just a fun script for a sonic space. To accomplish this, I essentially have a “Hope” theme (meant to represent humanity), the communicating circuitry of the AI, and the “Evil” theme meant to represent the impending doom. The marriage and layering of these themes over the groove element of the AI circuitry gives the piece a structure that represents my compositional language. The title, Code 404, is the error message when a file is not found which perfectly fits the theme of the piece. I leave it up to the listener where they are in this mixture of hope and despair.

-Program note from www.dennisllinasmusic.com

About the composer

Dennis Llinás (b. 1980, Miami, Fla.) is an American conductor, educator and composer.

Dr. Llinás received a Bachelor of Science in Music Education from Florida International University and both a Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts in Conducting from The University of Texas at Austin. His primary conducting professors were Roby George and Jerry Junkin. Prior to his collegiate teaching, Dr. Llinás taught at Miami Coral Park High School in Miami, Fla. and W. Charles Akins High School in Austin, Tx.

Llinás serves as associate professor of music and director of bands at the University of Oregon where his principal responsibilities include overseeing all aspects of the UO Department of Bands, conducting the Oregon Wind Ensemble, teaching graduate and undergraduate conducting, and wind literature. Prior to his appointment at the U of O, he served as the associate director of bands at Louisiana State University where his responsibilities included conducting the LSU Symphonic Winds, teaching undergraduate and graduate conducting, and directing the Tiger Band.

As a clinician, Llinás has worked with chamber orchestras and wind ensembles in Colombia and Austria, served as an adjudicator for the Mid-Europe International Festival, worked with ensembles at the World Youth Wind Orchestra Project (WYWOP) and World Adult Wind Orchestra Project (WAWOP), conducted all-state and honor bands throughout the U.S., guest conducted the Dallas Winds and the West Point Band, and presented at several conventions including WASBE, The Midwest Clinic, TMEA, FMEA, LMEA, OMEA (Oregon) and OMEA (Ohio) to name a few. He has also published a chapter in the 10th volume of the Teaching Music Through Performance series.

As a composer and arranger, Llinás has been commissioned to compose works for musicians from across the country. Waking Dreams and Javier’s Dialog were recorded by Mark Hetzler, trombone professor at The University of Wisconsin. His most recent transcription and collaboration was Masquerade by Anna Clyne which was premiered at the National College Band Directors National Association Conference. His compositions and arrangements have also been performed by The University of Texas Wind Ensemble, The University of Texas Men’s and Women’s Chorus, the Dallas Winds, and Louisiana State University, as well as performances by solo artists from The University of Texas, Columbus State University, The University of Wisconsin, Furman University, Conservatoire Strasbourg in France, Vanderbilt University, and Huston-Tillotson University.

In the world of marching arts, Llinás is an active arranger/composer/show designer producing marching band and indoor percussion shows for over 50 programs across the nation.

He maintains memberships in the Conductors Guild, the College Band Directors National Association, the Oregon Music Educators Association, the Golden Key National Honors Society, the Phi Kappa Phi National Honors Society, and is an honorary member of Kappa Kappa Psi.

Lincolnshire Posy
Percy Grainger
ed. Frederick Fennell

About the piece

Lincolnshire Posy was commissioned by the American Bandmasters Association and premiered at their convention with the composer conducting. It is in six movements, all based on folk songs from Lincolnshire, England. Grainger's settings are not only true to the verse structure of the folk songs, but attempt to depict the singers from whom Grainger collected the songs. Since its premiere, it has been recognized as a cornerstone of the wind band repertoire.

Lincolnshire Posy, as a whole work, was conceived and scored by me direct for wind band early in 1937. Five, out of the six, movements of which it is made up existed in no other finished form, though most of these movements (as is the case with almost all my compositions and settings, for whatever medium) were indebted, more or less, to unfinished sketches for a variety of mediums covering many years (in this case, the sketches date from 1905 to 1937). These indebtednesses are stated in the score.

This bunch of "musical wildflowers" (hence the title) is based on folksongs collected in Lincolnshire, England (one notated by Miss Lucy E. Broadwood; the other five noted by me, mainly in the years 1905-1906, and with the help of the phonograph), and the work is dedicated to the old folksingers who sang so sweetly to me. Indeed, each number is intended to be a kind of musical portrait of the singer who sang its underlying melody -- a musical portrait of the singer's personality no less than of his habits of song -- his regular or irregular wonts of rhythm, his preference for gaunt or ornately arabesqued delivery, his contrasts of legato and staccato, his tendency towards breadth or delicacy of tone.

- Program Note by Percy Aldridge Grainger


Edition note. This history of errors in this work is legend. When Percy Grainger wrote it, he wrote out all of the parts FIRST, then made a “compressed full score," meaning a two-line score like a condensed score, but with much more complete information than your usual condensed score.

Using that process, and under time pressure for the premiere, many errors found their way into parts and score. In the original Schott/Shirmer publication, there are over **500** errors. Frederick Fennell found most of them; others were discovered by other conductors (H. Robert Reynolds, Jennifer Martin, several others), and by players young and old, and were sent to Fennell over the years. Fennell made his first edition principally to fix those errors and to clarify information discovered in Grainger’s manuscript score and parts, while working from an unpublished full score by Ward Hammond.

Even with all of those errors found over the years, and proofreading by many people, further errors were discovered in the first printing, and another one or two in printings two through four. And yet errors persist, or perhaps have been introduced, in the latest, 2010, printing. Users are encouraged to be on the lookout for errors in this complex work.

- Edition Note by Jennifer Martin

About the composer

George Percy Grainger (8 July 1882, Brighton, Victoria, Australia – 20 February 1961, White Plains, N.Y.) was an Australian-born composer, pianist and champion of the saxophone and the concert band, who worked under the stage name of Percy Aldridge Grainger.

Grainger was an innovative musician who anticipated many forms of twentieth century music well before they became established by other composers. As early as 1899 he was working with "beatless music", using metric successions (including such sequences as 2/4, 2½/4, 3/4, 2½/4).

In December 1929, Grainger developed a style of orchestration that he called "Elastic Scoring". He outlined this concept in an essay that he called, "To Conductors, and those forming, or in charge of, Amateur Orchestras, High School, College and Music School Orchestras and Chamber-Music Bodies".

In 1932, he became Dean of Music at New York University, and underscored his reputation as an experimenter by putting jazz on the syllabus and inviting Duke Ellington as a guest lecturer. Twice he was offered honorary doctorates of music, but turned them down, explaining, "I feel that my music must be regarded as a product of non-education."

Rocky Point Holiday
Ron Nelson

About the piece

Rocky Point Holiday was a commission from Frank Bencriscutto and the University of Minnesota band for a tour of Russia. It was composed between 1968 and 1969. Bencriscutto had heard Nelson's orchestral work Savannah River Holiday and decided he wanted something virtuosic to take with him on the Russian tour. When asked about the limitations of the band, Bencriscutto told him there were none. "I'm going to write a tremendously difficult piece," Nelson warned him. "That's fine," replied Bencriscutto, and thus Rocky Point Holiday was born. Nelson says, "This was a pivotal moment in my notion of wind ensemble scoring, in which I focused on orchestrating in an extremely transparent way."

The bulk of the work on the composition occurred while Nelson was on vacation at a Rhode Island seaside resort. Rocky Point is an amusement park over a hundred years old, located in Warwick Neck, RI. It was closed down in the mid-1990s due to a lack of funds.

About the composer

Ron Nelson (14 December 1929, Joliet, Ill. – 24 December 2023, Scottsdale, Ariz.) was an American composer.

Nelson began piano lessons at the age of six. At that tender age, he wrote his first composition, entitled The Sailboat, finding it more fun to improvise than to practice. He became a church organist at the age of 13. His early efforts rewarded him with the discipline to write down his improvisations and the basic principles of orchestration.

Dr. Nelson received his bachelor of music degree in 1952, the master’s degree in 1953, and the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in 1956, all from the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester. He also studied in France at the Ecole Normale de Musique and at the Paris Conservatory under a Fulbright Grant in 1955. Dr. Nelson joined the Brown University faculty the following year, and taught there until his retirement in 1993.

He composed two operas, a mass, music for films and television, 90 choral works, and over 40 instrumental works. Composing for band became a major focus, and the community has been rewarded with his Savannah River Holiday, Rocky Point Holiday, Passacaglia (Homage on B-A-C-H), and Chaconne.

In 1991, Dr. Nelson was awarded the Acuff Chair of Excellence in the Creative Arts, the first musician to hold the chair. In 1993, his Passacaglia (Homage on B-A-C-H) made history by winning all three major wind band compositions – the National Association Prize, the American Bandmasters Association Ostwald Prize, and the Sudler International Prize. He was awarded the Medal of Honor of the John Philip Sousa Foundation in Washington, D.C., in 1994. In 2006, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Oklahoma City University.

Dr. Nelson received numerous commissions, including those from the National Symphony Orchestra, Rochester Philharmonic, the U.S. Air Force Band and Chorus, Rhode Island Philharmonic, Aspen Music Festival, Brevard Music Center, Musashino Wind Ensemble, and countless colleges and universities. He also received grants and awards from The Rockefeller Foundation, the Howard Foundation, ASCAP, and several from the National Endowment for the Arts. He also appeared as guest composer/conductor at a large number of colleges and universities, including Illinois, Yale, North Texas State, Western Michigan, Sam Houston, Lawrence, Dartmouth, Southern Maine, CalTech, MIT, and Princeton.

Symphonic Band

"Legends and Landscapes: Music from the British Isles"

Program Notes compiled from www.windrep.org

Variations on "Scarborough Fair"

About the piece

First published in 1989, this work from the late Calvin Custer epitomizes his command of orchestration and understanding of musical pacing. The familiar folk melody is stated first by a solo flute, then followed by a remarkable series of variations starting with a brass choir accompanied by woodwind flourishes. An Andante variation features the woodwind choir accompanying solos by baritone and oboe, and this leads to a striking fugue variation and bold finish.

About the composer

Calvin H. Custer (15 July 1939 - 21 April 1998) was an American composer and arranger.

He attended Carnegie Mellon University and Syracuse University where his composition teachers included Nikolai Lopatnikoff, Ernst Bacon, and Earl George. He also studied conducting with Karl Kritz, first music director of the Syracuse Symphony.

Custer was associated with the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra during the majority of his musical career serving in the keyboard, horn and string bass sections; holding various conducting positions; and serving as staff arranger. He helped to implement the orchestra's chamber music program which continues to perform in local schools and libraries to this day. Calvin was a member of the both the rock and percussion ensembles in which he played numerous instruments including keyboard and guitar. Custer was prolific in his creations of arrangements for orchestra, many of which were performed by orchestras across the country including the Boston Pops Orchestra. In 2006, the Syracuse Symphony released a CD of Custer's arrangements on the disc Big Band Bash. His many arrangements for band include Adagio from "Adagio for Strings" (Barber), Ashokan Farewell (Ungar), Rolling Thunder March (Fillmore), and Star Wars® Main Theme (Williams).

Themes from "Green Bushes"

About the piece

In setting such dance-folk songs (indeed, in setting all dance music) I feel that the unbroken and somewhat monotonous keeping-on-ness of the original should be preserved above all else.

The greater part of my passacaglia is many-voiced and free-voiced. Against the folk tune I have spun free counter-melodies of my own -- top tunes, middle tunes, bass tunes . . . The key-free harmonic neutrality of the folk song’s mixolydian mode opens the door to a wondrously free fellowship between the folk tune and these grafted-on tunes of mine.

My Green Bushes setting is thus seen to be a strict passacaglia throughout well-nigh its full length. Yet it became a passacaglia unintentionally. In taking the view that the Green Bushes tune is a dance-folk song... I was naturally led to keep it running like an unbroken thread through my setting, and in feeling prompted to graft upon it modern musical elements expressive of the swish and swirl of dance movements the many-voiced treatment came of itself.

The work is in no sense program music -- in no way does it musically reflect the story told in the verses of the Green Bushes song text. It is conceived, and should be listened to, as dance music (It could serve as ballet music.) ... as an expression of those athletic and ecstatic intoxications that inspire, are inspired by, the dance -- my newtime harmonies, voice-weavings and form-shapes being lovingly woven around the sterling old-time tune to in some part replace the long-gone but still fondly mind-pictured festive-mooded country-side dancers, their robust looks, body actions and heart-stirs.”

 

About the composer

George Percy Grainger (8 July 1882, Brighton, Victoria, Australia – 20 February 1961, White Plains, N.Y.) was an Australian-born composer, pianist and champion of the saxophone and the concert band, who worked under the stage name of Percy Aldridge Grainger.

Grainger was an innovative musician who anticipated many forms of twentieth century music well before they became established by other composers. As early as 1899 he was working with "beatless music", using metric successions (including such sequences as 2/4, 2½/4, 3/4, 2½/4).

In December 1929, Grainger developed a style of orchestration that he called "Elastic Scoring". He outlined this concept in an essay that he called, "To Conductors, and those forming, or in charge of, Amateur Orchestras, High School, College and Music School Orchestras and Chamber-Music Bodies".

In 1932, he became Dean of Music at New York University, and underscored his reputation as an experimenter by putting jazz on the syllabus and inviting Duke Ellington as a guest lecturer. Twice he was offered honorary doctorates of music, but turned them down, explaining, "I feel that my music must be regarded as a product of non-education."

About the arranger

Larry D. Daehn (b. 10 May 1939, Rosendale, Wisc.) is an American composer, arranger and educator.

Mr. Daehn grew up on the farms of Wisconsin. He received a B.A. in musical education from the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh in 1964 and his master's degree in 1976 from the University of Wisconsin at Platteville. He was a teacher of music for 33 years, the last 27 of them at the New Glarus (Wisc.) High School. A past president of the Wisconsin chapter of Phi Beta Mu, he was honored by that organization as Outstanding Bandmaster.

Daehn has composed With Quiet Courage, in memory of his mother, and As Summer Was Just Beginning. An avid admirer of Percy Aldridge Grainger, he has written several arrangements of that composer's melodies and an article on the Grainger Museum. He was the owner of Daehn Publications until his retirement.

A Longford Legend
A Collection of Irish Street Ballades

About the piece

A Longford Legend op. 58 was commissioned by the Normal Community West High School Band, Normal, Illinois, Lisa Preston, director. The piece was written in 1996 and premiered in April of that year with the composer conducting. It is based on the composer's impressions of three poems found in a collection of 18-century Irish ballades, and is written as a tribute to the wonderful music of Grainger, Holst and Vaughan Williams.

I. A Longford Legend

Oh! 'Tis of a bold Major tale I relate,
Who possessed a fine house and a charming estate,
Who, when possible, always his pleasure would take
From morning till night in a boat on his lake.

So a steam-launch he bought from a neighbouring peer,
And learnt how to start her, to stoke, and to steer;
But part of the craft he omitted to learn—
How to ease her, and to stop her, and back her astern.

Well, one lovely spring morn from their moorings they cast,
The furnace alight and the steam in full blast.
As they cruised through the lake, oh! what pleasure was theirs!
What congratulations! what swagger! what airs!

"Evening's come," says the Major; "let's home for the night.
Pick up the mooring and make her all right;
Whilst you, my gay stoker, your wages to earn,
Just ease her, and stop her, and back her astern."

"Do what?" asked the stoker. "Why, stop her, of course!"
"Faith! it's aisier stopping a runaway horse!
Just try it yourself!" The field officer swore!
But that was no use - they were nearly on shore!

He swore at himself, at the boat, and the crew;
He cursed at the funnel, the boiler, and screw,— But in vain! 
He was forced from his mooring to turn, Shouting, 
"Ease her, and stop her, and back her astern!"

It was clear that on shore they that night would not dine,
So they drank up the brandy, the whisky and wine;
They finished the stew and demolished the cake
As they steamed at full speed all the night round the lake.

Weeks passed; and with terror and famine oppressed,
One by one of that ill-fated crew sank to rest;
And grim death seized the Major before he could learn
How to ease her, and stop her, and back her astern.

And still round the lake there wild course they pursue,
While the ghost of the Major still swears at the crew,
And the ghosts of the crew still reply in this mode,
"Just ease her, and stop her yourself-and be blowed!"

Here's the moral: Imprimis, whene'er you're afloat,
Don't use haughty words to your crew on your boat;
And ere starting, oh! make this your deepest concern-
Learn to ease her, and stop her, and back her astern.

II. Young Molly Bawn

Come, all you young gallants that follow the gun.
Beware of late shooting at the setting sum,
For it's little you know of what happened off late
To young Molly Asthoreen, whose beauty was great.

It happened one evening in a shower of hail.
This maid in a bower herself did conceal:
Her love being a-shooting, took her for a fawn;
He leveled his gun and he shot Molly Bawn.

And when he came to her and found it was she,
His limbs they grew feeble and his eyes could not see:
His heart it was broken with sorrow and grief;
And with eyes up to heaven he implored for relief.

He ran to his uncle with the gun in his hand, 
Saying, Uncle, dear uncle, I'm not able to stand;
I shot my own true lover—alas! I'm undone
While she was in the shade by the setting off the sun.

