Overture To Dancer in The Dark
Björk arr. Mendoza/Smart/Smith
Winner of Cannes Film Festival’s Palm d’Or in 2000, Dancer in the Dark is a genre-defying cinematic creation, incorporating elements of melodrama, documentary, musical, and experimental film, shot in the manner of cinema vérité. The audience is made to feel as though they are a participant, rather than an observer, in the tumultuous and descending trajectory of the main character, Selma.
The Overture from Dancer in the Dark begins by rising from the stasis of the opening pedal. As the music develops, layers of the brass chorale establish a haunting, shimmering, melancholic mood upon which a main theme emerges. This motif, indicative of Selma, is restated and elaborated, each time becoming simultaneously more urgent and inexorably entwined in the darkening complexity of the work’s underlying harmonic web. As quickly as the work crests, it dissolves back to a more stable form of the stasis from which it grew.
– Program Note from University of Georgia Hodgson Wind Symphony concert program, 22 March 2017
Illumination
David Maslanka
Illumination — lighting up, bringing light. I am especially interested in composing music for young people that allows them a vibrant experience of their own creative energy. A powerful experience of this sort stays in the heart and mind as a channel for creative energy, no matter what the life path. Music shared in community brings this vital force to everyone. Illumination is an open and cheerful piece in a quick tempo, with a very direct A-B-A song form.
Illumination: Overture for Band was composed for the Franklin, Massachusetts’, public schools. The commission was started by Nicole Wright, band director at the Horace Mann Middle School in Franklin, when she discovered that my grandnephew was in her band. The piece was initially to have been for her young players, but the idea grew to make it the center of the dedication concert at the opening of Franklin’s new high school building. Rehearsals of Illumination were actually the first musical sounds made in their fine new auditorium.
– Program Note by composer
Lumen De Lumine Caelum
Joshua A. Idio
Lumen de Lumine Caelum was supposed to be a general idea. This theme about light and dark existed in the back of my mind and was just at first meant to be a thematic hymn for concert band. But in early 2020, the entire world was consumed with dread and sorrow from the presence of a new coronavirus disease, which was later called Covid-19. It was a devastating time, with hundreds of thousands of people dying. My family and I were also infected with Covid-19 and at one point, I thought I was going to lose both my parents. Restrictions to battle the disease unintentionally made a new way of life for all of us. There were so many conflictions between peoples about how to handle this new lifestyle, and it split even more an already divided world.
But it also brought us together with ideas of hope and solidarity. Millions band together, sacrificing so much to help bring the world out from sadness. It forged a fellowship that continues to reside in us: to bring out the light of our world from a dreadful time. It was this expression of hope from despair that inspired me to re-envision this piece and its purpose. I wanted to write a piece resembling a small light emanating out from the dark. The Latin title loosely translates to “The light from heaven” or “the light from the sky.” This elegy is my prayer for the world.
– Program Note by composer
First Suite in E♭
Gustav Holst
Gustav Holst’s First Suite in E♭ for Military Band occupies a legendary position in the wind band repertory and can be seen, in retrospect, as one of the earliest examples of the modern wind band instrumentation still frequently performed today. Its influence is so significant that several composers have made quotation or allusion to it as a source of inspiration to their own works.
Holst began his work with Chaconne, a traditional Baroque form that sets a series of variations over a ground bass theme. That eight-measure theme is stated at the outset in tubas and euphoniums and, in all, fifteen variations are presented in quick succession. The three pitches that begin the work — E♭, F, and B♭, ascending — serve as the generating cell for the entire work, as the primary theme of each movement begins in exactly the same manner. Holst also duplicated the intervallic content of these three pitches, but descended, for several melodic statements (a compositional trick not dissimilar to the inversion process employed by the later serialist movement, which included such composers as Schoenberg and Webern). These inverted melodies contrast the optimism and bright energy of the rest of the work, typically introducing a sense of melancholy or shocking surprise. The second half of the Chaconne, for instance, presents a somber inversion of the ground bass that eventually emerges from its gloom into the exuberant final variations.
The Intermezzo, which follows, is a quirky rhythmic frenzy that contrasts everything that has preceded it. This movement opens in C minor, and starts and stops with abrupt transitions throughout its primary theme group. The contrasting midsection is introduced with a mournful melody, stated in F Dorian by the clarinet before being taken up by much of the ensemble. At the movement’s conclusion, the two sections are woven together, the motives laid together in complementary fashion in an optimistic C Major.
The March that follows immediately begins shockingly, with a furious trill in the woodwinds articulated by aggressive statements by brass and percussion. This sets up the lighthearted and humorous mood for the final movement, which eventually does take up the more reserved and traditional regal mood of a British march and is simply interrupted from time to time by an uncouth accent or thunderous bass drum note. The coda of the work makes brief mention of elements from both the Chaconne and Intermezzo before closing joyfully.
– Program Note by Jacob Wallace for the Baylor Wind Ensemble concert program, 19 December 2014
Sun Dance
Frank Ticheli
Sun Dance was written in 1997 on a commission from the Austin Independent School District to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of their All-City Honor Band Festival, and it was premiered by that group on March 18 of that year. Ticheli writes about the piece:
While composing Sun Dance, I was consciously attempting to evoke a feeling: bright joy. After completing the work, I found that the music began to suggest a more concrete image — a town festival on a warm, sun-washed day. I imagined townspeople gathered in the park, some in small groups, some walking hand in hand, others dancing to the music played by a small band under a red gazebo. Throughout the composition process, I carefully balanced the songlike and dancelike components of “bright joy.” The oboe’s gentle statement of the main melody establishes the work’s song-like characteristics, while in the work’s middle section, a lyrical theme of even greater passion appears. Several recurring themes are indeed more vocal than instrumental in nature.
