Wind Symphony - College of Fine Arts

Illinois State University
College of Fine Arts
School of Music
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Wind Symphony
Martin H. Seggelke, conductor
Amy Mikalauskas, graduate conductor
Center for the Performing Arts
Monday Evening
April 6, 2015
8:00 p.m.
This is the one hundred and fifty-ninth program of the 2014-2015 season.
Program
Please silence all electronic devices for the duration of the concert. Thank you.
Funeral Music for Queen Mary (1992)
Threnos (1998)
Henry Purcell
(1659-1695)
edited by Steven Stucky
(born 1949)
Steven Stucky
Fictions IV (2015)
Laura Schwartz
(born 1991)
~World Premiere~
Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920, rev. 1947)
Igor Stravinsky
(1882-1971)
Program Notes
Welcome to Illinois State University! Thank you for joining us for today’s performances of the ISU University
Band and ISU Wind Symphony. We hope that you will enjoy our concert, and that you might consider joining us
again for future performances here at the ISU School of Music. Please visit http://www.bands.illinoisstate.edu for
more information. Thank you for your support!
Henry Purcell
(1659-1695) was an English composer and
was one of England's greatest and most original composers. When he was
eighteen years old, he was appointed to the Chapel Royal as a composer and
became organist of the chapel five years later. His official duties led him
composing of a large amount of church music. He also wrote much theater
music, short opera masterpieces for school performances, popular songs, and
a large quantity of instrumental music for harpsichord and string instruments.
A prominent feature of Purcell's music is a vigorous and steadily moving
bass line, an idiom heard throughout the remainder of the Baroque period
-Biography courtesy Wind Repertory Project
Funeral Music for Queen Mary
(1992) It was at the suggestion
of Esa-Pekka Salonen that I transcribed this music of Purcell for the Los
Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. I used three of the pieces heard at the
funeral of Mary II of England, who died of smallpox on 28 December 1694: a solemn march, the anthem "In the
Midst of Life We Are in Death," and a canzona in imitative polyphonic style. In working on the project I did not
try to achieve a pure, musicological reconstruction but, on the contrary, to regard Purcell's music, which I love
deeply, through the lens of three hundred intervening years. Thus, although most of this version is straightforward
orchestration of the Purcell originals, there are moments when Purcell drifts out of focus. My version was first
performed in Los Angeles on 6 February 1992.
- Program notes courtesy of the composer
Steven Stucky (born 1949) has an extensive catalog of
compositions ranging from large-scale orchestral works to a cappella miniatures
for chorus. He is also active as a conductor, writer, lecturer and teacher, and for
21 years he enjoyed a close partnership with the Los Angeles Philharmonic: in
1988 André Previn appointed him composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles
Philharmonic, and later he became the orchestra’s consulting composer for new
music, working closely with Esa-Pekka Salonen. Commissioned by the orchestra,
his Second Concerto for Orchestra brought him the Pulitzer Prize in music in
2005.
Steven Stucky has taught at Cornell University since 1980 and now serves as
Given Foundation Professor of Composition. He has also taught at the Aspen
Music Festival and School, the Eastman School of Music, and the University of
California (Berkeley). A world-renowned expert on Lutosławski’s music, he is a
recipient of the Lutosławski Society’s medal. He is a frequent guest at colleges
and conservatories, and his works appear on the programs of the world’s major
orchestras.
-Biography courtesy of the composer
Threnos
(1998), ('lamentation,' 'dirge') was commissioned by Marice Stith and the Cornell University Wind
Ensemble in memory of my colleague and friend Brian Israel, an American composer of enormous gifts who was
taken by leukemia at the age of thirty-five. The music is dominated by three elements: the forceful arpeggiated
gesture heard in the horns at the opening; the constant tolling of bells, both literal-piano, vibraphone, chimes, etc.and figurative; and a fragment of lament-like melody first heard in the solo oboe near the beginning. At its climax,
the music takes up this oboe melody in a full-throated cry of grief. Threnos was completed in January 1988 and
first performed in Ithaca, New York, on March 6th of the same year.