He rubbed her fair temples and found she was dead,
And a fountain of tears for my darling I shed;
And now I'll be forced by the laws of the land
For the killing of my darling my trial to stand."

III. Killyburn Brae

There was an ould man down by Killyburn brae,
Right fol, right fol, titty fol lay.
There was an ould man down by Killyburn brae,
Had a scolding ould wife for the most of his day, 
With a right fol da dol, titty fol lol,
Fol da-da dol, da dol da-da day.

One day as this man he walk'd out in the glen
Sure he met with the divil, says "How are you then?"
Says he, me ould man I have come for yer wife,
For I hear she's the plague an' torment of yer life,

So the divil he hoisted her up on his back,
An' hot-fut for hell with her then he did pack,
An' when at the finish they got to hell's gate,
Sure he threw her right down with a thump on her pate,

There were two little divils there playing at ball,
Whilst the one he was wee sure the other was small,
There were two other divils there tied up in chains,
An' she lifted her stick an' she scattered their brains,

So the divil he hoisted her up on his back,
They were seven years goin'-nine days comin' back,
Says he, me ould man here's yer wife safe an' well,
For the likes of herself we would not have in hell,

Now l've been a divil the most of me life,
But I ne'er was in hell till I met with yer wife,

So it's true that the women is worse than the men,
Right fol, right fol, titty fol lay.
So it's true that the women is worse than the men,
When they go down to hell they are thrown out again.
With a right fol da dol, titty fol lol,
Fol da-da dol, da dol da-da day.

About the composer

Robert Sheldon (b. 3 February 1954, Chester, Penn.) is an American composer, arranger, conductor and educator.

Sheldon has taught instrumental music in the Florida and Illinois public schools, and has served on the faculty at Florida State University where he taught conducting and instrumental music education classes, and directed the university bands. As Concert Band Editor for the Alfred Publishing Company, he maintains an active composition and conducting schedule, and regularly accepts commissions for new works. Sheldon received the Bachelor of Music in Music Education from the University of Miami and the Master of Fine Arts in Instrumental Conducting from the University of Florida.

An internationally recognized clinician, Sheldon has conducted numerous Regional and All-State Honor Bands throughout the United States and abroad, is Conductor of the Prairie Wind Ensemble in residence at Illinois Central College, and teaches Composition at Bradley University. He holds membership in several organizations that promote music and music education. The American School Band Directors Association has honored him with the Volkwein Award for composition and the Stanbury Award for teaching. He has also been a twenty-one-time recipient of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publisher's Standard Award for his compositions in the concert band repertoire. His compositions have been recorded and released on compact discs including, Images: The Music of Robert Sheldon, and Infinite Horizons: The Music of Robert Sheldon, as well as numerous other recordings. Mr. Sheldon has been the topic of articles published in The Instrumentalist, Teaching Music and School Band and Orchestra Magazine, and is one of eleven American wind band composers featured in Volume I of Composers on Composing Music for Band. He was honored by the International Assembly of Phi Beta Mu in 1990 as being the International Outstanding Bandmaster of the year.

Symphonic Winds

"Give Us This Day"

Psalm 46

About the piece

Psalm 46 is based upon the chorale melody from A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, the best known Martin Luther hymn which was composed sometime between 1527 and 1529. The hymn’s words paraphrase Psalm 46. Zdechlik’s setting is divided into four major sections with a wide variety of styles and meters that draw to a powerful heroic conclusion.

The work, originally published in 1971, is dedicated to Mr. Leon Titus and the Concordia College Band, St. Paul, Minnesota.

About the composer

John P. Zdechlik (2 May 1937, Minneapolis, Minn. – 21 May 2020, White Bear Lake, Minn.) was an American composer, conductor, performer and clinician.

He was born to a father who emigrated from Poland in 1910, though the surname Zdechlik is Czech in origin. Zdechlik had musical influences growing up - his grandfather was a church organist, his father regularly played recordings of Beethoven and Victor Herbert, and his parents enrolled him in piano lessons at age six. Zdechlik's parents encouraged musical pursuits but did not pressure him. In high school, Zdechlik began playing E-flat alto horn before switching to trumpet. During his high school years he also began to take an interest in jazz, and began to compose jazz band arrangements under the tutelage of his trumpet instructor Harry Strobel and local arranger and jazz pianist Herb Pilhofer.

Dr. Zdechlik earned his Ph.D. in theory and composition from the University of Minnesota, where he studied with Paul Fetler and Frank Bencriscutto for whom Zdechlik served as assistant for several years.

Thanks to Bencriscutto, Zdechlik's first major success as a composer came in 1969. Bencriscutto had been commissioned to write an original work for the Concordia College Band in Saint Paul, Minnesota, but was too busy to fulfill the commitment. The commissioner, Leon Titus, agreed to have Zdechlik fill in as the composer, resulting in Zdechlik's first major compositional success, Psalm 46.

In 1970, Zdechlik began his tenure at Lakewood Community College (now Century College) in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, where he served for nearly three decades as conductor, professor, music department chair, and resident composer until his retirement in 1997.

Soon thereafter, a commission from Bloomington Jefferson High School in Bloomington, Minnesota resulted in Zdechlik's most famous work, Chorale and Shaker Dance, which premiered at the Music Educators National Conference in 1972. Zdechlik claims to have guest conducted the piece over 500 times in his career.

Owing to his early success as a composer for the concert band medium, the vast majority of Zdechlik's future output was also for bands, most of which are commissions from high school or college ensembles. Dozens of his works have been published by Neil A. Kjos Music Company, and Zdechlik has conducted extensively throughout the United States, Japan, and Europe.

Zdechlik was elected to the American Bandmasters Association in 1989.

Let Us Break Bread Together

About the piece

 Let Us Break Bread Together is an adaptation of a familiar folk hymn tune. Root has surrounded this beautiful old hymn tune with chordal sonorities and a beautiful trumpet solo.

About the composer

Thomas Root (22 February 1947, Redwood Falls, Minn. - 4 August 2023, Ogden, Utah) was an American composer and music educator.

After completing his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Root received a doctorate in music composition from Michigan State University. The winner of nine Utah Composers' Guild Awards, he was voted president-elect of the College Band Directors National Association, Western Division. Dr. Root presently serves as director of bands and chairman of the music theory department at Weber State University until his retirement after 31 years in 2015. Under his direction, the WSU Wind Ensemble performed as a guest of the City of Chia Yi, Taiwan, in their 1998 International Wind Orchestra Festival, in 2000 served as the guest performance ensemble for the Chosen Gems clinics of the 2000 Regional CBDNA convention, at Carnegie Hall in spring of 2009.

Active nationally as a guest conductor and adjudicator, Thomas Root is also well-known as a composer. The winner of eleven Utah Composers' Guild Awards, he has written numerous commissioned pieces, including works for the University of Nevada-Reno Wind Ensemble premiered at the Western Division College Band Directors National Association meetings, two chamber works funded by Utah State Arts Council grants, and chamber works for other professional associations including the Utah chapter of Music Teachers National Association. Dr. Root also completed commissions for bands and orchestras in Minnesota, Texas, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado. In addition, he has composed major works for choral ensemble, including his highly acclaimed African Carols for choir and band.

Root's 1999 publication for band, Chorale Prelude on ‘Sleepers Awake,' placed first nationally and was "Best of Utah" in that year's Utah Composers Guild competition. Another familiar band publication by Thomas Root, Polly Oliver, was recently selected as one of the ten most important works for young band by the American Band College and is featured continuously in clinics, reading bands, graduate music education seminars and conducting classrooms throughout the world.

Give Us This Day
I. Moderately Slow
II. Very Fast

About the Piece

Give us This Day was commissioned by Eric Weirather, Director of Bands at Rancho Buena Vista High School in Oceanside, Calif., which is in the greater San Diego area. Eric put together a consortium to support the commission. The score was finished in October of 2005, and the premiere performance was done at Eric's school in the spring of 2006. Since then, with publication of the piece, and a lot of word of mouth, Give Us This Day has literally taken off. It continues to be performed all over the U.S., and many places around the world.

The words "give us this day" are, of course, from the Lord's Prayer, but the inspiration for this music is Buddhist. I have recently read a book by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (pronounced "Tick Not Hahn") entitled For a Future to be Possible. His premise is that a future for the planet is only possible if individuals become deeply mindful of themselves, deeply connected to who they really are. While this is not a new idea, and something that is an ongoing struggle for everyone, in my estimation it is the issue for world peace. For me, writing music, and working with people to perform music, are two of those points of deep mindfulness.

Music makes the connection to reality, and by reality I mean a true awakeness and awareness. "Give Us This Day" gives us this very moment of awakeness and aware aliveness so that we can build a future in the face of a most dangerous and difficult time.

I chose the subtitle "Short Symphony for Wind Ensemble" because the music really isn't programmatic in nature. It has a full-blown symphonic character, even though there are only two movements. The music of the slower first movement is deeply searching, while that of the highly energized second movement is at times both joyful and sternly sober. The piece ends with a modal setting of the chorale melody Vater Unser in Himmelreich ("Our Father in Heaven"), #110 from the 371 Four-Part Chorales by J.S. Bach.

About the Composer

David Maslanka (30 August 1943, New Bedford, Mass. – 6 August 2017, Missoula, Mont.) was an American composer.

Dr. Maslanka attended the Oberlin College Conservatory where he studied composition with Joseph Wood, and spent a year at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria. He also did graduate work in composition at Michigan State University with H. Owen Reed.

David Maslanka served on the faculties of the State University of New York at Geneseo, Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Kingsborough College of the City University of New York. He was a member of ASCAP.

Over the past four decades, David Maslanka has become one of America’s most original and celebrated musical voices. He has published dozens of works for wind ensemble, orchestra, choir, percussion ensembles, chamber ensembles, solo instrument, and solo voice. However, he is especially well-known for his wind ensemble works. Of his nine symphonies, seven are written for wind ensemble, and an additional forty-one works include among them the profound “short symphony” Give Us This Day, and the amusing Rollo Takes a Walk. Year after year, Maslanka’s music is programmed by professional, collegiate, and secondary school wind ensembles around the world.

When Maslanka wrote A Child’s Garden of Dreams, he was living in New York City and teaching music composition at Sarah Lawrence College and New York University. He was rapidly becoming interested in psychology, psychotherapy, and meditation, and was particularly captivated by the writings of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Maslanka began to incorporate self-hypnosis and lucid dreaming into his meditative exercises, which heavily influenced his musical thought. He began to notice specific symbols in his “mental landscape” that he translated into music. Today, Maslanka’s unique compositional technique is known for its emphasis on meditation, psychoanalysis, self-discovery, and the accession of one’s own subconscious energies. His search for spiritual and metaphysical discovery ultimately spurred him to leave New York City in 1990, and move to Missoula, Montana, where he lived and worked until his death.

Maslanka's works for winds and percussion have become especially well known. They include among others, A Child's Garden of Dreams for Symphonic Wind Ensemble, Concerto for Piano, Winds, and Percussion, the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th symphonies, Mass for soloists, chorus, boys chorus, wind orchestra and organ, and the two wind quintets. Percussion works include Variations of 'Lost Love' and My Lady White for solo marimba, and three ensemble works: Arcadia II: Concerto for Marimba and Percussion Ensemble, Crown of Thorns, and Montana Music: Chorale Variations. In addition, he has written a wide variety of chamber, orchestral, and choral pieces.

"The Band Dances"

About our Artist-in-Residence

Stephen Peterson (Fort Collins, CO) Stephen Peterson has enjoyed a 43-year career teaching and conducting throughout the United States and around the world. Most recently, he served as Director of Bands at the University of Illinois, where he served from 2015 until his retirement in 2022. At Illinois, he conducted the Illinois Wind Symphony, led the graduate wind conducting program, taught courses in wind literature, and guided all aspects of one of the nation’s oldest, largest, and most storied band programs.

Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Illinois, he served as director of bands at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York for 17 years. From 1988 to 1998, he served as Associate Director of Bands at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Dr. Peterson was also conductor of the renowned Northshore Concert Band. He held positions as Associate and Interim Director of Bands at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas and has several years of successful teaching experience in the public schools in Arizona.

Peterson maintains a busy schedule as a conductor and clinician and has appeared on four continents and in 45 states. In addition to many honor bands and clinics, since retiring, he has had residencies at the University of Michigan, The University of Colorado, The University of Massachusetts, Appalachian State University, and the Interlochen Center for the Arts Academy. He is a past president of the College Band Directors National Association and has been honored with membership in the prestigious American Bandmasters Association, where he has served on the Board of Directors. He is also a member of Phi Mu Alpha, Phi Kappa Phi, Pi Kappa Lambda, and an honorary member of Tau Beta Sigma and Kappa Kappa Psi.

Symphonic Dances from West Side Story
Leonard Berstein
trans. Paul Lavender

About the piece

Symphonic Dances from “West Side Story” was first performed by the New York Philharmonic on an all-Bernstein concert in 1961, four years after the opening of West Side Story on Broadway. The songs of the musical had immediately become popular standards, while at the same time the dance music had been sophisticated enough to find its way into the concert hall, similar to music of a ballet. Most composers for Broadway were songwriters who did not write their own dance music, but Bernstein, a fully trained composer who had already written two formal ballets, crafted these remarkable dances himself. This transcription was first performed by the United States Marine Band, "The President's Own," with Col. Michael J. Colburn conducting, as part of the Marine Band's fall tours in 2006 and 2007.

The suite encompasses Mambo, a competitive dance between the gangs; Cha-Cha, when Tony and Maria see one another for the first time; and the Finale, love music and a procession that recalls the ever-popular aria Somewhere, but now with a more tragic sentiment.

- Program Notes from www.windrep.org

About the composer

Leonard Bernstein (25 August 1918 in Lawrence, Mass. - 14 October 1990, New York, N.Y.) was an American composer, pianist, and conductor.

Bernstein was born to Russian immigrants and attended Boston Latin School, Harvard University, and the Curtis Institute of Music. His studied with composers Edward Burlingame Hill and Walter Piston as well as conducting with Fritz Reiner. In the summers of 1940 and 1941 he studied conducting at Tanglewood with Serge Koussevitzky along with Frederick Fennell, Lukas Foss, and Walter Hendl. He become assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic in 1943 and it was in this role he became famous by filling in last minute for Bruno Walter for a national broadcast on 14 November 1943.

His Symphony No. 1, "Jeremiah" was premiered by the Pittsburgh Symphony in January 1944 followed by Fancy Free and On the Town by the end of the year. These successes led to numerous opportunities overseas, including being the first American to conduct at La Scala. In 1951 he become the head of conducting at Tanglewood and seven years later became Music Director of the New York Philharmonic (1958-1969). In this position he promoted new music, developed a series of Young People's Concerts, and recorded the symphonies of Gustav Mahler but was limited in his time to compose.

Bernstein was able to compose more in the 1970s. His achievements included Kennedy Center Honor for Lifetime of Contributions to American Culture Through the Performing Arts, 11 Emmy Awards, election to the Academy of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.

About the transcriber

Paul Lavender is an American composer, music businessman and arranger.

Lavender studied music theory and composition at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant, where he obtained both his Bachelor of Music, 1973, and Master of Music degrees. At this institute he also taught music theory, sight singing and ear training. During this period, he also started his first arrangements for the Central Michigan University Marching Band, then led by Norman Dietz and Jack Saunders. In 1980 he became an arranger and collaborator at the music publishing house Jenson Publications, and in 1989 he joined the music publishing house Hal Leonard Corporation in the same position. He is currently [2021] vice president of instrumental publications.

In addition to numerous adaptations of classical music for wind orchestras, he also wrote his own compositions for this orchestral form, as well as chamber music and pedagogical works.

Folk Dances
Dmitri Shostakovich
ed. H. Robert Reynolds

About the piece

Shostakovich wrote the suite Op. 63, Native Leningrad, in 1942 as a tribute to the courage of the citizens of Leningrad. This suite was culled from the incidental music for a "concert play spectacle" entitled Native Country or Motherland. It was scored for tenor and bass soloists, choir and orchestra, and was premiered on November 7, 1942, at the Dzerzhinsky Central Club.

The suite has four movements: Overture – October 1917, Song of the Victorious October (Song of the River Neva), Youth Dance (Song of the Sailors), and Song of Leningrad. The Youth Dance is the movement transcribed as Folk Dances. It first received this name when transcribed for piano by Lev Solin. The name stuck when retranscribed for military band by M. Vakhutinsky. H. Robert Reynolds rescored Vakhutinsky's transcription, making it suitable for American wind bands.

While the melodies used in Youth Dance are reminiscent of folk tunes, Shostakovich's work is original. Considering the programmatic nature of the work, it is justifiable to assume Shostakovich wished to evoke an overt Russian sentiment in the same way that Gustav Holst's First Suite in E-flat and Gordon Jacob's An Original Suite sound and feel distinctly British.

- Program Note from State University of New York, Potsdam, Symphonic Band concert program, 13 April 2017

About the composer

Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (25 September 1906, Saint Petersburg, Russia – 9 August 1975, Moscow, Russia) was a Russian composer who lived under the Soviet regime.

