Fall 2012 was quite the semester at the Columbia Wind Ensemble. Aside from some especially intense Lerner Hall nonsense, which forced us to sometimes rehearse at odd hours and in very alternative locations, we lost a rehearsal (thankfully nothing else) due to Hurricane Sandy. Still, the ensemble stayed positive and tackled some fantastic and challenging music, including an arrangement of my own with a phenomenal soloist, and the world premiere of a new symphony for band. To recap the repertoire:
Conductor Leonard Slatkin described Ron Nelson (b. 1929) thusly: “Nelson is the quintessential American composer. He has the ability to move between conservative and newer styles with ease. The fact that he’s a little hard to categorize is what makes him interesting.” This quality has helped Nelson gain wide recognition as a composer. Nowhere are his works embraced more than in the band world, where he won the “triple crown” of composition prizes in 1993 for his Passacaglia (Homage on B-A-C-H). An Illinois native, Nelson received his composition training at the Eastman School of Music and went on to a distinguished career on the faculty of Brown University.
About Lauds (Praise High Day), Nelson writes:
Lauds (Praise High Day) is an exuberant, colorful work intended to express feelings of praise and glorification. Lauds is one of the seven canonical hours that were selected by St. Benedict as the times the monks would observe the daily offices. Three (terce, sext, and none) were the times of the changing of the Roman guards and four (matins, lauds, vespers, and compline) were tied to nature. Lauds, subtitled Praise High Day, honors the sunrise; it is filled with the glory and excitement of a new day.
Blue Shades (1996) was my introduction to Frank Ticheli and his music back when I played it (2nd trumpet) with the Dartmouth Wind Symphony in 2000. I’ve seen a lot of his music since then, and I still think it’s one of his best. Ticheli talks eloquently about the piece and its origins in the score:
In 1992 I composed a concerto for traditional jazz band and orchestra, Playing With Fire, for the Jim Cullum Jazz Band and the San Antonio Symphony. That work was composed as a celebration of the traditional jazz music I heard so often while growing up near New Orleans.
I experienced tremendous joy during the the creation of Playing With Fire, and my love for early jazz is expressed in every bar of the concerto. However, after completing it I knew that the traditional jazz influences dominated the work, leaving little room for my own musical voice to come through. I felt a strong need to compose another work, one that would combine my love of early jazz with my own musical style.
Four years, and several compositions later, I finally took the opportunity to realize that need by composing Blue Shades. As its title suggests, the work alludes to the Blues, and a jazz feeling is prevalent–however, it is not literally a Blues piece. There is not a single 12-bar blues progression to be found, and except for a few isolated sections, the eighth-note is not swung.
The work, however, is heavily influenced by the Blues.: “Blue notes” (flatted 3rds, 5ths, and 7ths) are used constantly; Blues harmonies, rhythms, and melodic idioms pervade the work; and many “shades of blue” are depicted, from bright blue, to dark, to dirty, to hot blue.
At times, Blue Shade burlesques some of the cliches from the Big Band era, not as a mockery of those conventions, but as a tribute. A slow and quiet middle section recalls the atmosphere of a dark, smoky blues haunt. An extended clarinet solo played near the end recalls Benny Goodman’s hot playing style, and ushers in a series of “wailing” brass chords recalling the train whistle effects commonly used during that era.
He goes on to say that the minor 3rd is the most important interval in the piece, showing up in various accompaniment figures and in every major melodic theme. The piece even starts with that message in mind: the first nine intervals are all minor thirds! Listen to this nearly perfect (though they don’t swing quite enough at 14) recording of the North Texas Wind Symphony playing it, and you’ll see what I mean:
And here’s the Columbia Wind Ensemble playing it in December 2007. We’re not North Texas, but as I look at that video, I see one of the most legendary front rows in CUWE history! Fair warning – this was recorded from the front row of the audience on a camcorder.
Now let’s look at some of the background in that program note: Ticheli talks about how there is no 12-bar blues in the piece, yet it’s full of blue notes, those in-between pitches usually found at the 3rd, 5th, and 7th. To illustrate where that comes from, here’s John Lee Hooker:
The smoky jazz club of the center section has its roots in slow blues. Ticheli even calls it “Dirty” in the score. So, here’s some nice, dirty, slow burlesque-type blues. This will give you an idea of the sound you’re after. I would show a dance to go along with it, but many of those are too PG-13 for this space. Suffice it to say, this section should sound like hair-tossing!