-Program notes courtesy of the composer
Laura Schwartz
(born 1991) is a composer and horn
player who grew up in Southern California. She attended the
University of California, Davis (B.A. in Music 2013), where she
studied primarily with Laurie San Martin, Sam Nichols, and Ross
Bauer. Laura is interested in action-based music that explores visual
movement as a foundation element of the compositional process.
In 2014, her piece Disjunct was performed during the Oregon Bach
Festival Composer’s Symposium. Recent collaborations include
Fictions I-III with flutist Sarah Pyle and animator Shayna Schwartz. In
2014-2015, she won the first ISU Large Ensemble Contest for her
piece Fictions IV. She is completing her Master’s degree in Music
Composition at Illinois State University and studies with Martha Horst
and Roy Magnuson. Laura lives in Bloomington, Illinois with her
fraternal twin sister.
-Biography courtesy of the composer
Fictions: IV
(2015) is a part of a larger collection of works that take inspiration from the format of literary
novels and short stories. Narratives, characters, and the underlying manifestations of philosophical ideas are used
as a basis to create musical novels. I refer to them as “sonic realties”. Fictions: IV’s foundation is the question
“Does music change when tonal bias created by a western education is recognized?” Building on this question,
Fictions: IV’s narrative presents all sound as cyclical. Despite developing and changing, it always returns to its
original form. The beginning will always match the end even if the middle is different. The characters are the
sound qualities of white noise, which can be harsh or pleasant. These characteristics, being foils, are intrinsically
linked.
-Program notes courtesy of the composer
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) began studying piano when he was
nine years old, but was far from a prodigy. Much like Tchaikovsky, he
was urged by his parents to study law, and he did in fact enroll at St.
Petersburg University. This early training served him well in later years
when he became known as the most litigious of composers, and thus
helped him in his many business dealings. When he was twenty years
old he showed his budding work to a friend of his father’s — composer
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Rimsky-Korsakov took Stravinsky on as his
pupil, providing him with much guidance and discipline that Stravinsky
had not had to this point. Under Rimsky-Korsakov’s tutelage,
Stravinsky was exposed to the music of many different composers and
met many artists, writers, and musicians.
Around 1908, the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev commissioned
Stravinsky to write music for his Paris series of the Ballet Russes: The
Firebird is the piece that resulted from this commission, and
Stravinsky’s name became famous. Following hot on the heels of The
Firebird came Petrouchka and the scandalous Le Sacre du Printemps.
Stravinsky’s international fame was assured by these works, and he
never lost the reputation for being one of the most brilliant composers of the twentieth century.
For nearly fifty years, Stravinsky toured the world as a concert pianist and then as a conductor, partly for the
money, but also to assure performances of his own works. In 1945, he became an American citizen and settled in
Hollywood, California. In 1969, he moved to New York to be closer to the medical facilities he depended upon.
Stravinsky died of pneumonia in New York on April 6, 1971.
-Biography courtesy of Wind Repertory Project
Symphonies of Wind Instruments
(1920, rev. 1947) In 1908, on the death of his beloved teacher
Rimsky-Korsakoff, Igor Stravinsky responded by composing a work in his memory which was conceived in terms
of instrumental ritual and which he afterwards remembered as the best work of his early period – the Chante
funèbre – later, unfortunately, lost. Ten years later, the death of his admired colleague, mentor and friend Debussy
caused him to write another memorial composition which stands among his most characteristic and influential
masterpieces – the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, dedicated “To the memory of Claude Achille Debussy”.