Shostakovich had a complex and difficult relationship with the Soviet government, suffering two official denunciations of his music, in 1936 and 1948, and the periodic banning of his work. Shostakovich's response to official criticism and, more importantly, the question of whether he used music as a kind of abstract dissidence is a matter of dispute. It is clear that outwardly he conformed to government policies and positions, reading speeches and putting his name to articles expressing the government line. It is also generally agreed that he disliked the regime, a view confirmed by his family and his letters to Isaak Glikman.

Shostakovich prided himself on his orchestration, which is clear, economical, and well-projected. This aspect of Shostakovich's technique owes more to Gustav Mahler than Rimsky-Korsakov. His unique approach to tonality involved the use of modal scales and some astringent neo-classical harmonies à la Hindemith and Prokofiev. His music frequently includes sharp contrasts and elements of the grotesque.

His most popular works are his 15 symphonies and 15 string quartets. His works for piano include 2 piano sonatas, an early set of preludes, and a later set of 24 preludes and fugues. Other works include two operas, six concertos, and a substantial quantity of film music.

About the editor

Harrah Robert Reynolds (April 10, 1934 – January 30, 2026) was an American musician, conductor and academic. He was the principal conductor of the Wind Ensemble at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California, where he held the H. Robert Reynolds Professorship in Wind Conducting. Reynold's appointment at the University of Southern California followed his retirement, after 26 years, from the School of Music of the University of Michigan where he served as the Henry F. Thurnau Professor of Music, director of university bands, and director of the division of instrumental studies. In addition to these responsibilities, he was also, for nearly 30 years, the conductor of the Detroit Chamber Winds and Strings, which is made up primarily of members from the Detroit Symphony.

Reynolds conducted in Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center (New York), Orchestra Hall (Chicago), Kennedy Center (Washington, D.C.), Powell Symphony Hall (St. Louis), Academy of Music (Philadelphia), and Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles). In Europe, he conducted the premiere of an opera for La Scala Opera (Milan, Italy), and concerts at the prestigious Maggio Musicale (Florence, Italy), the Tonhalle (Zurich, Switzerland), and at the Holland Festival in the Concertgebouw (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), as well as the 750th Anniversary of the City of Berlin. He has won the praise of numerous composers, including Aaron Copland, Karel Husa, Gyorgy Ligeti, Darius Milhaud, Gunther Schuller, and many others for his interpretive conducting of their compositions.

Reynolds was awarded an honorary doctorate from Duquesne University, and, in addition, held degrees in music education and performance from the University of Michigan, where he was the conducting student of Elizabeth Green. He began his career in the public schools of Michigan and California (Anaheim HS) before beginning his university conducting at California State University at Long Beach and the University of Wisconsin, prior to his tenure at the University of Michigan.

Reynolds spent his summers conducting the Young Artists Wind Ensemble at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute. This program works closely with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Music Center. The group includes young musicians from all across North America, and consistently performs the music at the highest difficulty to the highest quality. He shared this responsibility with David Martins, director of Wind Ensembles at Boston University.

Reynolds died on January 30, 2026, at the age of 91.

"Only Light"

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can." - MLK Jr.

About our Artist-in-Residence

Dr. Alfred L. Watkins is Co-Musical Director and Conductor of the Cobb Wind Symphony. He is former Director of Bands at Lassiter High School in Marietta, Georgia for 31 years. Mr. Watkins is a 1976 graduate of Florida A&M University. In 2022, he was conferred an Honorary Doctorate from the VanderCook College of Music. His bands have earned the Sudler Flag of Honor, Sudler Shield, and Sudler Silver Scroll and have performed at 32 invitational concert band events. He has conducted All-State High School Bands in 27 states and has worked with bands in 38 states.

Ensembles under Dr. Watkins’ batons have performed Midwest Band Clinic (five times), MFA National Festival (six times), GMEA Convention (six times) and the NBA Convention. The Lassiter Trojan Marching Band has performed in Rose Parade and Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. They are the 2-time Bands of America Grand National Champions and winner of nine Bands of America Regionals. The Lassiter Winter Color Guard was named the 2-time Winter Guard International World Champions and the Lassiter Percussion Ensemble performed at the GMEA Convention, MFA National Percussion Festival twice and won the PAS “Call for Tapes” in 2007.

Dr. Watkins is a member of the ABA, FAMU Gallery of Distinguished Alumni, CS Institute Hall of Fame, BOA Hall of Fame, MBDNA Hall of Fame, and has received the Edwin Franko Goldman Award from ASBDA. He has received the KKY “Distinguished Service to Music Award” and was the PBM “International Bandmaster of the Year in 2020.” He was awarded the “2022 Outstanding Conductor Award” by the Association of Community Bands. He has received 27 Certificates of Excellence from the NBA, the Sudler Order of Merit from the John Philip Sousa Foundation, and the Band World Magazine Legion of Honor Award. Dr. Watkins is a Co-Founder of MBDNA and is on the Advisory Boards of the Midwest Clinic and Association of Concert Bands.

The $1.5 million Alfred L. Watkins Band Building at Lassiter High School bears his name.

Let Freedom Ring
Ryan Nowlin

About the piece:

Before The Star-Spangled Banner officially became the national anthem in 1931, there were many popular hymns that served as de facto anthems for the United States, including My Country ‘tis of Thee. The lyrics of this patriotic American song were written by Samuel F. Smith and set to the melody of God Save the Queen, the anthem of the United Kingdom. Let Freedom Ring, an arrangement of My Country ‘tis of Thee, was penned as part of an audition for U.S. Marine Band staff arranger by SSgt. Ryan Nowlin and was performed by the Marine Band on January 21, 2013, at the second inaugural of President Barack Obama.

Drawing his inspiration for this piece directly from Smith’s patriotic words, Nowlin says his “simplistic treatment of the theme is to portray a deep reverence.” Shining through the texture on numerous occasions, great emphasis is placed on the lyrics, “land where my fathers died,” a strong reminder that America would not be what it is were it not for the sacrifices of those who have gone before us.

- Program Note by the United States Marine Band

About the composer:

Ryan Nowlin (b. 1978, Parma, Ohio) is an American composer, arranger and conductor.

Lt. Col. Nowlin holds both a B.M. in music education and an M.M. in music education and conducting from Bowling Green State University, where he studied horn with Herbert Spencer, Jr. and conducting with Bruce Moss and Emily Freeman Brown. He has also studied composition with prolific composer Anne McGinty, and has participated in workshops and master classes with several renowned conductors and educators including H Robert Reynolds, Mallory Thompson, Col. Arnald Gabriel, Harry Begian, and Frederick Fennell.

Nowlin taught instrumental music at the high school level in Ohio for ten years before joining “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band in August 2010 as staff arranger. He was appointed Assistant Director and commissioned a first lieutenant in July 2014, was promoted to the rank of captain in July 2016, was appointed Executive Officer and Associate Director in May 2018, and earned the rank of Major in January 2020. He was promoted to his current rank in December 2023. On Dec. 20, 2023, during a Change of Command Ceremony officiated by Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps General Christopher J. Mahoney, Lt. Col. Nowlin became the 29th Director of "The President's Own" United States Marine Band. As director, Nowlin oversees the Marine Band's educational outreach initiatives such as Music in the Schools, Music in the High Schools, Tour Educational Outreach, and the Concerto Competition for High School Musicians, and has been involved in the Marine Band’s Young People’s Concerts since 2011.

With “The President’s Own,” Nowlin has arranged and composed a variety of music for the Marine Band, Marine Chamber Orchestra, brass ensembles, and various small ensembles. He has written arrangements for an array of guest artists for national events, including a 2013 collaboration with Kelly Clarkson (America) and Beyoncé (The Star-Spangled Banner) for the second inauguration of President Barack Obama. In 2013, Lt. Col. Nowlin composed the concert march Montford Point Marines honoring the first African Americans to serve in the United States Marine Corps, and in 2018 he wrote the march Century of Service in honor of 100 years of women’s service in the Corps. Lt. Col. Nowlin’s music has been heard in performance at numerous White House events, including receptions, state dinners, and President Trump’s televised Fourth of July South Lawn celebration. His wind band transcriptions have been recorded on four Marine Band albums.

Lt. Col. Nowlin is co-author of the band director method book Tradition of Excellence, textbook Teaching Band with Excellence, and music theory series Excellence in Theory. He has received numerous awards including the James Paul Kennedy Music Achievement Award, the Mark and Helen Kelly Band Award, and the BGSU Faculty Excellence Award.

In addition to his duties with the United States Marine Band, Lt. Col. Nowlin frequently appears as a guest conductor with high school honor bands, community and municipal bands, and with university ensembles across the country. His published music and methods are used in lessons and performances around the globe, and he can frequently be found providing clinics and master classes to student musicians in classrooms around the country.

He is a member of Pi Kappa Lambda, MENC, ASCAP, and the International Horn Society. He also holds honorary memberships in Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, Kappa Kappa Psi, and Tau Beta Sigma.

Symphony for Band
Vincent Persichetti

About the piece:

The Symphony for Band was commissioned and premiered by Clark Mitze and the Washington University Band at the MENC Convention in St. Louis on April 16, 1956. According to the composer, it could have been titled Symphony for Winds, following, as it did, his Symphony No. 5 for Strings. Persichetti, however, did not wish to avoid the word “band,” which he felt no longer had the connotation of a poor quality of music. In the autumn 1964 Journal of Band Research, he wrote, “Band music is virtually the only kind of music in America today (outside of the ‘pop’ field) which can be introduced, accepted, put to immediate and wide use, and become a staple of the literature in a short time.” According to Jeffrey Renshaw, “The Symphony for Band ... was in many ways such a departure from the established concepts of band works that it influenced the attitudes of generations of composers.”

The four movements (Adagio allegro, Adagio sostenuto, Allegretto, and Vivace) have forms with traditional implications. The opening horn call and a following scale-wise passage in the slow introduction become the two principal themes (in reverse order) in the subsequent Allegro. The standard exposition, development, and recapitulation of sonata form are the Allegro, although the traditional key relationships are not completely retained. The slow second movement is based on Round Me Falls the Night, from the composer’s Hymns and Responses for the Church Year. The third movement, in trio form, serves as the traditional dance movement and is followed by a finale in free rondo form, which draws the thematic material from the preceding movements and concludes with a chord containing all 12 tones of the scale.

- Program Note from San Luis Obispo Wind Orchestra concert program, March 2, 2010

About the composer:

Vincent Persichetti (6 June 1915, Philadelphia, Penn. – 14 August 1987, Philadelphia) was an American composer, music educator and pianist.

Persichetti began his musical life at a young age, first studying the piano, then the organ, double bass, tuba, theory, and composition. By the age of 11 he was paying for his own musical education and helping by performing professionally as an accompanist, radio staff pianist, church organist, and orchestra performer. At the age of 16 he was appointed choir director for the Arch Street Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, a post he would hold for the next 20 years. During all of this, Persichetti was a student in the Philadelphia public schools and received a thorough musical education at the Combs College of Music, where he earned a degree in 1935 under Russel King Miller, his principal composition teacher.

Starting at the age of 20, he was simultaneously head of the theory and composition departments at the Combs College, a conducting major with Fritz Reiner at the Curtis Institute, and a piano major with Olga Samaroff at the Philadelphia Conservatory. He received a diploma in conducting from the Curtis Institute and graduate degrees from the Philadelphia Conservatory. In 1947 he joined the faculty of the Juilliard School of Music, and became the chairman of the Composition Department in 1963.

Persichetti composed for nearly every musical medium, with more than 120 published works. Although he never specifically composed "educational" music, many of his smaller pieces are suitable for teaching purposes. His piano music, a complete body of literature in itself, consists of six sonatinas, three volumes of poems, a concerto and a concertino for piano and orchestra, serenades, a four-hand concerto, a two-piano sonata, twelve solo piano sonatas, and various shorter works. His works for winds rank as some of the most original and well-crafted compositions in the medium, and his Symphony No. 6 is rightly considered one of the "cornerstones" of the genre.

Big City Lights
Marie A. Douglas

About the piece:

Big City Lights is a piece for wind band, inspired by the hip-hop subgenre "trap music", which finds its roots in the composer's home town, Atlanta, Georgia. The atonal piece has an electronic accompaniment aspect as well. There are musical elements that are meant to imitate techniques which are commonly utilized during the production of music within the genre. For example, in general the timpani performs what are intended to be "808s," while the tuba is often performing lines that would be reserved for synthesized bass; the combination creates an often utilized distortion technique.

Other production tactics travel through the ensemble as well. Certain aspects of the orchestration are imitating automation, which place sound exclusively in different spots of the ensemble (specifically on the left or right of the conductor) Sudden and gradual ensemble crescendos are dovetailing of melodies imitate low and high pass filters and volume knobs. Additionally, the piece aims to give the performers and audience a peek into a day in the life of an Atlanta resident.

The piece begins with the high-paced "It's Lit!" section which includes fortissimo exclamations occurring throughout the ensemble, demonstrating the hustle and bustle of the famed Atlanta traffic. The traffic sounds perform a trio with the clarinets and marimba, who depict a sense of "hurry and wait" as they endure the Atlanta traffic scene. The "Issa Vibe" section is much slower and intends to depict a night out on the town with friends, enjoying the city lights and the slightly slower paced environment.

For a short period, we return to "It's Lit!", followed by "Chopped and Screwed," which is a halftime recapitulation of the main themes. "Chopped and Screwed" is a famous DJ style which a song is slowed down tremendously. The piece closes out with one final return to the original marking of "It's Lit!" Enjoy a day in the life of an "AtLien" with Big City Lights!

- Program Notes from score

About the composer:

Marie A. Douglas (b. 1987) is an American hornist, educator, arranger, and composer.

Douglas received her undergraduate degree in music with a concentration in French horn performance from Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University. She holds graduate degrees in internet marketing from Full Sail University, and music technology and performance from Southern Utah University.

Douglas performs with the Cobb Wind Symphony, and is an adjunct professor of music theory and music history at Southern Utah University. In addition, she serves as chief arranger for high school band programs across the southeastern United States.

She currently [2024] serves as the director of bands and music technology at Tucker High School in Dekalb County, Georgia.

Douglas is one of eight founding members of the Nu Black Vanguard, a composers collective dedicated to the promotion and advancement of Black composers in the medium of music; the other seven founding members are Kevin Day, Katahj Copley, Benjamin Horne, Kelijah Dunton, JaRod Hall, Dayla D. Spencer, and Adrian B. Sims.

Only Light
Aaron Perrine

About the piece:

The melodic material for Only Light originally came from Beneath a Canvas of Green, a recently composed large-scale work of mine written for wind ensemble. At the time, I was not quite comfortable with how this music fit within the larger work (it passed by much too quickly), and I knew it was something I would eventually like to revisit.

In the fall of 2012, one of my best friend’s mother lost her battle with cancer. A year later, while thinking of ideas for what was eventually to be Only Light, I found myself thinking of him and his family quite often. At about this same time, I was on social media late one night -- procrastinating rather than composing -- and discovered a post written by another friend, written in reference to his wife. Here is an excerpt:

A timeline. Oh, the dark places I've dwelt this morning. The "hows," "what ifs," and "whys" pouring over me. But, I digress. There is no timeline at this time. There is only, "we aren't done with you yet." There is, "we've got more things to try." There is, in a word, hope. I need me some of that. Toni has pointed out that there are times that I can find the dark cloud behind any silver lining. (Had you only known me before I met you, young lady. Now that Tim could really find darkness where there was only light.) The medical team is set to battle on.

In an instant, I was reminded of how delicate life is and how things can change at a moment’s notice. Reflecting upon these events inspired me to expand upon and ultimately finish this previously composed music. Only Light is meant to convey a sense of hope and healing.

- Program Note by composer

About the composer:

Aaron Perrine (pronounced per-EEN) (b. 1979, McGregor, Minnesota) is an American composer.

Dr. Perrine earned his Bachelor's Degree in trombone performance and music education with high distinction from the University of Minnesota, Morris, in 2002. While an undergraduate, he received the Edna Murphy Morrison Award, Daisy Hansen Award, Chancellor's Award, and multiple awards in composition from the Minnesota Music Educators Association.

After his time in Morris, Dr. Perrine moved to Minneapolis and began working on his Master's Degree. While at the University of Minnesota, Aaron studied composition with Judith Zaimont and jazz arranging with Dean Sorenson. He completed his Master's degree in 2006, and his Ph.D. in composition from the University of Iowa, studying with David Gompper and Lawrence Fritts. He is assistant professor of music at Cornell College, Mt. Vernon, Iowa.

Dr. Perrine has been commissioned and recorded by various colleges, high schools and middle schools across the country. One of his compositions, April, was a finalist in the first Frank Ticheli Composition Contest. This piece was also a J.W. Pepper "Editors' Choice" and was a featured composition in Teaching Music Through Performance in Band, Volume 7. Both his 2011 composition Pale Blue on Deep and his 2014 composition Only Light were awarded the prestigious ABA Sousa/Ostwald Prize.