The clarinet solo was inspired by Benny Goodman. So here’s the man himself:
Finally, Ticheli uses a train whistle effect in the brass wails towards the end of the piece. You can hear bits and pieces of that in the Chattanooga Choo-Choo as performed by the Glenn Miller Orchestra:
Ticheli’s publisher hosts a complete, downloadable set of mp3s of the vast majority of his large ensemble music on their website – quite a find!
For those who have forgotten, here’s my short bio on Frank Ticheli: Educated at the University of Michigan, composer Frank Ticheli (b. 1958) has become one of the biggest names in new wind band repertoire. Since 1991 he has been a Professor of Composition USC-Thornton and, until 1998, Composer in Residence of the Pacific Symphony. The recipient of many awards, he was most recently winner of the 2006 NBA/William D. Revelli Memorial Band Composition Contest for his Symphony No. 2.
John Mackey (b. 1973) once famously compared the band and the orchestra to the kind of girl a composer might meet at a party. The orchestra seems like she ought to be your ideal woman, but she clearly feels superior to you and talks a lot about her exes (like Dvorak and Beethoven). The band, meanwhile, is loud and brash, but loves everything you do and can’t wait to play your stuff, the newer, the better! (I’ve rather poorly paraphrased Mackey – it’s best understood in his original blog post on the subject).
With this attitude and his prodigious talent, John Mackey has become a superstar composer among band directors. He has even eclipsed his former teacher, John Corigliano, by putting out more than a dozen new band works, including a handful of commissions, in the last 7 years. All are challenging, and all are innovative. Mackey’s works for wind ensemble and orchestra have been performed around the world, and have won numerous composition prizes. His Redline Tango, originally for orchestra and then transcribed by the composer for band, won him the American Bandmasters Assocation/Ostwald Award in 2005, making him, then 32, the youngest composer ever to recieve that prize. He won again in 2009 with Aurora Awakes. His compositional style is fresh and original. I once heard him state that he counted the band Tool among his musical influences.
Mackey wrote Hymn to a Blue Hour in 2010 on a commission Mesa State College. As you can read in his very candid blog, most of his music up to this point was of the loud and fast variety. Several conductors started asking him for a slow piece around the same time. This was the result. He wrote it while living in New York City in the summer of 2010, surrounded by the immense noise of the city but liberated from his car and the music he usually listened to while driving everywhere. Choice quote from the blog:
It was pretty funny, really, with me sitting outside on a beautiful summer morning in New York City, Moleskine music notebook in one hand, and my iPhone Pianist app in the other (so I could find pitches), writing this piece. As I said on Facebook, I felt like I was in an ad for something.
The “Blue Hour” of the title is supposed to be “the period of twilight where there’s neither full daylight nor complete darkness”. As is often the case with many a composer’s music, the title came after the music was finished, and in this case was suggested by Mackey’s wife.
Born in 1913 into a long line of Italian musicians, Norman Dello Joio followed quickly in his family’s footsteps. His father was an opera coach and organist; by age 12, young Norman was substituting for his father on organ jobs. He went to Juilliard on scholarship, where he shifted his focus from the organ to composition, studying with Paul Hindemith. He wrote for a wide range of ensembles and won accolades from all corners of the music world, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1957 and an Emmy in 1965 for his score to the television documentary A Golden Prison: The Louvre. His contributions to the wind band repertoire are significant, and include Scenes from The Louvre, the Variants on a Mediaeval Tune, a set of Satiric Dances, and several other beloved works. Dello Joio died in 2008 at age 95 having never retired from composition.
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, on a commission from Baldwin-Wallace College. 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 mediaeval theme “In dulci jubilo“, which Dello Joio also used in his Variants on a Mediaeval Tune. The “Finale” uses the Cestiliche Sonate of Vincenzo Albrici as its source material, to which Dello Joio adds his own harmonic flavor, particularly in the final passages of the piece.
Here’s the Concord Band of Massachusetts playing Scenes from the Louvre in full:
Now take a look at part of the TV documentary. It is truly a fascinating history and a very well-done film that you all should watch. While the whole thing was once on YouTube, now only part 4 remains. The entire film is also available as a DVD on Netflix.
Now for some source material! The first movement is Dello Joio’s own. Here’s the basis of the second, Susato’s Ronde et Salterelle, played on the organ:
I couldn’t find the exact Lully theme from “The Kings of France”. So you’ll have to settle for this extremely French movie clip, featuring the one and only Gerard Depardieu conducting what looks to be a reasonably authentic period orchestra. It certainly captures the royal spirit of Lully’s court compositions:
“In dulci jubilo” is all over the place. Here’s one version which takes me back to my Anglican choirboy youth:
Again, I couldn’t find the exact Albrici piece that Dello Joio used in the “Finale”. But this one captures his spirit quite well:
Dello Joio’s website. It’s unfortunately very out of date and looks very much like the early-internet relic that it is. But it is still an informative look into Dello Joio’s life and work.
