Sunday, April 23, 2023  •  6 p.m.

Weigel Auditorium
Columbus, OH

COLLEGIATE WINDS
Phillip Day, conductor
Christopher Hoch, guest conductor

UNIVERSITY BAND CONDUCTORS
Alex Mondragon
Joshua Reynolds
 

PROGRAM

University Band

Illumination (2013)
David Maslanka (1943–2017)

“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. 

— Note by David Maslanka

Old Churches (2002)
Michael Colgrass (1932–2019)

Old Churches uses Gregorian chant to create a slightly mysterious monastery scene filled with the prayers and chanting of monks in an old church. Gregorian chant is ancient church music and that has been in existence for over 1,500 years. The chant unfolds through call and response patterns. One monk intones a musical idea, then the rest of the monks respond by singing back. This musical conversation continues throughout the piece, with the exception of a few brief interruptions. Perhaps they are the quiet comments church visitors make to one another.

— Note by the composer

Suite Provençale (1989)
Jan Van der Roost (b. 1956)

This four-movement suite is based on authentic folk tunes from the beautiful southern province in France, the "Provence." The composer used harmonic language respecting the popular characteristics, but that on the other hand also contains some "spicy" notes (just like the well-known "Provençal sauce"!). The instrumentation is very colorful, paying a lot of attention to the different timbres of both brass and woodwinds as well as to the percussion section.

Every movement has its own character: Un Ange a fa la crido (An angel brought the creed/credo) is like a bourrée; Adam e sa Coumpagnou (Adam and his companion) is an old love song; Lou Fustié (the carpenter) a fast dance; and finally, Lis Escoubo (a whistle tune/popular ballad) is a farandole. In the latter, the old tradition of folk musicians who play a whistle with one hand and a drum with the other hand is clearly represented during the first presentations of the one and only theme.

— Note from the publisher

(not) Alone (2022)
Randall Standridge (b. 1976)

The composer writes:

"In 2021, I was asked to create a work for wind ensemble addressing mental illness. The resultant work, unBroken, is one of my favorite works I have ever created, both from an aesthetic and personal perspective. However, this work is very advanced (Grade 5), which limits its demographic for performers and, thus, audiences.

Those of us that teach or have taught middle school and high school know that there is a need to address this issue at younger ages, and to make such tools available to middle schools and developing high school ensembles. I decided to make this work a consortium, expecting there would be 20–30 schools that would support such a piece. 40 tops.

The consortium included over 300 schools. This is an issue whose time has come. The time is now. We need to talk about this, and we are going to talk about this. We are going to show them all that they are not alone.

The piece starts very softly, with both beauty and dissonance. The individual is aware that something is wrong but is trying to bravely persist. A soloist introduces the main theme of the work, a bittersweet melody that is lovely and vulnerable. As the first segment continues, dissonant elements and a three-note descending theme signals the onset of a mental health crisis.

The second segment is manic and violent. The individual struggles with their condition as everything seems to be in darkness. The piece builds to a thunderous moment before dying away to a cloud of confusion. Their heartbeat is heard racing and then slowing. The individual is broken.

The original theme sounds out again, unaccompanied, but others join in. The work rises to a triumphant climax, as a sense of solidarity is achieved. The work ends with the soloist again, but more confident and with others there for support."

— Note by Randall Standridge

Diamond Tide (2015)
Viet Cuong (b. 1990)

A 2010 article published in Nature Physics details an experiment in which scientists were able to successfully melt a diamond and, for the first time, measure the temperature and pressure necessary to do so. When diamonds are heated to very high temperatures, they don’t melt; they simply turn into graphite, which then melts (and the thought of liquid graphite isn’t nearly as appealing or beautiful as liquid diamond). Therefore, the addition of extremely high pressure — 40 million times the pressure we feel on Earth at sea level — is crucial to melt a diamond.

The extreme temperature and pressure used in this experiment are found on Neptune and Uranus, and scientists therefore believe that seas of liquid diamond are possible on these two planets. Oceans of diamond may also account for these planets’ peculiar magnetic and geographic poles, which do not line up like they do here on Earth. Lastly, as the scientists were melting the diamonds, they saw floating shards of solid diamond forming in the pools — just like icebergs in our oceans. Imagine: distant planets with oceans of liquid diamond filled with bergs of sparkling solid diamonds drifting in the tide…

These theories are obviously all conjecture, but this alluring imagery provided heaps of inspiration for Diamond Tide, which utilizes the “melting” sounds of metallic water percussion and trombone glissandi throughout.