Danzon No. 2
Arturo Márquez
Transcribed by Oliver Nickel

About the piece:

The idea of writing the Danzón No. 2 originated in 1993 during a trip to Malinalco with the painter Andrés Fonseca and the dancer Irene Martínez, both of whom are experts in salon dances with a special passion for the danzón, which they were able to transmit to me from the beginning, and also during later trips to Veracruz and visits to the Colonia Salon in Mexico City. From these experiences onward, I started to learn the danzón’s rhythms, its form, its melodic outline, and to listen to the old recordings by Acerina and his Danzonera Orchestra. I was fascinated and I started to understand that the apparent lightness of the danzón is only like a visiting card for a type of music full of sensuality and qualitative seriousness, a genre which old Mexican people continue to dance with a touch of nostalgia and a jubilant escape towards their own emotional world; we can fortunately still see this in the embrace between music and dance that occurs in the state of Veracruz and in the dance parlors of Mexico City.

The Danzón No. 2 is a tribute to the environment that nourishes the genre. It endeavors to get as close as possible to the dance, to its nostalgic melodies, to its wild rhythms, and although it violates its intimacy, its form and its harmonic language, it is a very personal way of paying my respects and expressing my emotions towards truly popular music. Danzón No. 2 was written on a commission by the Department of Musical Activities at Mexico’s National Autonomous University and is dedicated to my daughter Lily.

- Program Note by composer

About the composer:

Arturo Márquez (b. 20 December 1950, Alamos, Sonora, Mexico) is a Mexican composer.

He began his musical training in La Puente, California, in 1966, later studying piano and music theory at the Conservatory of Music of Mexico and composition at the Taller de Composición of the Institute of Fine Arts of Mexico with such composers as Joaquín Gutiérrez Heras, Hector Quintanar, and Federico Ibarra. He also studied in Paris privately with Jacques Castérède, and at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick, Stephen Mosko, Mel Powell, and James Newton.

In recent years, Marquez has written a series of danzones, works based on an elegant Cuban dance that migrated to Veracruz, Mexico. His Danzon No. 2 is among the most popular Latin American works to emerge since the 1950s, enhanced by its use by Gustavo Dudamel with the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra in their 2007 tour of the United States and Europe. In February 2006, Arturo Marquez received the Medalla de Oro de Bellas Artes (Gold Medal of Fine Arts), the highest honor given to artists by Mexico’s Bellas Artes. That evening the concert El Danzon según Márquez (The Danzón according to Márquez) was presented at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. The concert included six danzons, all contained on a forthcoming CD.

Márquez has received commissions from the OAS, the Universidad Metropolitana de Mexico, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, Festival Cervantino, Festival del Caribe, Festival de la Ciudad de Mexico, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has received grants from the Institute of Fine Arts of Mexico, the French government, and the Fulbright Foundation. In 1994 he received the composition scholarship of Mexico’s Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. Márquez’s Octeto Malandro (Misbehaving Octet) was commissioned and premiered by Philadelphia’s Relâche Ensemble in 1996, and subsequently recorded by Relâche for Monroe St. Records. Márquez’s flute concerto, commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Consejo Nacional para las Artes, was premiered by James Newton. Other works by Márquez include En Clave for piano, Son a Tamayo for harp, percussion, and tape (featured at the 1996 World Harp Congress),Homenaje a Gismonti for string quartet, and Zarabandeo for clarinet and piano.

Sound and Smoke
Viet Cuong
I. (feudal castle lights)

About the piece:

Both the title and concept of Sound and Smoke were derived from a line from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s play Faust, when Faust equates words to “mere sound and smoke” and declares that “feeling is everything.” Each of the two movements has been given an abstract, parenthetical title to further incorporate Goethe’s conjecture that words will never be able to fully express what feelings and, in this case, music can. Therefore, these titles serve merely as starting points for personal interpretation and should not interfere with the music itself.

The first movement, (feudal castle lights), blurs the many different timbres of the ensemble to create a resonant and slowly “smoldering” effect. Because reverb is essentially built into the orchestration, harmonies must shift using common tones and are always built upon the notes preceding them. The second and final movement, (avalanche of eyes), opens with an alternating unison-note brass fanfare that is then spun out into a fast-paced toccata. Suspense and excitement are created as the spotlight moves quickly between the various colors of the ensemble and the fanfare is transformed.

The original concept of “sound and smoke” unifies these two otherwise dissimilar movements; oftentimes ideas are presented and then promptly left behind or transformed. Musical events therefore appear and dissipate as quickly as sound and smoke.

- Program Note by composer

About the composer:

Viet Cuong (b. 1990, West Hills, Calif.) is an American composer.

Viet holds the Curtis Institute of Music’s Daniel W. Dietrich II Composition Fellowship as an Artist Diploma student of David Ludwig and Jennifer Higdon. Viet received his MFA from Princeton University as a Naumburg and Roger Sessions Fellow, and he finished his Ph.D. there in 2021. At Princeton he studied with Steven Mackey, Donnacha Dennehy, Dan Trueman, Dmitri Tymoczko, Paul Lansky, and Louis Andriessen. Viet holds Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University, where he studied with Pulitzer Prize-winner Kevin Puts and Oscar Bettison.

While at Peabody, Viet received the Peabody Alumni Award (the Valedictorian honor) and the Gustav Klemm Award for excellence in composition. Viet has been a fellow at the Mizzou International Composers Festival, Eighth Blackbird Creative Lab, Cabrillo Festival’s Young Composer Workshop, Copland House’s CULTIVATE emerging composers workshop, and was also a scholarship student at the Aspen, Bowdoin, and Lake Champlain music festivals. Additionally, he has received artist residencies from Yaddo, Copland House, Ucross Foundation, and Atlantic Center for the Arts (under Melinda Wagner, 2012 and Christopher Theofanidis, 2014).

Viet Cuong's music has been performed on six continents by musicians and ensembles such as Sō Percussion, Eighth Blackbird, Alarm Will Sound, Sandbox Percussion, the PRISM Quartet, JACK Quartet, Gregory Oakes, Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, Albany Symphony, Jacksonville Symphony, and Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, among many others. Viet’s music has been featured in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Aspen Music Festival, New Music Gathering, Boston GuitarFest, International Double Reed Society Conference, US Navy Band International Saxophone Symposium, and on American Public Radio’s Performance Today. He also enjoys composing for the wind ensemble medium, and his works for winds have amassed over one hundred performances by conservatory and university ensembles worldwide, including at Midwest, WASBE, and CBDNA conferences.

Viet is a recipient of the Barlow Endowment Commission, Copland House Residency Award, ASCAP Morton Gould Composers Award, Suzanne and Lee Ettelson Composers Award, Theodore Presser Foundation Music Award, Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra Call for Scores, Cortona Prize, New York Youth Symphony First Music Commission, Boston GuitarFest Composition Competition, and Walter Beeler Memorial Prize, among others. In addition, he received honorable mentions in the Harvey Gaul Composition Competition and two consecutive ASCAP/CBDNA Frederick Fennell Prizes. Scholarships include the Evergreen House Foundation scholarship at Peabody, a 2010 Susan and Ford Schumann Merit Scholarship from the Aspen Music Festival and School, and the 2011 Bachrach Memorial Gift from the Bowdoin International Music Festival.

Viet is a member of BMI, the American Composers Forum, and the Blue Dot Collective, a group of composers who focus on writing adventurous new music for wind band. In 2020-2021, he was composer-in-residence at Kennesaw State University, Georgia. In 2024, he became one of the youngest members ever to be elected to the prestigious American Bandmasters Association.

The Corcoran Cadets
John Philip Sousa

About the piece:

The Corcoran Cadets drill team was the pet of Washington, D.C., being the most notable of the drill teams that flourished there after the Civil War. Their average age was 16, and they presented a snappy picture with their colorful uniforms, wooden rifles, and youthful enthusiasm. They competed vigorously with units from Washington and other towns, and were the first company of cadets to be mustered into the National Guard. Their esprit de corps was high, and the Corcoran Cadets Veterans' Association held annual reunions for many years.

The "Corcorans" had their own band. Although it is not recorded, they probably made a formal request for this march. Sousa's affirmative response, "to the officers and men of the Corcoran Cadets," was no doubt tendered by an early association with William W. Corcoran, for whom the Cadets were named. It was he who nearly changed American musical history by considering Sousa for a musical education in Europe. Sousa had declined this opportunity, and the march was probably a belated expression of appreciation.

- Program Note from John Philip Sousa: A Descriptive Catalog of His Works

About the composer:

John Philip Sousa (6 November 1854, Washington, D.C. – 6 March 1932, Reading, Pennsylvania) was America's best known composer and conductor during his lifetime. Highly regarded for his military band marches, Sousa is often called the "The March King" or "American March King".

Sousa was born the third of 10 children of John Antonio Sousa (born in Spain of Portuguese parents) and Maria Elisabeth Trinkhaus (born in Bavaria). His father played trombone in the U.S. Marine band, so young John grew up around military band music. Sousa started his music education, playing the violin, as a pupil of John Esputa Jr. and G. F. Benkert for harmony and musical composition at the age of six. He was found to have absolute pitch. When Sousa reached the age of 13, his father enlisted him as as an apprentice of the United States Marine Corps. Sousa served his apprenticeship for seven years, until 1875, and apparently learned to play all the wind instruments while also continuing with the violin.

Several years later, Sousa left his apprenticeship to join a theatrical (pit) orchestra where he learned to conduct. He returned to the U.S. Marine Band as its head in 1880, and remained as its conductor until 1892. He organized his own band the year he left the Marine Band. The Sousa Band toured 1892-1931, performing 15,623 concerts in America and abroad. In 1900, his band represented the United States at the Paris Exposition before touring Europe. In Paris, the Sousa Band marched through the streets including the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe – one of only eight parades the band marched in over its forty years. Sousa died at the age of 77 on March 6th, 1932 after conducting a rehearsal of the Ringgold Band in Reading, Pennsylvania. The last piece he conducted was "The Stars and Stripes Forever", his most famous work and the US's national march.

Sousa wrote 136 independent marches, while a host of other marches and dances have been adapted from his stage works. Despite the genre's relatively limited structure, Sousa's marches are highly varied in character. The vast majority are in the quickstep dance style and a third of their titles bear military designations. His earlier marches are best suited for actual marching, while later works are increasingly complex. He also wrote school songs for several American Universities, including Kansas State University, Marquette University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Minnesota.

"Folk Roots, Modern Voices"

Symphonic Band

Summer Dances
Brian Balmages

About the piece:

Summer Dances is a light and lively piece worthy of its namesake. Structured in contrasting sections, ABA’, the piece opens with the effervescence of sparkling woodwinds followed immediately with the energetic main theme played by the trumpets and horns. The theme returns frequently accompanied in a new manner with each reprisal. The slow, lyrical B section contains its own miniature rounded binary form (aba’), with frequent use of chamber-like scoring. After its return to the “energetically” section, the piece ramps up again with an extended transition of woodwind polyphony before the main theme returns in the trumpets and horns.

Whether it is actually summer or winter, Balmages’s Summer Dances strives to emulate the many summer music festivals and civic celebrations around Columbia, Maryland.

- Program Note by Myron Peterson for the University of Iowa University Band concert program, 5 December 2022

About the composer:

Brian Balmages (b. 24 January 1975, Baltimore, Md.) is an active trumpeter composer, conductor, producer, and performer.

Mr. Balmages received his bachelor's degree in music industry from James Madison University and his masters in media writing and production from the University of Miami.

His fresh compositional ideas have been heralded by many performers and directors, resulting in a high demand of his works for winds, brass, and orchestra. He received his Bachelor’s of Music from James Madison University and his master’s degree from the University of Miami in Florida. Mr. Balmages studied trumpet with James Kluesner, Don Tison, and Gilbert Johnson.

Mr. Balmages’ compositions have been performed worldwide at conferences including the College Band Directors National and Regional Conferences, the Midwest Clinic, the International Tuba/Euphonium Conference, the International Trombone Festival, and the International Trumpet Guild Conference. His active schedule of commissions and premieres has incorporated groups ranging from elementary schools to professional ensembles, including the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Miami Symphony Orchestra, the University of Miami Wind Ensemble, and the Dominion Brass Ensemble. Among the professional artists that have commissioned him are James Jenkins, Principal Tuba of the Jacksonville Symphony; Lynn Klock, Saxophone Performing Artist for Selmer; Arthur Campbell, Clarinet Performing Artist for Leblanc; and Jerry Peel, professor of horn at the University of Miami. He has also had world premieres in prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall along with numerous performances abroad.

As a conductor, Mr. Balmages enjoys engagements with numerous honor bands, university groups, and professional ensembles throughout the country. Guest conducting appearances have included the Midwest Clinic, College Band Directors National Conference, Mid-Atlantic Wind Conductors Conference, and the Atlantic Classical Orchestra Brass Ensemble.

He served as director of instrumental publications for The FJH Music Company Inc. in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he oversaw all aspects of the instrumental program related to works for concert band, jazz ensemble, and orchestra. Balmages joined Alfred Music as director of digital education and MakeMusic Publications in 2022.

He is also a freelance musician and has performed with the Miami Symphony Orchestra, the Florida Chamber Orchestra, Skyline Brass, and the Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra.

Three Ayres from Gloucester
Hugh M. Stuart

About the piece:

A three-movement suite written in the early English folksong style, this piece came into being as a result of the composer's fascination with an old 10th century couplet:

There's no one quite so comely
As the Jolly Earl of Cholmondeley.

The resulting three compositions, The Jolly Earl of Cholmondeley [pronounced "Chumley"], Ayre for Eventide and The Fiefs of Wembley, are in early English folk song style and are designed to capture the mood of the peasants and their life on the fiefs of Wembley castle.

- Program Note from score

About the composer:

Hugh M. Stuart (5 October 1917, Harrisburg, Pa. – 31 January 2006, Albuquerque, N.M.) was an American composer, arranger and educator.

Stuart received his music training from Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Columbia Teachers College, Rutgers University, Newark State College, and the University of Michigan. He taught instrumental music in the schools of Maryland and New Jersey for 33 years. During this time he conducted several brass bands and ensembles. He also taught at various clinics and workshops for winds. Stuart wrote more than 100 published compositions, arrangements, method books, band and orchestral collections, solos, and ensembles in the educational field. He appeared as a clinician in forty-five states. He lived in Albuquerque, N.M. until his death on Jan. 31, 2006 at the age of 89.

Songs of Old Kentucky
Brant Karrick

About the piece:

Five folk tunes are employed in Karricks Songs of Old Kentucky. All come from transcriptions made by Josephine McGill and Loraine Wyman, who traveled the Cumberland Mountains during the early 20th century collecting a total of more than 200 songs. These songs reflect the heritage of the mountain settlers, reaching back to their Scottish and English roots of generations past.

The work was premiered in 2006 by the Kentucky Music Educators Association District — IX All District Band, the group for which it was commissioned. John Riley (with Wayfaring Stranger), is the first movement of the work. The music emerges from a beautiful if somewhat lonely alto saxophone soliloquy. Soon joined in counterpoint by the clarinet, the lines unfold to engage the entire ensemble in a colorful tapestry of thematic statements until the movement is called to conclusion through the return of the melancholy call of the alto saxophone.

- Program Note by the Louisville Concert Band concert program, 19 December 2013

About the composer:

Brant Karrick (b. 14 August 1960, Bowling Green, Ky.) is an American composer, arranger and educator.

In the fall of 1991 Karrick entered the Ph.D. program in Music Education at Louisiana State University, completing the degree in 1994. His prior education includes a Bachelor of Music Education from the University of Louisville which he completed in 1982, and a Master of Arts in Education from Western Kentucky University, completed in 1984. Dr. Karrick's musical life has been influenced by many individuals. He studied trumpet with Leon Rapier, music education with Cornelia Yarborough, and conducting with Frank Wickes. His primary composition teachers were David Livingston, Steve Beck, and Cecil Karrick. His professional affiliations include: Music Educators National Conference, the Kentucky Music Educators Association, Phi Beta Mu, ASCAP, the National Band Association, and the College Band Directors National Association.

Karrick began his service as a public school teacher in 1984 at Beechwood School in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky. In 1986 he returned to his alma mater, Bowling Green (KY) High School, as the Director of Instrumental Music. His concert bands received superior ratings at regional and state concert festivals every year of his five year tenure there, and in 1988 his marching band was named Class AA State Champion. In 2003, Karrick joined the faculty of Northern Kentucky University as director of bands, a post he held until his retirement in 2022.

Symphonic Winds

Fanfare Forza
Brian Balmages

About the piece:

Written to celebrate the opening of the new Performing Arts Center at Brainerd High School in Minnesota, this powerful fanfare symbolically brings all of the students together. Prior to the PAC being built, music students would have to walk off campus to another location. Originally titled Warriors in Unison, this piece signifies the first time all students (the Brainerd Warriors) were able to come together on campus and perform in a brand new space. The music is powerful, highly rhythmic, and is constantly driving forward. Despite being just 3 minutes in length, the music has a clear are and substantial thematic, rhythmic and harmonic development.

Fanfare Forza was commissioned by the Brainerd High School Bands (Christopher Fogderud and Kelsi Olson, Conductors) in honor of their new Performing Arts Center.

