Wind Symphony Concert 10/4/22

Russel C. Mikkelson, conductor
Sarah Baker, guest conductor
Alex Mondragon, guest conductor

An Outdoor Overture was premiered on December 16, 1938, by the New York High School of Music and Art Orchestra, Alexander Richter conducting. Copland writes:

An Outdoor Overture owes its existence to the persuasive powers of Alexander Richter, head of the music department of the High School of Music and Art. He had witnessed a performance of The Second Hurricane and made up his mind that I was the man to write a work for his school orchestra . . . Richter won me over when he explained that my work would be the opening gun in a campaign the school planned to undertake with the slogan: “American Music for American Youth.” I found this so irresistible that I interrupted my orchestration for Billy The Kid in the fall of 1938 to write the piece.

Elliott Carter, writing in Modern Music, chastised the musical establishment for disregarding the piece: “An Outdoor Overture . . . contains some of the finest and most personal music. Its opening is as lofty and beautiful as any passage that has been written by a contemporary composer. It is Copland in his ‘prophetic’ vein which runs through all his works . . . never before . . . has he expressed it so simply and directly.” Cecil Smith, in a 1954 London Philharmonic program note, wrote: “Youth and freedom and tireless energy are the subject matter of the Overture. This is music without poetizing, without introversion. Perhaps it is already a period piece: It is without a care in the world. Could any composer anywhere have written it after 1938?”

Farewell to Gray

Donald Grantham (b. 1947)

Alex Mondragon, guest conductor

The composer writes:

Farewell to Gray was commissioned by the United States Military Academy Band in celebration of the Academy’s 200th anniversary. While considering what I could do to give this work particular resonance for West Point cadets, it was pointed out to me that following graduation, the cadet would no longer wear the distinctive gray uniform worn throughout his or her matriculation, and that this has long been a very significant event in each cadet’s life and career. It is an ending and a beginning accompanied by all the ambivalent feelings such events entail, and this is what I have tried to reflect in this music.

Anahita

Roshanne Etezady (b. 1973)

1.  The Flight of Night
2. Night Mares
3. Sleep and Repose/The Coming of Light

In the Assembly Chamber of the State Capitol Building in Albany, New York, there are two murals that were completed in 1878 by the New England painter William Morris Hunt. These works are enormous — each approaching 18 feet in length — and are considered the culminating works of the artist’s career.

One of these murals, The Flight of Night, depicts the Zoroastrian Goddess of the Night, Anahita, driving her chariot westward, fleeing from the rising sun. However, if you travel to Albany today, you won’t see The Flight of Night. Two years after Hunt completed the giant murals (and only one year after his death), the ceiling in the Assembly Chamber began to leak. By 1882, The Flight of Night had already been damaged, and by 1888, the vaulted ceiling in the Assembly Chamber had to be condemned. A “false” ceiling was erected, completely obscuring Hunt’s murals, and today, most of The Flight of Night has been destroyed by the elements. Only the lowest inches of the original painting are still visible.

Anahita draws inspiration from photographs of Hunt’s masterpiece before its decay as well as from the Persian poem that inspired Hunt originally. The first movement, The Flight of Night, is characterized by dramatic, aggressive gestures that are meant to evoke the terrifying beauty of the goddess herself. Movement two, Night Mares, is a scherzo-like movement that refers to the three monstrous horses that pull the chariot across the sky. In the final movement, Sleep and Repose/The Coming of Light, we hear the gentler side of the night, with a tender lullaby that ends with trumpets heralding the dawn.

What follows is the translated Persian poem that Colonel Leavitt Hunt sent to his brother, William Morris Hunt.

Anahita

Enthroned upon her car of light, the moon
Is circling down the lofty heights of Heaven;
Her well-trained courses wedge the blindest depths
With fearful plunge, yet heed the steady hand
That guides their lonely way. So swift her course,
So bright her smile, she seems on silver wings.
O’er-reaching space, to glide the airy main;
Behind, far-flowing, spreads her deep blue veil,
Inwrought with stars that shimmer in its wave.
Before the car, an owl, gloom sighted, flaps
His weary way; with melancholy hoot
Dispelling spectral shades that flee
With bat-like rush, affrighted, back
Within the blackest nooks of caverned Night.
Still Hours of darkness wend around the car,
By raven tresses half concealed; but one,
With fairer locks, seems lingering back for Day.
Yet all with even measured footsteps mark
Her onward course. And floating in her train
Repose lies nestled on the breast of Sleep,
While soft Desires enclasp the waist of Dreams,
And light-winged Fancies flit around in troops.

Danzón No. 2 (1994)

Arturo Márquez (b. 1950)

The composer writes:

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.