The work is in two movements, which can be performed separately.

Heartfelt thanks to Cheryl Floyd, Richard Floyd, the TMEA Region 18 bands, and John Mackey for making this piece possible.

— Note from the composer’s website

The Footlifter (1935)
Henry Filmore (1881–1956)
Ed. Rick Blatti (b. 19—)

The Footlifter March was composed for a series of radio broadcasts sponsored by a small Cincinnati insurance agency in 1928. The company's slogan was "A penny a day" (for insurance), and the march was referred to as the "Penny-a-Day March" for the short duration of the sponsorship — short because of the widespread depression. However, the president of the agency remarked that the piece certainly was a "footlifter," and Fillmore used the title while the work was in manuscript. During a discussion with his good friend Phil Gates at a massed band concert in Piqua, Ohio in 1930, Fillmore remarked that the most energetic "footlifters" were the best marchers. Gates then suggested the same term for a future march title — not realizing the coincidence — and the name became permanent. It was published in 1935.

— Note from "Program Notes for Band"

Collegiate Winds

Danse Saltarelle (1999)
David Gorham (b. 1960)

Christopher Hoch, guest conductor
    
Written in the style of the Italian saltarello, Danse Saltarelle exploits the rhythmic energy of the dance characterized by a hopping or jumping step (Italian saltare means “to jump”). The work also employs alternation of the usual triple rhythm of the saltarello with duple rhythms to create interest and highlight certain musical lines.

David Gorham composed the work for the Owasso High School band in Owasso, Oklahoma, where he served as director of bands from 1989 until his retirement in 2014. Danse Saltarelle was written to open Owasso’s performance at the 1999 Midwest Band and Orchestra Clinic.

My Eyes are Full of Shadow (2014)
Joel Puckett (b. 1977)

About My Eyes are Full of Shadow, the composer writes:

“My eyes are full of shadow, and my part 
Of life is yesterday.” 
— Edith Nesbit

I’ve always been a person prone to melancholy. My mother used to say that I had periods of sadness interrupted by periods where I was happy about being sad.

As an adult, I’ve learned to be contented in these low periods, and in those moments I seek out the healing power of music and poetry. Edith Nesbit’s Age to Youth, from which this work’s title is taken, describes looking back on a moment of pain in the past and an inability — an unwillingness? — to move beyond it. Finding this poem brought me great joy in connecting to its sadness. 

My Eyes are Full of Shadow opens with an optimism of a new day, but as the cadences are consistently left largely unfulfilled, we realize something is amiss. Each attempted restart of the opening results in another aborted cadence, and now they are frequently interrupted by a simple, sad chaconne. Reflecting the poem’s insistence on living in the past, this interrupting chaconne grows more insistent and eventually gives way to a return to the opening, but now colored by the assertions of the chaconne.

Joel Puckett is a composer leaving both audiences and the press buzzing. His music has been described as, “soaringly lyrical” (Minneapolis Star Tribune), “Puccini-esque”(Wall Street Journal), and “containing a density within a clarity, polyphony within the simple and — most importantly — beautiful and seemingly spiritual” (Audiophile Audition). Parterre Box recently proclaimed, “Puckett should be a household name” and the Philadelphia Inquirer’s David Patrick Stearns mused, “if the name Joel Puckett isn’t etched into your brain, it should be.” In 2011, NPR Music listed him as one of the top 100 composers under 40 in the world.

Hailed as “visionary” (Washington Post) and “an astonishingly original voice” (Philadelphia Inquirer), his music is performed by the leading artists of our day and is consistently recognized by organizations such as the American Composers Forum, BMI, Chorus America, National Public Radio, and the American Bandmasters Association.

Puckett’s music attracts diverse performers and listeners through its emotional energy and commitment. Melding tradition with innovation, his distinctive style grows from his power to create transcendent experiences using charismatic musical language. 