-Program Note by composer

Prelude, Siciliano and Rondo
Malcolm Arnold
Transcribed by John P. Paynter

About the piece:

This work was first written in 1963 for brass band under the title Little Suite for Brass. Paynter's arrangement for wind bands includes woodwinds and additional percussion but retains the breezy effervescence of the original work. All three movements are written in short, clear, five-part song forms. The A-B-A-C-A is instantly apparent to the listener while giving the composer's imaginative melodies a natural, almost folklike, settings. The Prelude begins bombastically in a fanfare style but reaches a middle climax and winds down to a quiet return of the opening measures, which fade to silence. The liltingly expressive Siciliano is both slower and more expressive than the other movements, thus allowing solo instruments and smaller choirs of sound to be heard. It also ends quietly. The rollicking five-part Rondo provides a romping finale in which the technical facility of the modern wind band is set forth in boastful brilliance.

- Program Note from Program Notes for Band

About the composer:

Sir Malcolm Arnold (21 October 1921, Northampton, England – 23 September 2006, Norfolk, England) was a British composer and trumpeter.

Malcolm Arnold was born in Northampton to a family of shoemakers. As a rebellious teenager, he was attracted to the creative freedom of jazz. After seeing Louis Armstrong play in Bournemouth, he took up the trumpet at the age of 12 and 5 years later won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music (RCM). At the RCM he studied composition with Gordon Jacob and the trumpet with Ernest Hall. In 1941, he joined the London Philharmonic Orchestra as second trumpet and became principal trumpet in 1943.

In 1944, he volunteered for military service, but after he found out the army wanted to put him in a military band, he shot himself in the foot to get back to civilian life. After a season as principal trumpet with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, he returned to the London Philharmonic in 1946 where he remained until 1948 to become a full-time composer.

Malcolm Arnold began his career playing trumpet professionally, by age thirty his life was devoted to composition. He was bracketed with Britten and Walton as one of the most sought-after composers in Britain. His natural melodic gift earned him a reputation as a composer of light music in works such as his sets of Welsh, English, Scottish, Irish and Cornish Dances, and his scores to the St Trinian's films and Hobson's Choice. Arnold was a relatively conservative composer of tonal works, but a prolific and popular one. He acknowledged Hector Berlioz as an influence, and several commentators have drawn a comparison with Jean Sibelius.

He was knighted in 1993 for his service to music. He received honorary doctorates from the University of Exeter (1969), University of Durham (1982), University of Leicester (1984), Miami University of Ohio (1989), University of Winchester (1983), and the University of Northampton (2006).

About the transcriber:

John P. Paynter (29 May 1928, Mineral Point, Wis. – 4 February 1996, Glenview, Ill.) was an American arranger, conductor and clarinetist.

Paynter enrolled in the School of Music at Northwestern University in 1946 and earned a bachelor's degree and master's degree in theory and composition in 1950 and 1951, respectively. He served as acting director of bands in 1950-51 while working toward his master's degree. At age 23, he was appointed to the full-time faculty in 1951 and became director of the marching band, assistant director of bands and instructor of theory. Two years later, he succeeded Glenn Bainum as director of bands, becoming the second person to hold this post at Northwestern University. He held this position until his death.

He also served the School of Music as professor of conducting, taught courses in conducting and band arranging, and conducted many University's musical productions, including the famed "Waa-Mu Show." Under Paynter's direction, the Northwestern "Wildcats" Marching Band, Symphonic Wind Ensemble, Concert and Symphonic Bands have ranked with the finest of the country.

Mr. Paynter was awarded many awards and honors from distinguished societies. In addition, in August, 1987, he was chosen as one of the inaugural recipients of the Northwestern University Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award. In June of 1992, DePaul University awarded him an honorary doctor of humane letters degree.

Armenian Dances, Part I
Alfred Reed

About the piece:

The Armenian Dances, Parts I and II, constitute a four-movement suite for concert band or wind ensemble based on authentic Armenian folk songs from the collected works of Gomidas Vartabed (1869-1935), the founder of Armenian classical music.

Part I, containing the first movement of this suite (the remaining three movements constituting Part II), is an extended symphonic rhapsody built upon five different songs, freely treated and developed in terms of the modern, integrated concert band or wind ensemble. While the composer has kept his treatment of the melodies within the general limits imposed on the music by its very nature, he has not hesitated to expand the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic possibilities in keeping with the demands of a symphonic-instrumental, as opposed to an individual vocal or choral, approach to its performance. Nevertheless, it is hoped that the overall effect of the music will be found to remain true in spirit to the work if this brilliant composer-musicologist, who almost single-handedly preserved and gave to the world a treasure trove of beautiful folk music that to this day has not yet become as widely known in the Western world as it so richly deserves. Hopefully, this new instrumental setting will prove to be at least a small step in this direction.

Part I of the Armenian Dances was completed in the summer of 1972 and first performed by Dr. Harry Begian, (to whom the work is dedicated), and the University of Illinois Symphonic Band, on January 10, 1973, at the C.B.D.N.A. Convention in Urbana, Illinois.

Gomidas Vartabed (1869-1935), the founder of Armenian classical music, is credited with collecting well over four thousand Armenian folk songs. Born Soghomon Soghomonian in Keotahya, a small town in Anatolia, Turkey, he would later be given the name Gomidas. His exceptional lyric voice led the prelate of the region to select the orphan Soghomon, at the age of eleven, to study at the Kevorkian Seminary in Etchmiadzin, Armenia. He was ordained an Apegha (monk) in 1895, at which time he assumed the name Gomidas, after the Armenian architect-musician Catholicos Gomidas. His desire for further musical training led him first to studies with Magar Yekmalian in Tiflis, Georgia, and from 1896-1899 to Berlin, where he studied at the Richard Schmidt Conservatory, as well as Frederic Wilhelm University, under eminent musicians of the time. In 1899 he graduated from both the Conservatory and the University, receiving his Ph.D. in musicology; his dissertation topic was Kurdish Music.

Gomidas was a founding member of the International Music Society (1899-1912), for which he read important papers on Armenian neumatic notation, the structure of Armenian sacred melodies and folk melodies. At the age of forty-six, at the apex of his career, Gomidas was exiled, together with other Armenian intellectuals, by the Turks, in April, 1915, at which time the genocide of one and a half million Armenians took place. He was released within a short time, but the sufferings and atrocities which he had witnessed resulted in a complete mental and physical breakdown from which he never recovered. He died in Paris in 1935. His legacy to the Armenian people, and to the world's ethnic music, is invaluable, and his major contribution lies in preserving so many centuries-old melodies from obscurity, or oblivion.

Part I of the Armenian Dances is built upon five Armenian folk songs which were first notated, purified, researched and later arranged by Gomidas for solo voice with piano accompaniment, or unaccompanied chorus. In order of their appearance in the score, they are : Tzirani Tzar (The Apricot Tree); Gakavi Yerk (Partridge's Song); Hoy, Nazan Eem (Hoy, My Nazan); Alagyaz and Gna, Gna (Go, Go).

The Apricot Tree consists of three organically connected songs which were transcribed in 1904. Its declamatory beginning, rhythmic vitality and ornamentation make this a highly expressive song.

The Partridge's Song is an original song by Gomidas; it was published in 1908 in Tiflis, Georgia. He originally arranged it for solo voice and children's choir, and later for solo voice with piano accompaniment. It has a simple, delicate melody which might, perhaps, be thought of as depicting the tiny steps of the partridge.

Hoy, Nazan Eem was published in 1908, in a choral version arranged by Gomidas. This lively, lyric love song depicts a young man singing the praises of his beloved Nazan (a girl's name). The song has dance rhythms and ornamentation which make it an impressive, catchy tune.

Alagyaz (name of a mountain in Armenia), was first written by Gomidas for solo voice with piano accompaniment, and also in a choral arrangement. It is a beloved Armenian folk song, and it long-breathed melody is as majestic as the mountain itself.

Go, Go is a humorous, light-textured tune. In performance, Gomidas coupled it with a contrasting slower song, The Jug. Its repeated note pattern musically depicts the expression of laughter. This song also is in recitative style.

- Program Note by Violet Vagramian, Florida International University

About the composer:

Alfred Reed (25 January 1921, Manhattan, N.Y. – 17 September 2005, Miami, Fla.) was an American composer, arranger, conductor and educator.

Born into a family of Austrian descent that cherished music, Alfred Reed began his musical studies at age ten on trumpet, and by high school age he was performing professionally in the Catskills at resort hotels. He served as musician and arrangement during World War II in the 529th Army Air Force Band, for which he created more than 100 works, and following the war was a student of Vittorio Giannini at Juilliard.

He was staff composer and arranger for both the National Broadcasting Corporation and the American Broadcasting Corporation. In 1953, Mr. Reed became conductor of the Baylor Symphony Orchestra at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, at the same time completing his academic work; he received his B.M. in 1955 and his M.M. in 1956. His Masters thesis was the Rhapsody for Viola and Orchestra, which later was to win the Luria Prize. It received its first performance in 1959, and was subsequently published in 1966. During his two years at Baylor, he also became interested in the problems of educational music at all levels, especially in the development of repertoire materials for school bands, orchestras, and choruses. This led, in 1955, to his accepting the post of editor at Hansen Publishing in New York.

In 1966 he left this post to join the faculty of the School of Music at the University of Miami, holding a joint appointment in the Theory-Composition and Music Education departments, and to develop the unique (at the time) Music Industry degree program at that institution, of which he became director.

With over 250 published works for concert band, wind ensemble, orchestra, chorus, and various smaller chamber music groups, many of which have been on the required performance lists in this country for the past 20 years, Mr. Reed was one of the nation’s most prolific and frequently performed composers.

His work as a guest conductor and clinician took him to 49 states, Europe, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Australia and South America, and for many years, at least eight of his works have been on the required list of music for all concert bands in Japan, where he was the most frequently performed foreign composer today. He left New York for Miami, Florida, in 1960, where he made his home until his death.

 

Shepherd's Hey
Percy Grainger

About the piece:

Shepherd's Hey was scored for wind band in 1918. The word 'Hey' denotes a particular figure in Morris Dancing. Morris Dances are still danced by teams of "Morris Men" decked out with bells and quaint ornaments to the music of the fiddle or 'the pipe and tabor' (a sort of drum and fife) in several agricultural districts in England. The ‘hey’ involves the interweaving of generally two lines of dancers, which may be symbolized by Grainger's use of two parallel lines of music at the opening of the composition, rather than a simple statement of a theme that then moves into variants.

- Program Note from Windband.org

About the composer:

George Percy Grainger (8 July 1882, Brighton, Victoria, Australia – 20 February 1961, White Plains, N.Y.) was an Australian-born composer, pianist and champion of the saxophone and the concert band, who worked under the stage name of Percy Aldridge Grainger.

Grainger was an innovative musician who anticipated many forms of twentieth century music well before they became established by other composers. As early as 1899 he was working with "beatless music", using metric successions (including such sequences as 2/4, 2½/4, 3/4, 2½/4).

In December 1929, Grainger developed a style of orchestration that he called "Elastic Scoring". He outlined this concept in an essay that he called, "To Conductors, and those forming, or in charge of, Amateur Orchestras, High School, College and Music School Orchestras and Chamber-Music Bodies".

In 1932, he became Dean of Music at New York University, and underscored his reputation as an experimenter by putting jazz on the syllabus and inviting Duke Ellington as a guest lecturer. Twice he was offered honorary doctorates of music, but turned them down, explaining, "I feel that my music must be regarded as a product of non-education."

"Something Old and Something New"

Three Symphonic Fanfares
James Barnes

I. Fanfare for Annapolis

About the piece:

Three Symphonic Fanfares is a collection of short works by composer James Barnes. Each fanfare is written for a different institution. The first movement is written for the United States Navel Academy Band, the second for West Point, and the third for the American Bandmasters Association. This short fanfare is an exciting and bold way to begin tonight's concert.

About the composer:

James Charles Barnes (b. 9 September 1949, Hobart, Okla.) is an American composer, conductor and educator.

Barnes studied composition and music theory at the University of Kansas, earning a Bachelor of Music degree in 1974, and Master of Music degree in 1975. He studied conducting privately with Zuohuang Chen.

Professor Barnes is member of both the history and theory-composition faculties at the University of Kansas, where he teaches orchestration, arranging and composition courses, and wind band history and repertoire courses. At KU, he served as an assistant, and later, as associate director of bands for 27 years.

His numerous publications for concert band and orchestra are extensively performed at Tanglewood, Boston Symphony Hall, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.

Barnes has twice received the coveted American Bandmasters Association Ostwald Award for outstanding contemporary wind band music. He has been the recipient of numerous ASCAP Awards for composers of serious music, the Kappa Kappa Psi Distinguished Service to Music Medal, the Bohumil Makovsky Award for Outstanding College Band Conductors, along with numerous other honors and grants. He has recorded three commercial compact discs of his music with the world famous Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra. More recently, he completed a CD of his works with the Koninklijke Militaire Kapel (The Queen’s Royal Military Band) in Holland. He has also been commissioned to compose works for all five of the major military bands in Washington, DC.

Mr. Barnes has traveled extensively as a guest composer, conductor, and lecturer throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, Japan and Taiwan. He is a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), the American Bandmasters Association and numerous other professional organizations and societies.

-Bio from www.windrep.org

The Red Machine
Peter Graham

About the piece: 

The Red Machine was commissioned by the London-based Band of the Coldstream Guards. Among the band's duties is the famous changing of the guard ceremony at Buckingham Palace where their reputation for precision marching has led to them being described as the "Red Machine."

The music reflects the title and heritage of this fine group: from the aggressive, machine-type music of the opening, the contrasting nostalgic French-flavoured waltz through the recapitulation and vivace finale. Listeners may hear references to music associated with the band, from Holst (The Planets) through the opening phrase of the chorale Ein Feste Burg -- familiar to British Guards Bands from the troop march Les Huguenots.

- Program Note from publisher

About the composer:

Peter Graham (b. 1958, Lanarkshire, Scotland), is a British composer.

After his education at the University of Edinburgh, he undertook postgraduate studies with Edward Gregson at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He holds a Ph.D. in composition.

From 1983 until 1986, he resided in New York City where he worked as a freelance composer/arranger and as a publications editor with the South American Music Bureau. Since his return to the United Kingdom, he has worked regularly as an arranger for BBC Television and Radio and has specialized in composition for the British style brass band. Since the publication of Dimensions (1983), he has carved out a niche as an outstanding arranger for brass bands, and a leading figure amongst contemporary band composers. His original compositions, which include The Essence of Time, Montage and Journey to the Center of the Earth, are performed worldwide and have been selected as test-pieces for national championships in Australia, New Zealand, North America and across Europe.

His music for wind and concert band has been recorded and performed by many of the world’s leading ensembles, including the Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra and the Royal Norwegian Navy Band. Harrison's Dream, commissioned by the United States Air Force Band, Washington D.C., won the 2002 American Bandmasters Association Ostwald Award for composition. Commissioned by BMG/RCA Red Label to arrange and compose an album of xylophone music for virtuoso Evelyn Glennie, the resulting recording was nominated as Best Classical Crossover Album at the 1999 Grammy Awards held in Los Angeles.

-Bio from www.windrep.org

Colossus of Columbia
Russell Alexander

About the piece:

The rhythmic drive and excitement of this march, written in 1901, reflect the composer's circus band experience. He had arranged all of the music and composed several marches during the five-year tour of Europe with the Barnum and Bailey Circus. It was in that fifth year that he wrote Colossus of Columbia and dedicated it to "the Continental Congress of Washington." Having experienced a variety of other governments, the homesick young composer must have regarded the achievements of his own America (Columbia) as "colossal."

- Program Note from Program Notes for Band

About the composer:

Russell T. Alexander (26 February 1877, Nevada, Mo. - 2 October 1915, Liberty, N.Y.) was an American composer.

It is not known how he first became interested in music or whether his parents were musicians, but at 20 years of age he signed a contract with Barnum and Bailey's Circus to play euphonium for a five-year tour of Europe and Great Britain. He obviously had extensive musical training, because he was entrusted with the task of arranging music used by the band while on tour. During another period, he played with the Belford Carnival. While on tour with these organizations, he composed many of his famous marches.

During the time he was in Europe, his brother Newton was playing trumpet in theater orchestras in Philadelphia and Atlantic City. After accompanying many vaudeville shows, Newton conceived the idea of a music unit as a vaudeville act. He organized a group composed of himself, his brother Woodruff, James Brady, and Willie Patton. The act gained popularity under the name The Exposition Four. Russell Alexander replaced Willie Patton in the Exposition Four, which was basically a comedy team.

Both Russell and Woodruff were frequently treated in tuberculosis sanitariums. Russell, despite his health problems, continued to compose. He finally succumbed to the disease, however, at a sanitarium in Liberty, New York, on October 1, 1915. He was only 38 years of age.

Alexander has come to be regarded as one of the greatest composers of circus music and was elected to the Windjammers Hall of Fame in 1978. It is a sad footnote to the history of band music that his widow, Eleanor, was penniless and sold all rights to his compositions to C.L. Barnhouse for a mere $125.