The work’s dancelike qualities are enhanced by a syncopated rhythmic figure… The figure is used not only in the main melody, but also as a structural building block for virtually everything in the piece, including other melodies, accompaniment figures, and episodes.
– Program Note from Baylor University Concert Band concert program, 18 February 2018
Candide Suite
Leonard Bernstein
Candide was Leonard Bernstein’s third Broadway musical, following On the Town and Wonderful Town. Adapted by Lillian Hellman from Voltaire’s 18th-century satire on blind optimism, Bernstein’s Candide is an operetta set in the castle of the Baron Thunder-ten-Tronckh in the mythical European land of Westphalia. Within these walls live the Baron and Baroness; Cunégonde, their beautiful and innocent virgin daughter; Maximilian, their handsome son; Candide, their handsome bastard nephew; and Paquette, the Baroness’ buxom serving maid. They are taught by Dr. Pangloss, who preaches the philosophy that all is for the best in “The Best of All Possible Worlds.” Candide and Cunégonde kiss, and Candide is banned from Westphalia. As he leaves, Bulgarians invade, kidnap him and slaughter everyone except for Cunégonde, who they prostitute out to a rich Jew and the Grand Inquisitor. Candide escapes and begins an optimistic, satirical journey, taking with him his sweetheart Cunégonde and Pangloss. Candide journeys to Lisbon, Paris, Buenos Aires, and even the legendary El Dorado, only to discover reality in the forms of crime, atrocity, and suffering. He returns to Venice with Cunégonde, stripped of his idealism. His ultimate emotional maturation concludes in the finale with “You’ve been a fool, and so have I, But come and be my wife, And let us try before we die, To make good sense of life. We’re neither pure nor wise nor good; We’ll do the best we know; We’ll build our house, and chop our wood, And make our garden grow.”
Opening on Broadway on December 1, 1956, Candide was perhaps a bit too intellectually weighty for its first audiences and closed after just 73 performances. Bernstein was less concerned over the money lost than the failure of a work he cared about deeply. The critics had rightly noted a marvelous score, and Bernstein and others kept tinkering with the show over the years. With each revival, Candide won bigger audiences. In 1989, the already seriously ill Bernstein spent his last ounces of vital energy recording a new concert version of the work. “There’s more of me in that piece than anything else I’ve done,” he said.
– Program note by San Luis Obispo Wind Orchestra concert program, 12 May 2012
The Fairest of the Fair
John Philip Sousa
The Fairest of the Fair is generally regarded as one of Sousa’s finest and most melodic marches, and its inspirations came from the sight of a pretty girl with whom he was not even acquainted. It was an immediate success and has remained one of his most popular compositions. It stands out as one of the finest examples of the application of pleasing melodies to the restrictive framework of a military march. The Boston Food Fair was an annual exposition and music jubilee held by the Boston Retail Grocers’ Association. The Sousa Band was the main musical attraction for several seasons, so the creation of a new march honoring the sponsors of the 1908 Boston Food Fair was the natural outgrowth of a pleasant business relationship. In fairs before 1908, Sousa had been impressed by the beauty and charm of one particular young lady who was the center of attention of the displays in which she was employed. He made a mental note that he would someday transfer his impressions of her into music. When the invitation came for the Sousa Band to play a twenty-day engagement in 1908, he wrote this march. Remembering the comely girl, he entitled the new march The Fairest of the Fair.
Because of an oversight, the march almost missed its premiere. Nearly three months before the fair, Sousa had completed a sketch of the march for the publisher. He also wrote out a full conductor’s score from which the individual band parts were to have been extracted. The band had just finished an engagement the night before the fair’s opening and had boarded a sleeper train for Boston. Louis Morris, the band’s copyist, was helping the librarian sort music for the first concert, and he discovered that the most important piece on the program — The Fairest of the Fair — had not been prepared. According to Morris’s own story, the librarian, whose job it had been to prepare the parts, went into a panic. There was good reason; considerable advance publicity had been given to the new march, and the fair patrons would be expecting to hear it. In addition, the piano sheet music had already been published, and copies were to be distributed free to the first five hundred ladies entering the gates of the fair.
Morris rose to the occasion. He asked the porter of the train to bring a portable desk, which he placed on a pillow across his lap. He worked the entire night, and the parts were nearly finished when dawn broke. Both were greatly surprised by the appearance of Sousa, who had arisen to take his usual early morning walk. When asked about the frenzied activity, they had no choice but to tell exactly what had happened. There were many times in the life of John Philip Sousa when he demonstrated his benevolence and magnanimity, and this was surely one of them. After recognizing Morris’s extraordinary effort and remarking that it was saving the band from considerable embarrassment, he instructed him to complete his work and to take a well- deserved rest, even if it meant sleeping through the first concert. With no one the wiser, Louis Morris — hero of the day — was asleep in his hotel as Sousa’s Band played The Fairest of the Fair for the first time on September 28, 1908. Sousa did not mention the subject again, but Morris found an extra fifty dollars in his next pay envelope — the equivalent of two weeks’ salary.
– Program Note from John Philip Sousa: A Descriptive Catalog of His Works