The work is not a ‘symphony’ in the accustomed sense; Stravinsky went back to the word’s ancient connotation of
groups of instruments sounding together, and used the plural to indicate that the music is made up of several of
these instrument colloquies. He described it at various times as ‘a grand chant, an objective cry’, and ‘an austere
ritual which is unfolded in terms of short litanies between different groups of homogenous instruments’. The
overall form of the piece is an apparent challenge to all previously accepted canons of musical architecture. It is a
kind of mosaic, made out of discrete blocks of contrasting material, separate yet interlocking, in different but
closely related tempi. These are shuffled, juxtaposed or intercut without modulation or transition, culminating in
the ineffably severe calm of the concluding chorale. Stravinsky had already explored the potential of such ‘antisymphonic’ discontinuity in The Rite of Spring and Les Noces, but the Symphonies of Wind Instruments raises it to
a new level. The scoring, which associates each idea with a different grouping of instruments, enhances the
impression. Yet paradoxically, at the smallest level, the melodic and harmonic cells out of which the music is spun
work across the surface divisions of the work, lending it a kind of secret organic continuity. Stravinsky’s
description of the music as a ‘ritual’ however gives the clue to its expressive nature: this is an instrumental liturgy,
a burial service, the chorale rounding off the proceedings in something like a Byzantine Alleluia. In this sense,
Symphonies of Wind Instruments is a forerunner of such later Stravinsky works as the Mass and Requiem
Canticles.
The first performance of the complete work was given at the Queen’s Hall in London on June 10, 1921, conducted
by Serge Koussevitsky as part of a series of Russian Festival Concerts. The original version of 1920 was never
finalized for publication except in piano reduction. In 1945, Stravinsky made a revised version, published in 1947,
for a slightly different ensemble, dropping the two ‘exotics’ of the original scoring, the alto flute in G and the alto
clarinet in F. He also changed some of the music, added a few bars, entirely re-thought the rhythmic articulation,
and re-barred the entire work, breaking down its larger irregular phrases into simpler units. It is in this form that
the Symphonies of Wind Instruments has entered the repertoire. Stravinsky first conducted the Symphonies of Wind
Instruments in his completely rewritten 1947 version of the music at Town Hall, New York, April 11, 1948. After
the performance, his friend Stark Young, the novelist and former drama critic for The New York Times, wrote to
him: ‘I am wondering how these incredible patterns of form and tone appear to any soul, how can the wonder and
beauty of what you say come to anyone like that. All the miracles of the ancient, barbaric, passionate world are
there, and all of the human heart is there.”
-Program notes courtesy of Malcolm MacDonald and Robert Craft
Wind Symphony Personnel
Dr. Martin H. Seggelke, conductor
Amy Mikalauskas, graduate conductor
Flute
Miranda DeBretto
Daniel Gallagher
Mark Grigoletti
Pam Schuett*
Casey Sukel
Oboe
Linnea Couture
David Merz*
Terri Rogers
Bassoon
Veronica Dapper*
Matt Jewell
Contrabassoon
Aston Karner
Clarinet
Brian Do
Jenny Dudlak
Beth Hildenbrand*
Marissa Poel
Colby Spengler
Bileshia Sproling
Nuvee Thammikasakul
Bass Clarinet
Cassie Wieland
Contrabass Clarinet
Andy Lucas
Saxophone
Jeff Blinks
Amy Mikalauskas*
Alex Pantazi
Tre Wherry
Trumpet
Eli Denecke*
Nicole Gillotti
Sean Hack
Robin Heltsley
Michael Pranger
Ginny Ulbricht
Trombone
Aaron Gradberg
Jordan Harvey
Wm. Riley Leitch*
Bass Trombone
James Mahowald
Euphonium
Morgan McWethy
Sam Stauffer*
Tuba
Alex Hill*
Jason Lindsey
Percussion
Francis Favis
Elliott Godinez
Kevin Greene
Matt James
Mallory Konstans*
Kyle Singer
String Bass
Laura Bass
Ana Miller
Piano
Seung-Kyung Baek
Horn
Jack Gordon
Kevin Krivosik
Laura Makara
Nelson Ruiz*
Acknowledging the important contributions of all ensemble members, this list is in alphabetical order.