 

-Bio from www.windrep.org

 

Incantation and Dance
John Barnes Chance

About the piece:

The present title of this work suggests a religious orientation, but not towards any of the established religions of a Western or Eastern culture. To the standard deities one offers prayers -- incantations are uttered in rituals of magic, demonic rites, and the conjuring up of spirits, evil and benign. The opening Incantation is full of mystery and expectation, wandering, unstable and without tonality. The Dance also begins quietly, but percussion instruments quickly begin, one by one, to drive a rhythmic pattern of incredible complexity and drive. As other instruments are added, the dance grows wilder and more frenzied. The brasses hammer out ferocious snarls -- the woodwinds fly in swirling scales. Here there is no pretty tune but a paroxysm of rhythm, a convulsion of syncopation that drives on and on, mounting in tension, to a shattering climax of exaltation.

Incantation and Dance was premiered as Nocturne and Dance by Herbert Hazelman and the Greensboro High School Band on November 16, 1960. The original version (saved by Hazelman) has several interesting differences, including 31 additional measures. It was programmed at the NBA convention in New Orleans in June 1995 by Robert Pouliot and the City of Fairfax Band.

- Program Note from Program Notes for Band

About the composer:

John Barnes "Barney" Chance (1932, Beaumont, Texas - 1972, Lexington, Kentucky) was an American composer.

Chance began composing while attending Beaumont High School (Beaumont, Texas) where he performed on percussion in the school band and orchestra under the direction of Arnold Whedbee. It was during this time that he wrote his first symphony (for orchestra), which was premiered by Whedbee during his senior year.^[1]

He received Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from the University of Texas, where he studied with Clifton Williams, Kent Kennan, and Paul Pisk. After studies at the University of Texas, Chance played with the Austin Symphony Orchestra, and also performed with the Fourth U.S. Army Band in San Antonio and the Eighth U.S. Army Band in Korea.

After leaving the army, Chance was selected by the Ford Foundation to be a part of the Young Composers Project. From 1960 through 1962 he was composer-in-residence at the Greensboro, North Carolina, public schools. It is there that he composed seven pieces for school ensembles including his first work for wind band. Throughout his short career, Chance composed for band, orchestra, chorus, chamber groups and solo instruments.

His career was tragically ended when he was accidentally electrocuted in the back yard of his home in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1972 at the age of 40.

-Bio from www.windrep.org

Battle Royal
Fred Jewell/arr. Timothy Rhea

About the piece:

Most marches reserve the instrumental “fireworks” for the trio interlude -- also known as the “break-up” or “dog-fight” strain. In Battle Royal -- composed in 1909 when Jewell’s euphonium playing skill was near its peak -- the lower and upper brass begin their melody-countermelody “battle” at the introduction and never let up. Battle Royal is the obvious work of a circus musician who knew how to generate circus crowd excitement.

- Program Note from publisher

About the composer:

Frederick Alton Jewell (28 May 1875, Worthington, Ind. - 11 February 1936, Worthington, Ind.) was an American euphoniumist, conductor and composer.

Jewell became interested in music at a young age, learning a number of instruments, including cornet, violin, clarinet, trombone, piano, and calliope. At the age of 16, Jewell ran away from home and joined the Gentry Bros. Dog & Pony Show as a euphonium player. He also played the calliope.

As a performer, Jewell is best remembered as a virtuoso euphonium player. Much of his career was spent playing in or conducting traveling circus bands, including the Gentry Bros. Circus, Ringling Bros. Circus., Sells-Floto Circus, Barnum and Bailey Circus, and Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus. In the off-season he led various theatrical stock company bands, theater orchestras, and church ensembles near his Indiana hometown. From 1917 to 1923 he lived in Iowa and led various adult bands; first in Fairfield, and then Oskaloosa, where he also organized the first high school band in 1919.

Jewell’s first composition was published in 1897; he eventually started his own publishing company (1920) and in total, composed over 100 marches, along with several overtures, waltzes, novelties, and other works. Returning to Indiana in 1923, he led the Murat Temple Shrine Band of Indianapolis, traveled to Tampa to lead its municipal band for a brief period, and spent the balance of his career leading bands in Indiana and composing music. Highly esteemed by his peers, Jewell was elected to membership in the American Bandmasters Association.

-Bio from www.windrep.org

About the arranger:

Timothy B. Rhea (b. 18 June 1967, Ashdown, Ark.) is an American conductor, composer, arranger and educator.

Dr. Rhea is a graduate of the DeKalb (Texas) High School, and grew up in the music programs of the Texas public schools. He earned a Bachelor of Music degree with honors at the University of Arkansas. He earned a Master of Music in Wind Conducting degree at Texas Tech University, where he studied with the late James Sudduth. While there Rhea served as assistant conductor of the University Symphonic Band and graduate assistant conductor and musical arranger for the 400-member Texas Tech University Marching Band. In May, 1999 Rhea earned a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Wind Conducting and Composition at the University of Houston.

Dr. Rhea was named conductor of the Texas A&M University Symphonic Band in 1995. He has led this band in performances at conventions of the Texas Music Educators Association, the College Band Directors National Association, and the American Bandmasters Association. He has led the band on several tours throughout the state of Texas, and on a tour of Europe. He was appointed Texas A&M University’s Director of Bands on June 1, 2002.

Rhea was named the Outstanding Young Bandmaster of the Year for the state of Texas at the Texas Bandmasters Association Convention in San Antonio, in July, 1999. In December, 2000, Rhea was awarded the President’s Meritorious Service Award by Dr. Ray Bowen, former president of Texas A&M University. Dr. Rhea is also noted as a successful composer and arranger. For more than ten years he has been active as an arranger for public school and university marching bands, and has been the recipient of a number of commissions for original concert works for band.

He is a member of the Texas Music Educators Association, the Texas Bandmasters Association, the College Band Directors National Association, the Big 12 Band Directors Association, the National Band Association, the World Association of Symphonic Bands and Wind Ensembles (WASBE), and ASCAP, among others. He is also active as a conductor, clinician, and adjudicator in Texas and throughout the country.

Symphony No. 7 "Titan"

Julie Giroux

About the piece:

Multi-movement works always pose the problems of balancing content as well as performance order. It is very much like decorating a room in your home. If you get a new rug, now you have to paint the walls. Then, you need different pillows for the couch or maybe even an entirely new one. So also goes the story with composing any group of multiple works.

I composed 14 movements to get to the final six when composing Bookmarks from Japan. Two, I wasn’t happy with. The others twelve, because of the aforementioned problems. Maybe someday I will publish Bookmarks from Japan II - The “Other” bookmarks, which of course will force me to compose even more bookmarks so maybe not.

I feel lucky that I only had to write 10 to get the original final five. After the dust settled, listening to them with fresh ears made me realize I had to write one more to balance it; hence number 11. It was very easy to pick the subject. It was also easy to pick the style it had to be. What I did not foresee was the turn it would take during it’s creation.

I love movement V, which was supposed to be VI. Sleeping Dragon became a love story with a tragic ending. It would not be the gigantic ending most one expects from XX minutes of music. Titan’s VI. Kraken Mare quotes IV. Departure so it shouldn’t go before IV. Also, Kraken Mare has a strong ending, musically stating the willpower of mankind, the solution to light year traveling and the diversity to thrive on some of the most hostile worlds imaginable = a strong, typical ending for multi movement works.

Sunrise on CoRot-7b - Lava Planet.

CoRoT-7b is an exoplanet that orbits CoRoT-7. It's located in the constellation Monoceros, about 500 light-years away. CoRoT-7b is very close to its star, CoRot-7. That star appears 360 times larger than the sun does in our sky. A typical sunrise on CoRot-7b takes temperatures from 1800°F to upwards of 4700°F. Currently, it’s the only known planet in our universe suspected as being completely made of lava. All the low instruments, including the use of many pedal tones, represent the lava. There are two distinct sections of music depicting the heating up process titled Lava Fireflies and Dance with the Devil. The end of the movement programmatically reaches a 4700°F lava temperature that, combined with its emitted gases, would instantly vaporize humans.

Where Stars Are Born.

Stars are formed when large clouds of gas and dust in space, called molecular clouds, collapse under their own gravity. This essentially causes dense cloud clumps to form and then heat up enough to initiate nuclear fusion, which gives birth to a new star. This process is referred to as stellar formation that occurs within regions called stellar nurseries. There are many star forming regions in our galaxy including Orion’s Nebula. Fifty million years is the average time it takes to create a single star. This movement is full of solos from nearly every instrument, representing all the star creating stages. The music grows and ebbs several times. The music ends with a peaceful, newborn “shine”.

Kraken Mare - Sailing the Seas of Titan.

Titan is the only celestial body in our solar system with conditions similar to Earth. Its shell would protect us from radiation and its gravity is similar to that of our moon. The Huygens probe landed on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, on January 14, 2005. The footage of it is captivating. Titan has many seas and bodies of hydrocarbons, which consist mostly of liquid methane. Kraken Mare is the largest of such bodies at nearly five times the size of Lake Superior. We could actually sail the seas of Titan. The gravity there would also allow us to fly like birds with even the crudest of homemade wings. The music represents such sailing and flights, ending with a triumph of epic proportions.

Lord of a Thousand Rings - Star J1407b.

J1407b is 20 times more massive than Saturn. Its ring system is 180 million kilometers wide and is 200 times larger than Saturn's rings. Scientists now believe it to be unbound by gravity to any objects, making it a “rogue” planet. The last sighting of J1407b was in 2007, when it passed in front of the star J1407. It is widely believed that we will never see J1407b again. The music reflects its rogue journey into our view and then eternally disappears.

Departure - A Final Fare Thee Well to Earth.

Because of man’s “money over matter” existence, we have essentially become a deadly plague to nearly all life on Earth. As a species, if we manage to survive long enough and create the technology needed, we will most likely have to leave Earth for a new world. I have always loved Dvorak’s New World Symphony, especially the hymn and what it represents. This movement depicts that departure with an A-B-A structure. The B section of this movement echoes Dvorak’s haunting melody, but has my voice, our voices, as its harmonic structure.

Sleeping Dragon - Constellation Draco (The Dragon) “Rumiko & Junichi.

Constellation Draco belongs to the Ursa Major family of constellations. It is the eighth largest constellation in the night sky, easily visible with the naked eye. It includes several major stars, seventeen formally named stars, has nine stars with known planets, and contains one Messier object, M102. It also contains several famous deep sky objects including the Spindle Galaxy, the Tadpole Galaxy, and the beautiful Cat’s Eye Nebula. Located in the northern celestial hemisphere, the Draco constellation also represents Ladon, the dragon that guarded the gardens of the Hesperides in Greek mythology. Greek mythology went on to have other dragons represented by the same constellations. While composing Sleeping Dragon my dragon was not of mythology but of my own imagination. My dragon was an ancient blue dragon named Junichi. He had outlived all other dragons including his offspring, as well as his life mate Rumiko. The music opens with Junichi sleeping, and we hear the first simple rendition of his theme. Pedal tones in the brass as well as the lowest tones available in the low woodwinds are used in all of Junichi’s themes. Dragons dream, and Junichi often dreamed of Rumiko. The passing of centuries had only made his love for her grow stronger. One day while Junichi slept, a large group of thieves snuck into his lair with the intention of stealing his hoard, something all dragons accumulate. The thieves become bolder the longer they were there, thinking the old dragon was most likely deaf. Not only was Junichi not deaf, but he was an expert at killing. In his youth, he killed both for food and for sport. As an ancient dragon, it was only for food and even then, it had been years since he had eaten. He had no desire to kill these wretched humans, but a dragon was nothing without its hoard. A ferocious battle between Junichi and the thieves ensues. Junichi wins, but just barely. He begins the task of gathering his hoard back up. While doing so, he comes across an intricate golden medallion, large enough for a dragon. It was the last gift he had given to Rumiko. With giant dragon tears falling to the floor, Junichi held the amulet close to his giant dragon heart and dreamed once more of his beloved Rumiko. Unbeknownst to him, Junichi’s injuries were fatal. While dreaming of her, the very last dragon, Junichi, died. I didn’t have the heart to make him suffer any longer. Everything he had ever loved; he had also lost. I could have ended Sleeping Dragon right after the battle with triumphant fanfare, but I didn’t. For me, the best ending was for him to die and rejoin all the other dragons, including his beloved Rumiko. It is what I would wish for myself as well!

- Program Note by composer

Commissioned by Drs. Mark and Sandu Auburn and Dr. Larry and Cynthia Snider for the University of Akron Wind Symphony in honor of its conductor, Dr. Galen S. Karriker.

Dedicated to my dear friend, mentor and conductor, Dr. Paula Crider. She blazed a brand-new trail that many of us women have the pleasure of walking on.

- Program Note from score

About the composer:

Julie Ann Giroux (pronounced Ji-ROO (as in "Google," not Ji-ROW, as in "row your boat") (b. 12 December 1961, Fairhaven, Mass.) is an American composer of orchestral, choral, chamber, and numerous concert band works.

She received her formal education at Louisiana State University and Boston University. She also studied composition with John Williams, Bill Conti, and Jerry Goldsmith.

Julie is an extremely well-rounded composer, writing works for symphony orchestra (including chorus), chamber ensembles, wind ensembles, soloists, brass and woodwind quintets and many other serious and commercial formats. Much of her early work was composing and orchestrating for film and television. Her writing credits include soundtrack score for White Men Can't Jump and the 1985 miniseries North and South. She has also arranged music for Reba McIntyre, Madonna and Michael Jackson. Ms. Giroux is a three-time Emmy Award nominee and in 1992 won an Emmy Award in the category of Outstanding Individual Achievement in Music Direction.

Ms. Giroux has an extensive list of published works for concert band and wind ensemble. She began writing music for concert band in 1983, publishing her first band work Mystery on Mena Mountain with Southern Music Company. Giroux left Los Angeles in 1997 to compose for concert bands and orchestras full time, publishing exclusively with Musica Propria. In 2004 Gia Publications, Inc. published the book entitled Composers on Composing for Band, Volume Two which features a chapter written by Julie Giroux. Her insightful chapter gives a down-to-earth description which is often humorous of her personal methods and techniques for composing for bands. In 2009 Giroux, an accomplished pianist, performed her latest work, Cordoba for Solo Piano and Concert Band, in five U.S. cities and attended the premier of Arcus IX, a work for solo F tuba and concert band, at Blinn College in Brenham, Texas.

Her 2009 film and documentary orchestrations and compositions include the ongoing project "Call for Green China" which, primarily funded by the World Bank, was recorded, performed and broadcast live in china in 2007. In 2009 the project was extended with new musical material, recorded and set to tour seven cities in China where the show was performed live.

Giroux is a member of American Bandmasters Association (ABA), the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP, and an honorary brother of the Omicron Chapter of Kappa Kappa Psi at West Virginia University. She was initiated into the fraternity on April 2, 2005.

-Bio from www.windrep.org

About our Artist-In-Residence

A native of Greeley, Colorado, Dr. Lowell E. Graham was the Director of Orchestral Activities and Professor of Conducting at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and was the recipient of the “Abraham Chavez” Professorship in Music. From 2002-2014 he served as Chair of the Department of Music. He has enjoyed a distinguished career conducting ensembles in many musical media, including the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra, the Virginia Symphony, the Spokane Symphony, the Valdosta Symphony Orchestra, the El Paso Symphony Orchestra, the American Promenade Orchestra, the Greeley Philharmonic, Chamber Music Palm Beach Chamber Orchestra, the Westsachsisches Symphonieorchester, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Banda Sinfonica do Estado de Sao Paulo, Orquestra de Sopros Brasileira, Banda Sinfonica de la Provincia de Cordoba – Argentina, Banda Municipal de Musica de Bilbao – Espana, Banda Municipal de Barcelona – Espana, the National Symphonic Winds, the National Chamber Players, the Avatar Brass Ensemble and the Denver Brass. In 2006 he was named the “Director Honorifico Anual” for the Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional de Paraguay. He has held numerous conducting positions to include that of the Commander and Conductor of the United States Air Force’s premier musical organization in Washington, DC. As a USAF Colonel, he became the senior ranking musician in the Department of Defense.

Graham is a graduate of the University of Northern Colorado where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in music education in 1970 and a Master of Arts degree in performance the following year. In 1977 he became the first person to be awarded the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in orchestral conducting from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

Graham has initiated many important media projects for American Public Radio and other broadcasting organizations, as well as live telecast/web cast concerts and video productions on which his credits include those of conductor, writer and musical producer. He is a frequent guest on radio talk shows and performed on NBC’s “Today Show” for five consecutive years on Independence Day.

In March 1995, he was honored with membership in the prestigious American Bandmasters Association (ABA), the professional association of master conductors and musicians. Membership is considered the highest honor achievable by American bandsmen; it recognizes outstanding achievement in the field of concert bands. In 2018 he served as the 81st President of ABA. In 2014 he was named as the President and CEO of the John Philip Sousa Foundation.