More on Scenes from the Louvre from Alex Armstead, to whom this page owes a great debt: I never would have identified the source composers of each movement without his information. Here’s his lesson plan and awesome presentation.
I first came across Piazzolla’s music in 2001, while working for the Little Orchestra Society of New York. The conductor, Dino Anagnost, had heard Gidon Kremer‘s version of Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires(CuatroEstaciones Porteñas) for string orchestra and violin solo, and wanted to perform it. There was no published version of it, just the arranger’s manuscript. So, as the “music assistant” I got to sit at the Maestro’s computer for several weeks, creating the set of parts in Sibelius. What could have been endless tedium was instead a revelation: I got inside every note of the piece and came away with an intimate knowledge of Piazzolla’s musical language. He was romantic. He was lyrical. He would hover on astonishing dissonances, preserving them like the surface of smoothly rippling water. He had a gift for counterpoint far beyond what I was expecting of a tango master. This initial contact led me to study up on the man and his music. Finally, in 2005, I arranged two of his tangos, Milonga del Angel and La Muerte del Angel, into a two-movement concerto for flute and band. It premiered in 2006, with Leonardo Hiertz as the soloist. And now, in 2012, we get to do it again!
Some background: Astor Pantaleón Piazzolla is widely regarded as the most influential tango artist of the 20th century. His work borrows elements from tango, jazz, and classical music to form a new genre called nuevo tango. He was a virtuoso performer and a respected composer whose work is widely performed around the world. He was born in Mar del Plata, Argentina on March 11, 1921, to Italian immigrant parents. When he was 4 years old, they moved to Greenwich Village in New York City. He picked up the bandoneón, the accordion-like instrument that would dominate his musical career, at age 8. He heard a wealth of different kinds of music from an early age: his father brought Argentine tango records to New York; he heard jazz on the streets of the city; and by age 12, he was learning to play Bach on his bandoneón. He returned to Argentina at 16, and moved to Buenos Aires the following year to try his luck on the tango scene there. He found some success, but realized that his interests leaned more towards contemporary classical composers like Bartok and Stravinsky. To that end, he studied composition with Alberto Ginastera and nearly dropped all tango activities. Finally, in 1954 he left for Paris to study with the legendary composition teacher Nadia Boulanger. She encouraged him to embrace his tango heritage. He returned to Argentina inspired to elevate the tango to an artistic level. He wrote original compositions for traditional ensembles, as well as for his own groups which ranged in size from quintets to nonets. He toured the world with his music, and changed the tango forever.
Regarding the tangos in the arrangement, they both originated as incidental music for a play in 1962. They eventually became part of a five-part series of “Angel” tangos, completed in 1965. James Reel of allmusic.com neatly describes Milonga del Angel:
For Alberto Rodriguez Muñoz’s 1962 stage play Tango del Angel, in which an angel heals the spirits of the residents of a shabby Buenos Aires neighborhood, Piazzolla added two new pieces to an earlier tango that gave the play its name. This music reappeared in at least two different concert forms, but one of the unifying elements is the piece Milonga del ángel. A milonga is a sort of proto-tango, lighter and gentler than the more familiar form. This milonga is openly sentimental and begins with a lounge music feel with strummed bass chords; a simple, keening violin line; and a few tinkles from the piano. The bandoneón creeps in almost unnoticed, but takes control of the piece with a sad, nostalgic melody (at this point, one could easily imagine the piece being played in a jazz club). Just as the treatment of the melody becomes more complex and emotional, a secondary section arrives to allow some air around the music. It initially seems like a transition, but opens into a highly romantic and sensual violin solo. The bandoneón reclaims its place, offering its own variation on this melody, which is actually closely tied to the main theme, and musing on it with the violin and electric bass. A more intense passage leads to the coda, which strips the music down to a series of chords, much as the piece began.
Le Muerte del Angel comes from the same play. It is notable for its opening fugue and its brisk tempo.
Here is the master himself performing Milonga del Angel on the BBC:
He and his quintet (similar to the group above) do La Muerte del Angel. Wind players, watch the way he breathes with the bandoneón.
Now the copious links begin. Piazzolla remains very popular as a composer, so there is much written about him on the internet.
Wind Band Literature 