*Denotes Section Leader
THANK YOU
Illinois State University College of Fine Arts
James Major, Dean
John Walker, Executive Associate Dean
Sherri Zeck, Associate Dean
Pete Guither, Assistant Dean
Laurie Merriman, Assistant Dean
Janet Tulley, Assistant Dean
Illinois State University School of Music
A. Oforiwaa Aduonum, ethnomusicology
Allison Alcorn, music history
Debra Austin, voice
Mark Babbitt, trombone
Daniel Belongia, associate director of bands
Glenn Block, orchestra & conducting
Connie Bryant, bands administrative clerk
Karyl K. Carlson, director of choral activities
Renee Chernick, piano
David Collier, percussion & associate director
Andrea Crimmins, music therapy
Peggy Dehaven, office support specialist
Judith Dicker, oboe
Michael Dicker, bassoon
Geoffrey Duce, pano
Tom Faux, ethnomusicology
Angelo Favis, graduate coordinator & guitar
Sarah Gentry, violin
Amy Gilreath, trumpet
David Gresham, clarinet
Mark Grizzard, men’s glee club
Christine Hansen, academic advisor
Kevin Hart, jazz studies & theory
Martha Horst, theory & composition
Mona Hubbard, office manager
Joshua Keeling, theory & composition
John Michael Koch, vocal arts coordinator
Shela Bondurant Koehler, music education
William Koehler, string bass & music education
Adriana La Rosa Ransom, cello
Marie Labonville, musicology
Katherine J. Lewis, viola
Roy D. Magnuson, theory
Joseph Manfredo, music education
Leslie A. Manfredo, choir, music education
Tom Marko, director of jazz studies
Rose Marshack, music business & arts technology
Joe Matson, musicology & music history
Kimberly McCord, music education
Carren Moham, voice
Carlyn Morenus, piano
Joe Neisler, horn
Paul Nolen, saxophone
Maureen Parker, administrative clerk
Stephen B. Parsons, director
Frank R. Payton, Jr., music education
Kim Risinger, flute
Cindy Ropp, music therapy
Andy Rummel, euphonium & tuba
Tim Schachtschneider, facilities manager
Carl Schimmel, composition
Daniel Peter Schuetz, voice
Martin H. Seggelke, director of bands
Matthew Smith, arts technology
David Snyder, music education
Ben Stiers, percussion & assistant director of bands
Tuyen Tonnu, piano & accompanying
Rick Valentin, arts technology
Justin Vickers, voice & musicology
Michelle Vought, voice
Sharon Walsh, advisor
Band Graduate Teaching Assistants
Aaron Gradberg, Josh Hernday,
Beth Hildenbrand, Amy Mikalauskas,
Nelson Ruiz, Shannon Shaffer
Upcoming Illinois State University Large Instrumental Ensemble Performances
Details and links to tickets at www.bands.ilstu.edu
Jazz Combos Concert
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
Center for the Performing Arts
8:00 P.M.
Jazz Ensembles Concert
Thursday, April 16, 2015
Center for the Performing Arts
8:00 P.M.
2015 State of Illinois Junior High Concert Band Festival
Saturday, April 18, 2015
Center for the Performing Arts
All Day
Symphonic Winds Concert
Sunday, April 19, 2015
Center for the Performing Arts
3:00 P.M.
University Band and Symphonic Band Concert
Thursday, April 23, 2015
Center for the Performing Arts
8:00 P.M.
2015 State of Illinois High School Concert Band Festival
Friday & Saturday, April 24-25, 2015
Center for the Performing Arts
All Day
Wind Symphony Concert
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Center for the Performing Arts
5:00 P.M.
Visit the School of Music website for more upcoming events:
http://finearts.illinoisstate.edu/events/