In February 1996, Graham was inducted into the University of Northern Colorado School of Music “Hall of Honor.” This distinction was bestowed on only 18 alumni and faculty who have achieved greatness as musician, educators and humanitarians in the school’s first 100 years. He received The Catholic University of America’s 1998 Alumni Achievement Award in the field of Music. This award, which is presented annually by the Board of Governors Alumni Association, recognized his accomplishments and honored him for his life’s work. In 1999 he received the University of Northern Colorado Alumni Association Honored Alumni Award in the category of “Contributions to Music.” In 2001, he was the recipient of the Award of Distinction for Contributions to Music Education from the Illinois Music Educators Association. The two previous recipients were Sir Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Meryl J. Isaac. In 2003 he was the recipient of the Phi Beta Mu International Outstanding Bandmaster Award. In 2008, he was honored by the American School Band Directors Association with the A. Austin Harding Award for “making significant and lasting contributions to the school band movement.” In 2013 the University of Northern Colorado Graduate School honored him with the “Century of Scholars Award” in performance representing excellence and achievement in the previous 100 years of the Graduate School.

In 2005 Graham was named as the “Supervising Editor” for LudwigMasters Music Publications, Inc., a division of Edwin F. Kalmus & Co., Inc. Masters Music Publications that includes rare, out-of print, and foreign editions as well as offering one of the finest catalogs of original works and arrangements for concert band and wind ensemble available today. Furthermore, Graham actively serves as an Educational Clinician for Conn-Selmer Education Division.

Graham has released recordings on six labels — Naxos, Telarc, Klavier, Mark, Altissimo and Wilson — that have been recognized for both their artistic and sonic excellence. These recordings have been recognized in Stereophile’s “Records to Die-For” list, The Absolute Sound’s “The Super Disc List,” as well as one having won a Grammy.

 

Bio from https://www.americanbandmasters.org/dr-lowell-graham-bio/

"Unlikely Origins"

Carnegie Anthem
William Owens

About the piece:

Carnegie Hall is one of the most prestigious performance venues in the world. Built in 1891 by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, the hall was home to the New York Philharmonic from 1892 to 1962. To this day, Carnegie Hall continues to play host to the finest artists of all genres from around the globe.

Commissioned by the Lamar Consolidated High School Band of Rosenberg, Texas, Carnegie Anthem plays brilliant musical tribute to this venerable institution and the vibrant city it calls home. The opening statement is a bold and brilliant fanfare characterizing the splendor of the great hall itself. The subsequent middle section is a “driving calm” with engaging melodies and a rhythmic thrust symbolizing the non-stop activity of bustling NYC on any given day. Returning then to its bold origins, the music concludes with a resplendent finish.

- Program Note by composer

About the composer:

William Owens (b. 22 January 1963, Gary, Indiana) is an American composer, conductor, clinician and educator.

He is a 1985 graduate of VanderCook College of Music in Chicago. A seasoned music educator, Mr. Owens is active as a composer, conductor, and clinician throughout the United States and Canada.
Mr. Owens has written nearly 200 commissioned and published works for concert band and string orchestra. His music has been programmed at prestigious venues such as the Midwest Clinic and appears on required music lists both nationally and abroad. Principal commissions include those from the California Band Director’s Association, the Chicago Public School Bureau for Cultural Arts, the South Plains college Dept. of Fine arts and the Texas University Interscholastic League.

He is a consistent winner of the ASCAP1us award and a two-time recipient of the Forrest L. Buchtel Citation for Excellence in Composition. In 2014, he was recognized by the Texas Bandmasters Association as the featured composer, and he was named distinguished alumnus by his alma mater. Professional memberships include ASCAP, the American Composers Forum and the TMEA.

Simple Gifts
Frank Ticheli

About the piece:

THE SHAKERS

The Shakers were a religious sect who splintered from a Quaker community in the mid-1700s in Manchester, England. Known then derisively as "Shaking Quakers" because of the passionate shaking that would occur during their religious services, they were viewed as radicals, and their members were sometimes harassed and even imprisoned by the English. One of those imprisoned, Ann Lee, was named official leader of the church upon her release in 1772. Two years later, driven by her vision of a holy sanctuary in the New World, she led a small group of followers to the shores of America where they founded a colony in rural New York.

The Shakers were pacifists who kept a very low profile, and their membership increased only modestly during the decades following their arrival. At their peak in the 1830s, there were some 6,000 members in nineteen communities interspersed between Maine and Kentucky. Soon after the Civil War their membership declined dramatically. Their practice of intense simplicity and celibacy accounts for much of their decline.

Today there is only one active Shaker community remaining, the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester, Maine.

The Shakers were known for their architecture, crafts, furniture, and perhaps most notably, their songs. Shaker songs were traditionally sung in unison without instrumental accompaniment. Singing and dancing were vital components of Shaker worship and everyday life. Over 8,000 songs in some 800 songbooks were created, most of them during the 1830s to 1860s in Shaker communities throughout New England.

THE CREATION OF SIMPLE GIFTS: FOUR SHAKER SONGS

My work is built from four Shaker melodies -- a sensuous nature song, a lively dance tune, a tender lullaby, and most famously, Simple Gifts, the hymn that celebrates the Shaker's love of simplicity and humility. In setting these songs, I sought subtle ways to preserve their simple, straightforward beauty. Melodic freshness and interest were achieved primarily through variations of harmony, of texture, and especially of orchestration.

The first movement is a setting of In Yonder Valley, generally regarded to be the oldest surviving Shaker song with text. This simple hymn in praise of nature is attributed to Father James Whittaker (1751-1787), a member of the small group of Shakers who emigrated to America in 1774. My setting enhances the image of spring by turning the first three notes of the tune into a birdcall motive.

The second movement, Dance, makes use of a tune from an 1830s Shaker manuscript. Dancing was an important part of Shaker worship, and tunes such as this were often sung by a small group of singers while the rest of the congregation danced. One interesting feature in my setting occurs near the end of the movement, when the brasses state the tune at one-quarter speed, in counterpoint against the woodwinds who state it at normal speed.

The third movement is based on a Shaker lullaby Here Take This Lovely Flower, found in Dorothy Berliner Commin's extraordinary collection, Lullabies of the World and in Daniel W. Patterson's monumental collection The Shaker Spiritual. This song is an example of the phenomenon of the gift song, music received from spirits by Shaker mediums while in trance. Although the Shakers practiced celibacy, there were many children in their communities, including the children of recent converts as well as orphans whom they took in. Like many Shaker songs, this lullaby embodies the Shakers' ideal of childlike simplicity.

The finale is a setting of the Shakers' most famous song, Simple Gifts, sometimes attributed to Elder Joseph Bracket (1797-1882) of the Alfred, Maine, community, and also said (in Lebanon, New York, manuscript) as having been received from a Negro spirit at Canterbury, New Hampshire, making Simple Gifts possibly a visionary gift song. It has been used in hundreds of settings, most notably by Aaron Copland in the brilliant set of variations which conclude his Appalachian Spring. Without ever quoting him, my setting begins at Copland's doorstep, and quickly departs. Throughout its little journey, the tune is never abandoned, rarely altered, always exalted.

- Program Note by composer

About the composer:

Frank Ticheli (b. 21 January 1958, Monroe, La.) is an American composer and conductor.

Ticheli joined the faculty of the University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music in 1991, where he served as Professor of Composition until 2023. From 1991 to 1998, Ticheli was Composer in Residence of the Pacific Symphony, and he still enjoys a close working relationship with that orchestra and their music director, Carl St. Clair.

Ticheli is well known for his works for concert band, many of which have become standards in the repertoire. In addition to composing, he has appeared as guest conductor of his music at Carnegie Hall, at many American universities and music festivals, and in cities throughout the world, including Schladming, Austria, at the Mid-Europe Music Festival; London and Manchester, England, with the Meadows Wind Ensemble; Singapore, with the Singapore Armed Forces Central Band; and numerous cities in Japan, with the Bands of America National Honor Band.

Frank Ticheli is the winner of the 2006 NBA/William D. Revelli Memorial Band Composition Contest for his Symphony No. 2. Other awards for his music include the Charles Ives and the Goddard Lieberson Awards, both from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Walter Beeler Memorial Prize, and First Prize awards in the Texas Sesquicentennial Orchestral Composition Competition, Britten-on-the-Bay Choral Composition Contest, and Virginia CBDNA Symposium for New Band Music.

Dr. Ticheli received his doctoral and masters degrees in composition from The University of Michigan. His works are published by Manhattan Beach, Southern, Hinshaw, and Encore Music, and are recorded on the labels of Albany, Chandos, Clarion, Klavier, Koch International, and Mark Records.

Canarios Fantasia
Douglas Akey

About the piece:

Canarios Fantasia is a contemporary band work that uses the melody from a Baroque guitar work for its inspiration. The source work is Canarios by Gaspar Sanz (1647-1710).

- Program Note from score

About the composer:

Douglas Akey (b. 13 October 1957) is an American composer and teacher.

Mr. Akey began his musical training in the public schools of Elmhurst, Illinois. He attended Arizona State University on a performance scholarship, earning a Bachelor of Music degree in instrumental music (1979) and a Master of Music degree in solo performance (1985).

In 1985, Mr. Akey received the Stanbury Award of the American School Band Directors Association as the outstanding young junior high school band director in the United States. From 1987 to 2006, Akey was director of bands and music/drama department chairperson at Hendrix Junior High School in Chandler, Arizona. His bands have been invited to perform numerous education conferences, including the 1994 Midwest International Band and Orchestra Clinic and the 1998 Music Educators National Conference.

He has become recognized as an accomplished composer of school band music. His works have appeared on dozens of state contest lists and are performed by bands throughout North America, Europe, Australia and the Far East. In 1996, he was honored as the National Federation of Secondary Schools Music Educator of the Year for Section 7 (Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada and Utah).
Akey currently teaches music technology and band at the Mesa Academy for Advanced Studies in Mesa, Arizona, and serves as director of the Tempe Symphony Orchestra. He is in demand as a clinician, having directed many junior high school and high school honor bands throughout the United States.

Mr. Akey is an active performer, having played with the Del Sol Brass Quintet and Arizona Brass Quintet, as well as the Phoenix and Tucson Symphony Orchestras. He currently serves as principal horn with the Tempe Symphony Orchestra.

Fission
John Mackey

About the Piece:

Fission is an exhilarating and dynamic work and is the concert band adaptation of Mackey's contribution to Carolina Crown Drum and Bugle Corps 2024 show, "Promethean." Known for his energetic and innovative compositions, Mackey has once again captured the imagination of performers and audiences alike with this electrifying work. The piece draws it's inspiration from the concept of nuclear fission, where the nucleus of an atom splits into smaller parts, releasing a significant amount of energy. This scientific process serves as a powerful metaphor for the explosive energy and rapid changes that characterize the piece. Listeners will experience a musical journey that mirrors the intense energy release and transformative nature of fission. Fission received its original premiere at the 2024 Texas Bandmasters Association Convention.

- Program Note by Ryan Johnstone

About the Composer:

John Mackey (b. 1 October 1973, New Philadelphia, Ohio) is an American composer.

Mackey holds a Master of Music degree from The Juilliard School and a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he studied with John Corigliano and Donald Erb, respectively. Mr. Mackey particularly enjoys writing music for dance and for symphonic winds, and he has focused on those media for the past few years.

His works have been performed at the Sydney Opera House; the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Carnegie Hall; the Kennedy Center; Weill Recital Hall; Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival; Italy's Spoleto Festival; Alice Tully Hall; the Joyce Theater; Dance Theater Workshop; and throughout Italy, Chile, Japan, Colombia, Austria, Brazil, Germany, England, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.

John has received numerous commissions from the Parsons Dance Company, as well as commissions from the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra, New York City Ballet’s Choreographic Institute, the Dallas Theater Center, the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, the New York Youth Symphony, Ailey 2, Concert Artists Guild, Peridance Ensemble, and Jeanne Ruddy Dance, among many others. Recent and upcoming commissions include works for the concert bands of the SEC Athletic Conference, the American Bandmasters Association, and the Dallas Wind Symphony.

As a frequent collaborator, John has worked with a diverse range of artists, from Doug Varone to David Parsons, from Robert Battle to the U.S. Olympic Synchronized Swim Team. (The team won a bronze medal in the 2004 Athens Olympics performing to Mackey's score Damn.)

John has been recognized with numerous grants and awards from organizations including ASCAP (Concert Music Awards, 1999 through 2006; Morton Gould Young Composer Award, 2002 and 2003), the American Music Center (Margaret Jory Fairbanks Copying Assistance Grant, 2000, 2002), and the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust (Live Music for Dance commissioning grants, 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2005). He was a CalArts/Alpert Award nominee in 2000.

In February 2003, the Brooklyn Philharmonic premiered John’s work Redline Tango at the BAM Opera House, with Kristjan Jarvi conducting. John made a new version of the work for wind ensemble in 2004 -- Mackey's first work for wind band -- and that version has since received over 100 performances worldwide. The wind version won the 2004 Walter Beeler Memorial Composition Prize, and in 2005, the ABA/Ostwald Award from the American Bandmasters Association, making John the youngest composer to receive the honor. In 2009, John's work Aurora Awakes received both the ABA/Ostwald Award and the NBA William D. Revelli Composition Contest.

John served as a Meet-The-Composer/American Symphony Orchestra League "Music Alive!" Composer In Residence with the Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphony in 2002-2003, and with the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra in 2004-2005. He was Composer In Residence at the Vail Valley Music Festival in Vail, Colorado, in the summer of 2004, Composer In Residence at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in August 2005. He has held college residencies at Florida State, University of Michigan, Ohio State, Arizona State, University of Southern California, University of Texas, among many others. Mr. Mackey served as music director of the Parsons Dance Company from 1999-2003.

To entertain himself while procrastinating on commissions, John is a photography enthusiast.

Lux Aurumque
Eric Whitacre

About the piece:

Commissioned by the Texas Music Educators Association for their 2005 All-State Band, Lux Aurumque is a lush and poignant adaptation of one of Eric Whitacre’s most popular choral works. Simple triads melt from one chord to the next, creating a slowly evolving wash of aural color. For his chorale setting, Whitacre had the original poem by Edward Esch (b. 1970) translated into Latin by Charles Anthony Silvestri.

Here is Esch’s original poem:

Light,
warm and heavy as pure gold
and the angels sing softly
to the new-born baby. 

- Program Note by California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, Wind Orchestra

About the composer:

Eric Whitacre (b. 2 January 1970, Reno, Nev.) is an American composer, conductor and lecturer.

Mr. Whitacre's first musical experience was singing were in his college choir. Though he was unable to read music at the time, Whitacre began his full musical education at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, eventually taking a bachelor's degree in music composition. He wrote his first concert work, Go, Lovely, Rose, at the age of 21. Eric went on to the Juilliard School, earning his Master of Music degree and studying with John Corigliano and David Diamond. At the age of 23 he completed his first piece for wind orchestra, Ghost Train, and his popular wind piece Godzilla Eats Las Vegas stems from this period. He graduated in 1997 and moved to Los Angeles to become a full-time professional composer.

Whitacre's first album as both composer and conductor, Light & Gold, won a Grammy Award in 2012, and became the No. 1 classical album in the U.S. and UK charts. His second album, Water Night, featured performances from his professional choir, the Eric Whitacre Singers, the London Symphony Orchestra, Julian Lloyd Webber, and Hila Plitmann.

Many of Whitacre's works have entered the standard choral and symphonic repertories. His works Water Night, Cloudburst, Sleep, Lux Aurumque and A Boy and a Girl are among the most popular choral works of the last decade, and his Ghost Train, Godzilla Eats Las Vegas, and October have achieved success in the symphonic wind community. As a conductor, Whitacre has appeared with hundreds of professional and educational ensembles throughout the world. He has conducted concerts of his choral and symphonic music in Japan, Australia, China, Singapore, South America and much of Europe, as well as dozens of American universities and colleges. Online, Whitacre's massed choral music has reached a worldwide audience. Whitacre's 2007 musical Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings, combining trance, ambient and techno electronica with choral, cinematic, and operatic traditions, won the ASCAP Harold Arlen award and the Richard Rodgers Award for most promising musical theater composer.

Whitacre's virtual choir projects began in 2009 with Sleep and Lux Aurumque. In virtual choirs, singers record and upload their individual videos from all over the world. The videos are then synchronized and combined into one single performance to create the virtual choir. Though 2020, six virtual choirs have been formed, the last featuring more than 17,000 singers.

Deep Field: The Impossible Magnitude of the Universe is a 2018 audiovisual collaboration between Whitacre, NASA, the Space Telescope Science Institute, Music Productions and 59 Productions. The soundtrack for the film, inspired by the Hubble Space Telescope and its pioneering deep field image, features the Virtual Choir 5, representing 120 countries: more than 8,000 voices aged four to 87, alongside the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Eric Whitacre Singers.

Whitacre has won awards from the Barlow international composition competition, American Choral Directors Association, American Composers Forum and in 2001 became the recipient of The Raymond W. Brock Commission given by the American Choral Directors Association. The album Cloudburst and Other Choral Works received a Grammy nomination in 2007 for Best Choral Performance. Later, his album Light & Gold won a Grammy for Best Choral Performance in 2012.