His flute concerto, The Shadow of Sirius, premiered in 2010 and has received more than 200 performances and been recorded multiple times, including 2015’s Naxos Surround Sound disc, Shadow of Sirius, which received a 2016 Grammy Nomination. Currently the chair of Music Theory, Ear Training and Piano Skills at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore where he has received a 2022 Johns Hopkins Catalyst Award, the 2022 Johns Hopkins Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award, and the 2021 Peabody Conservatory Student Affairs Mental Health Ally Award, Puckett presents workshops nationwide and frequently serves as an adjudicator at competitions for rising composers. His music is represented worldwide by Bill Holab Music.

Carmina Burana (1937/1967)
Carl Orff (1895–1982)
arr. John Krance (1934–1989)

I.       O Fortuna, velut Luna ("O Fortune, variable as the moon")
II.      Fortune plango vulnera ("I lament Fortune’s blows")
IV.    Tanz – Uf dem anger (Dance – On the lawn)
VI.    Were diu werlt alle min ("Were the world all mine")
VIII.  Ego sum abbas ("I am the abbot")
IX.    In taberna quando sumus ("When we are in the tavern")
X.     In trutina ("I am suspended between love and chastity")
XIII.  Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi ("Fortune, Empress of the World")

Carl Orff was a 20th-century German composer, best known for his cantata Carmina Burana (1937). In addition to his career as a composer, Orff developed an influential approach toward music education for children.

Orff started studying the piano at age five, and he also took organ and cello lessons. He soon found that he was more interested in composing original music than in studying to be a performer. Orff wrote and staged puppet shows for his family, composing music for piano, violin, zither and glockenspiel to accompany them. He had a short story published in a children's magazine in 1905 and started to write a book about nature. In his spare time, he enjoyed collecting insects.

By the time he was a teenager, having studied neither harmony nor composition, Orff was writing songs; his mother helped him set down his first works in musical notation. Orff wrote his own texts and learned the art of composing by studying classical masterworks on his own.

In 1911, at age 16, some of Orff's music was published. Many of his youthful works were songs, often settings of German poetry. They fell into the style of Richard Strauss and other German composers of the day, but with hints of what would become Orff's distinctive musical language.

Orff studied at the Munich Academy of Music until 1914. He then served in the German Army during World War I, when he was severely injured and nearly killed when a trench caved in. Afterwards, he held various positions at opera houses in Mannheim and Darmstadt, later returning to Munich to pursue his music studies. He devoted himself to studying the music of the 16th and 17th centuries. For the next fifteen years, he studied Renaissance music, Bavarian folk songs, and ancient languages while developing his concept of elementary music education. In 1924, Orff opened the Guntherschule in Munich, an educational center for rhythmic movement, gymnastics, music and dance. It was here that his concept — known as the Orff Method — evolved into a synthesis of gesture, poetic language and music. Music teachers worldwide recognize Carl Orff as one of the two most important music educators in history (the other being Zoltán Kodály).

About Carmina Burana, Silas Nathaniel Huff writes:

Six hundred years before Carl Orff was born, a group of monks at the Bavarian monastery of Benediktbeuern created a manuscript of verses written by various traveling scholars, clerics and students who had stayed at the monastery. This manuscript was discovered in 1803 and published in 1847. The verses of late medieval poetry, written in Latin, Middle High German and Old French, are marked by their vernacular, blunt language and startling eroticism. They extol the virtues of eating, drinking and carnal behavior while taking a sarcastic and scornful stab at the clergy’s decline in morality. In 1937 Orff set them to music that has since become his most famous composition, Carmina Burana.

Carmina Burana has become such a staple of the choral-orchestral repertoire that its music has pervaded many film scores and television commercials (if the producers of these projects had taken the time to find out what the chorus was singing, they might have chosen something more appropriate!). Nearly everyone recognizes the opening chorus, O Fortuna, but hardly anyone knows that it is a song in praise of the moody Goddess of Fortune, whose wheel of fate rolls unpredictably over mankind. The rest of the cantata is divided into three sections: Spring, In the Tavern and Court of Love. Spring is a collection of poems praising nature, the sun, the earth and her resources, boisterous singers, and the sensual germination of life and love. In the Tavern consists of verses reserved solely for men. The men first lament, then celebrate the fate of the beautiful swan who is to be roasted for dinner, then sing a series of toasts which degenerate into senseless drinking. Court of Love contains only verses with a hint of subtlety. These poems describe the sighs of love, longing, courtship and the desire for a kiss. Court of Love ends with a hymn to the Goddess of Love before the O Fortuna chorus returns, creating a bridge from the beginning of the cantata to the end, reminding us that the wheel of life keeps turning: yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Carmen Ohio/Across the Field
arr. Roger Cichy (b. 1956)
 

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ROSTERS

University Band

Musicians are listed alphabetically by section.

PICCOLO
Sabrina Sedlacko

FLUTE
Sidney Apel
Naddelynne Ferguson
Katie Freytag
Ash Harmon
Aspen Lieber
Saanil Rao
Sabrina Sedlacko
Emma Smith
Ashley Watkins

OBOE
Emma Robinson
Lauren Yoder

CLARINET
Leah Bauer
Jake Blevins
Audra Franke
Tamya Halison
Nathan Hogg
Brayden Hyder
Brian Lo
Ericka Niehaus
Trevor Paul
Michaela Strunck

BASS CLARINET
Jacob Claggett
Danielle Marshal
Tori Steinbrecher

BASSOON
Jaylyn Fogle

ALTO SAXOPHONE
Jack Burkhart
Elizabeth Howes
Kate Lazuka
Katie Weaver

TENOR SAXOPHONE
Ian Claggett
Kaitlyn Collinsworth
SusieLee Horton

BARITONE SAXOPHONE
Kaitlyn Daum

TRUMPET
AJ Alexander
Madison Bricker
Evan Freeland
Alex Hartsough
Blake Hassay
Hussam Jadaan
Tommy Kasarcik
Cooper Kellogg
Vishank Raghavan
Joshua Silver
Stephen Strouse
Jess Vanek
    
HORN
Chelsea Afadzi
Nik Henderson
Clark Hou
Ki Jones
Autumn McComb
Ethan Moseley
Allison Simon
Will Weisenburger

TROMBONE
Nick Carter
Jacob Gnau
Nathan Greenberg
Meghana Kanathur
Emily Leninsky
Isaac Shah
Nathan Vernon
Noor Yunis

EUPHONIUM
I. Burgos
Brianne Cochill
Abigail DeLong
Katie Lowry

TUBA
Isaac Clemens
Joseph Orr
Kelly Scott
Courtney Shalifoe
Cameron Wright

PERCUSSION
Daniel Allen
Gavin Brown
Claudia Church
Carter Fry
Muhammad Khairie bin Iswandy
Travis Jahna
Dylan Kerniskey
Andrew Lineweaver
Chang Lu
Morgan Riddiford
Chris Smallwood
Vivek Soni

Collegiate Winds

Musicians are listed alphabetically by section.
 
PICCOLO
Devin Zdanowicz

FLUTE
Hanna Everding *
Jhon Fajardo
Cooper Greenlees
Natalie O’Brien
Corrina Pohlman

OBOE
Witty Kwok *
Maddie Wittman

BASSOON
Conner Ozatalar *

CLARINET
Phillip Ainsworth
Dominic Barnes
Ethan Dale
Leena Jafri
Sydney Thompson *
Abbey Zunic

BASS CLARINET
Swaraj Patnaik

ALTO SAXOPHONE
Katia de Jong *
Willow Mauldin

TRUMPET
Justin Barnes
Sofia Barragan
Luke Buzard
Carolyn Hensley
Joel Kellar
Jonathan Levene
Gregg Mendel
Joung Min Oh
Eric Pattison
Alex Tuma *

HORN
Leila Culp
Annalise Johnson *
Sarah Jones
Olivia Sexton
Aidan Walsh

TROMBONE
Lucia Cherok *
Safa Jeelani
Lily Kent
Andric McNabb, bass
Callum Murphy
Hikari Nawa
Nathan Palmer

EUPHONIUM
Sayaka Iimura *
Clayton Messinger

TUBA
Michael Flowers
Ryan Ouimet
Sydney Reeves
Lucas Snouffer *

PIANO
Alex Buckley

PERCUSSION
Andrew Bourget
Alex Buckley
Andrew Haines
Cierra Miller
Joey Speidel *
Marie Zantopulos

* principal
 

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