Whitacre is a founding member of BCM International, a quartet of composers consisting of himself, Steven Bryant, Jonathan Newman and James Bonney, which aspires to "enrich the wind ensemble repertoire with music unbound by traditional thought or idiomatic cliché." He is married to the soprano Hila Plitmann.

Pageant
Vincent Persichetti

About the piece:

Pageant, op. 59 (1953) is the composer’s third work for band, commissioned by Edwin Franko Goldman for performance at the nineteenth annual convention of the American Bandmasters Association. The premiere was on March 7, 1953, by the University of Miami Band with Persichetti conducting.

The composer’s manuscript sketches show that Persichetti had originally intended to title the work Morning Music for Band -- the opening horn motive and the first theme in the clarinet choir have a serene, pastoral quality that evokes thoughts of sunrise. The opening horn call provides the motivic basis for the rest of the work, germinating long phrases supported by chordal harmonies. The phrases are passed around amongst various small choirs of instruments, exploiting the plethora of timbral and textural combinations possible in an ensemble of wind and percussion instruments. The tonal centers shift as often as the instrumentation, landing on a B-flat major chord that transitions into the second part of the work, the “parade.” In the Allegro second section, the snare drum provides a rhythmic version of the melodic material to follow. This section utilizes polytonality with multiple key centers existing in the music at the same time.

- Program Note from University of North Carolina Charlotte Wind Ensemble concert program, 20 October 2021

About the composer:

Vincent Persichetti (6 June 1915, Philadelphia, Penn. – 14 August 1987, Philadelphia) was an American composer, music educator and pianist.

Persichetti began his musical life at a young age, first studying the piano, then the organ, double bass, tuba, theory, and composition. By the age of 11 he was paying for his own musical education and helping by performing professionally as an accompanist, radio staff pianist, church organist, and orchestra performer. At the age of 16 he was appointed choir director for the Arch Street Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, a post he would hold for the next 20 years. During all of this, Persichetti was a student in the Philadelphia public schools and received a thorough musical education at the Combs College of Music, where he earned a degree in 1935 under Russel King Miller, his principal composition teacher.

Starting at the age of 20, he was simultaneously head of the theory and composition departments at the Combs College, a conducting major with Fritz Reiner at the Curtis Institute, and a piano major with Olga Samaroff at the Philadelphia Conservatory. He received a diploma in conducting from the Curtis Institute and graduate degrees from the Philadelphia Conservatory. In 1947 he joined the faculty of the Juilliard School of Music, and became the chairman of the Composition Department in 1963.

Persichetti composed for nearly every musical medium, with more than 120 published works. Although he never specifically composed "educational" music, many of his smaller pieces are suitable for teaching purposes. His piano music, a complete body of literature in itself, consists of six sonatinas, three volumes of poems, a concerto and a concertino for piano and orchestra, serenades, a four-hand concerto, a two-piano sonata, twelve solo piano sonatas, and various shorter works. His works for winds rank as some of the most original and well-crafted compositions in the medium, and his Symphony No. 6 is rightly considered one of the "cornerstones" of the genre.

Scenes from "The Louvre"
Norman Dello Joio

About the piece:

Scenes from "The Louvre" comes from a 1964 television documentary produced by NBC News called A Golden Prison: The Louvre, for which Dello Joio provided the soundtrack. The documentary tells the history of the Louvre and its world-class collection of art, which is in many ways inseparable from the history of France.

Dello Joio chose to use the music of Renaissance-era composers in his soundtrack in order to match the historical depth of the film. He collected the highlights of this Emmy-winning score into a five-movement suite for band in 1965. The first movement, Portals, is the title music from the documentary, and it consists entirely of Dello Joio’s original material, complete with strident rhythms and bold 20th-century harmony. The second movement, Children’s Gallery, never actually appears in the film. It is a light-hearted theme and variations of Tielman Susato’s Ronde et Saltarelle. The stately third movement is based on themes by Louis XIV’s court composer, Jean-Baptiste Lully, and is aptly titled The Kings of France. Movement four, The Nativity Paintings, uses the medieval theme In Dulci Jubilo. The Finale uses the Cestiliche Sonata of Vincenzo Albrici as its source material, to which Dello Joio adds his own harmonic flavor, particularly in the final passages of the piece.

- Program Note from Ohlone Wind Orchestra concert program, 10 November 2013

About the composer:

Norman Dello Joio (born Nicodemo DeGioio 24 January 1913, New York City - 24 July 2008, East Hampton, N.Y.) was an American composer.

Dello Joio was born to Italian immigrants and began his musical career as organist and choir director at the Star of the Sea Church on City Island in New York at age 14. His father was an organist, pianist, and vocal coach and coached many opera stars from the Metropolitan Opera. He taught Norman piano starting at the age of four. In his teens, Norman began studying organ with his godfather, Pietro Yon, who was the organist at Saint Patrick's Cathedral. In 1939, he received a scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music, where he studied composition with Bernard Wagenaar.

As a graduate student at Juilliard he arrived at the conclusion that he did not want to spend his life in a church choir loft, and composition began to become his primary musical interest. In 1941, he began studies with Paul Hindemith, the man who profoundly influenced his compositional style. It was Hindemith who told Dello Joio, "Your music is lyrical by nature, don’t ever forget that." Dello Joio states that, although he did not completely understand at the time, he now knows what he meant: "Don’t sacrifice necessarily to a system; go to yourself, what you hear. If it’s valid, and it’s good, put it down in your mind. Don’t say I have to do this because the system tells me to. No, that’s a mistake."

A prolific composer, the partial list of Dello Joio’s compositions include over forty-five choral works, close to thirty works for orchestra and ten for band, approximately twenty-five pieces for solo voice, twenty chamber works, concertos for piano, flute, harp, a concertante for clarinet, and a concertino for harmonica. He has also written a number of pedagogical pieces for both two and four hands.
Dello Joio taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Mannes College of Music, and was Professor of Music and Dean of the Fine and Applied Arts School of Boston University. From 1959 until 1973, he directed the Ford Foundation’s Contemporary Music Project, which placed young composers in high schools who were salaried to compose music for school ensembles and programs. The project placed about ninety composers, many who successfully continued their careers.

Joyride
Michael Markowski

joyRiDE drew inspiration from an earlier period in my life. Nearly ten years ago, in the summer of 2005, I was on stage at Carnegie Hall in New York City playing alto saxophone as a senior in my high school band. When my band director, Jon Gomez, first received word that our high school music department was selected to perform in New York, he asked me if I'd like to write something to open the concert and commemorate the trip —- something that was bursting with joy. "Maybe," he suggested, "it would be cool to take something more traditional, like Beethoven's Ode to Joy, and blend it with something more modern, like John Adams." The idea was so simple and so astounding that the assignment excited me immediately -- it excited me so much that within ten days, I had completed the first complete draft of joyRiDE, a two-and-a-half-minute concert opener that borrows Beethoven's infamous melody and dresses it in a tie-dye blazer of rhythm and texture that nod humbly to John Adams's Short Ride on a Fast Machine. (Program note from composer)

Suite No. 2
Gustav Holst

Gustav Holst was one of England's premier composers, and among his works are the orchestral suite, The Planets, a large number of choral works, 8 operas, and over 40 songs. Holst was a trombonist, and his association with that instrument gave birth to his band works. The First Suite in E-flat was composed in 1909, and the Suite in F appeared two years later. Together with Hammersmith, composed in 1930, this trio of works has an almost unique distinction; they are works originally written for band and later arranged for orchestra.
Second Suite for Military Band in F (suite) was composed in 1911 and was first published in 1922 by Boosey & Company. This suite uses English folk songs and folk dance tunes throughout, being written at a time when Holst needed to rest from the strain of original composition. The opening march movement uses three tunes, the first of which is a lively Morris Dance. The folk song Swansea Town is next, played broadly and lyrically by the euphonium, followed by the entire band playing the tune in block harmonies - a typically English sound. Claudy Banks is the third tune, brimming with vitality and the vibrant sound of unison clarinets. The first two tunes are repeated to conclude the first movement. The second movement is a setting for the English folk song I'll Love My Love. It is a sad story of a young maiden driven into Bedlam by grief over her lover being sent to sea by his parents to prevent their marriage. The Hampshire folk song, The Song of the Blacksmith, is the basis of the third movement, which evokes visions of the sparks from red hot metal being beaten with a lively hammer's rhythm on the blacksmith's anvil. The English country-dance and folk song, The Dargason, dating from the sixteenth century, completes the suite in a manner that continues to cycle and seems to have no end. The Elizabethan love tune Greensleeves is intertwined briefly and withdrawn before the final witty scoring of a piccolo and tuba duet four octaves apart. The Second Suite in F is considered one of Holst’s masterworks for band. (From Philharmonic Winds and BandMusic PDF Library)

Riften Wed
Julie Giroux

Riften is a city in Skyrim located in the expansive world of Elder Scrolls, the fifth installment of an action role-playing video game saga developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. Skyrim is an open world game that by any video game standard is geographically massive and more closely related to an online mmorpg (massive multiplayer online role-playing game) than to its console and pc competition.

Skyrim is a beautiful world, from mountainous snowy regions to open tundra plains, sea coasts, beaches, thick woods, lakes and hot spring-fed swamps. Large cities, villages, forts, ancient ruins, caves, lone houses, sawmills and abandoned shacks dot the atlas. One can spend hours just walking or riding horseback from one side of the continent to the other doing nothing but experiencing its wondrous environment and lore. It is truly a game worthy of total immersion. Oh, and I should mention that it is also a deadly world, torn apart by civil war and dragons who have resurfaced after thousands of years, not to mention the cult of vampires that are also threatening to take over the world.

Riften is a seedy, crime-filled and nearly lawless city. Located on a waterfront with skooma-addicted dock workers and corrupt guards, it also boasts the headquarters of the Thieves Guild. Sadly enough, it is also the location for the world's orphanage and the Temple of Mara, the place where the good citizens of Skyrim have to go to get married, you included.

Weddings in Skyrim are about survival as much as fondness or imagined love. Courtship can be as simple a dialogue as “Are you interested in me? Why yes, are you interested in me? Yes. It’s settled then.” Sometimes the dialogue is more along the lines of “You are smart and strong. I would be lucky to have you. I would walk the path of life beside you ‘til the end of time if you will have me.” Although this game feels somewhat like the iron age with magic and dragons, it has a progressive, flourishing society.

In Skyrim, if so desired, your spouse can and will fight beside you. They will die for you or with you. For most of them, that death is permanent. You cannot remarry (not without cheating anyway). What was is over and there will be no other. Being the hopeless romantic that I am, I found the whole situation intriguing and heart wrenching, especially if related or injected into real world circumstances. In one instance while playing the game, I emerged from the chapel with my brand new husband only to have him killed later that evening in a vicious full-on vampire attack right outside the temple. (Hey! No fair! I knew I should have married a warrior and not a merchant. I restarted the game.) Skyrim weddings are happening in the middle of a world full of violence, disease, war and death, something Earth is all too familiar with.

Riften Wed is the music for loves and unions, past and present such as this. A love, a wedding, a lifetime shared by two people in the middle of a storm that threatens to tear them apart. Where “‘til death do us part” is not only a reality, it’s a given. Where love is a gift worthy of all the joy and pain it demands. One life, one love, one ending. This music is for those that are truly Riften Wed. (Program notes by composer)

Symphony No. 10
Dmitri Shostakovich
trans. Dennis Fischer

Shostakovich’s symphonic structures often confound traditional analysis. Therefore traditional analysts often, mistakenly, dismiss his symphonies as “impostors." The reason is simple: his structures are not purely musical, but driven by dramatic designs. In works where the musical aspect predominates, folk will declare Shostakovich to be a fine, if perhaps somewhat, wayward composer. The Tenth Symphony is a case in point.

Following World War II, Joseph Stalin screwed his totalitarian vice even tighter. Shostakovich, for his “crime” of writing a Ninth Symphony that gave joy to the people, was censured. During the immediate post-war years, Zhdanov was busy ”purging” the various Russian artistic communities. In 1948, the storm clouds broke over the Composers’ Union. Along with Prokofiev, Khachaturian and Myaskovsky, Shostakovich was pilloried. True to form, Shostakovich’s resolve quietly hardened. Secreted in his bottom drawer, amongst other works, the Tenth Symphony was slowly taking shape.
It has been said that the second movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 is a “portrait of Stalin” -- frenetic, free-flowing, short but extremely savage. Shostakovich knew that the denizens of the Kremlin would swallow the idea that the music portrayed the late Great Leader’s boundless energy and dynamism. Everybody else, of course, would have understood that Stalin, through his own incessant machinations, spread a deep fear that stifled any ”unauthorized activity” in all others.

This edition of Movement II, ”Allegro,” from Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 has been expertly arranged by Dennis Fisher, Associate Director of Wind Studies, University of North Texas. (Program note by Paul Serotsky and Todd Nichols)

Shine
Julie Giroux

Shine (2017) is a programmatic work that centers around the Prohibition era. Backwood stills and liquor-running jalopies are a part of our American heritage. Many a legitimate distillery has a history in bootlegging, and NASCAR of course was born out of moonshine running souped-up cars. America is a country of immigrants, and every immigrant who comes here brings their music and instruments with them. What we call bluegrass music today represents that Irish and Scottish folk music “sound.” The folk music of the American hill people, the Appalachians, Smoky Mountains stretching from the south to the north, gave birth to not only our bluegrass but to several instruments as well. Banjos, fiddles, dulcimers, autoharps, jaw or jews harp, the jug, mandolins, guitars, and several other instruments became our folk instruments; some instruments that existed before, some we invented. There is only one problem ... none of those instruments are normal instrumentation for symphonic bands.

I wanted to capture the imagination of an audience with as much bluegrass flavor as I could without having to score for the actual instruments. Double reeds, muted brass, combinations of low winds with other instruments all captured a lot of that visceral essence. Using washboards and special mallets in the percussion helped too. The sixteenth notes followed by dotted-eighth rhythms and vice versa so prevalent in Scottish and Irish music is also the backbone of bluegrass music.

Moonshine is a big part of our country’s past and many today still earn a living making and selling legal and illegal white lightning. I will admit I sampled many different types and flavors of moonshine while I was composing this work. Some I bought in a store, some, well, not exactly. My opinion of moonshine has not changed. I still don’t care for it. When I close my eyes and listen to Shine I can see those stills far back in the woods, hear those tires spinning out in gravel as they tear down country roads, and I can feel the burn of moonshine not just down my throat but in my soul. I hope as you listen to this back road American heartbeat, you can see it, live it too. (Program note by composer)

Polka and Fugue
Jaromir Weinberger
arr. Glenn Cliff Bainum

Weinberger began seriously working on the opera Schwanda the Bagpiper in 1924. Although excerpts from the opera (including the Polka from Act II, Scene 2, and the Fugue from the closing scene) had previously become successful concert pieces, the entire opera was first performed in Prague on April 27, 1927. The premiere was not noteworthy, but the revival in German (as Schwanda, der Dudelsackpfeifer) in Breslau, on December 16, 1928, was a sensation. Over 2,000 performances were given in Europe between 1927 and 1931. In the next few years it was performed in cities around the world, including the New York premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House on November 7, 1931. For a time, Weinberger found himself both rich and famous. Polka and Fugue was introduced to American orchestra audiences in 1928 by the eminent Austrian-German conductor Erich Kleiber (a student and conductor in Prague in 1911-1912). The score for band was transcribed by Glenn Cliffe Bainum in 1928.

The opera libretto, based on a Czech folk tale and adapted by Milos Kares from a play by Josef Tul, is a delightful mixture of humor, fantasy, satire, and realism. The story involves Schwanda, the master bagpiper, and Babinsky, a robber who leads Schwanda on a series of adventures. The polka is taken from a scene in which Schwanda plays for Queen Iceheart, who is waiting for someone who can melt her heart. His irresistible playing does the trick, and the queen and Schwanda decide to get married, sealing their vow with a kiss. However, Schwanda is already married to Dorota, so the marriage to the queen is canceled. In response to his wife’s questions of his fidelity, he cries, “If I have given the queen a single kiss, may the devil take me” -- and the devil does. He is rescued from hell, however, by Babinsky, who plays cards with the devil and wins everything he owns. He returns it all in exchange for Schwanda, who plays the fugue on his bagpipe before he leaves, so that the servants of hell may hear the playing of a master bagpiper. (From Program Notes for Band)

Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company
John Philip Sousa

Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company was composed in 1924, and was dedicated to a military unit in Boston, Massachusetts, which bore that name. The company was founded by colonists who had immigrated to America from Great Britain, where the original ‘Honourable Artillery Company of London’ was founded in 1537 by King Henry VIII. The organization in Boston was formed in 1637, and is the oldest chartered military organization in North America. The Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts remains active to this day, and serves as Honor Guard to the state’s governor. While not considered one of Sousa's more well-known marches, Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company features the highly recognizable and cherished melody from Auld Lang Syne, which is incorporated into the trio section as well as the final strain. (Program notes by Karissa Higley for the Marcus High School Wind Symphony)