PALATINE CONCERT BAND

SUNDAY, MAY 10, 2009

7:30 PM

PROGRAM

Centennial Fanfare-March – Roger Nixon

Fetes – Claude Debussy/Arranged by William A. Schaefer

Onward-Upward March – Edwin Franko Goldman/Edited by Edward S. Lisk

Blue Shades – Frank Ticheli

Intermission

Classic Duke – Arranged by Luther Henderson/Paul Murtha

Dusk – Steven Bryant

Down Home Melody – Dick Hyman

Conducted by Stan Louiseau

William Tell Overture – Gioacchino Antonio Rossini/Arranged by Erik W. G. Leidzen


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Program Notes Copy, Palatine Concert Band, May 10, 2009

Centennial Fanfare-March was commissioned by the Modesto Junior College Symphonic Band on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the founding of its namesake city in California. The music was first performed in 1970, during the festivities of Modesto's Centennial Ball.

Roger Nixon (b.1921) was born and raised in California's Central Valley. He studied clarinet at Modesto Junior College and received a degree in 1941 at the University of California at Berkeley. He served four years of active duty in the Navy during World War II then returned to earn an M.A. and later a Ph.D. He was on the music faculty at Modesto Junior College and then at San Francisco State College where he is now Professor Emeritus of Music.

Most of Nixon's works are for band. He has also composed for orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, choral ensembles, as well as song cycles and an opera. Among his many awards are five grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Fêtes (Festivals) is the second of Three Nocturnes. Debussy imagined "the restless dancing rhythms of the atmosphere, interspersed with sudden flashes of light." After the exciting opening section, a procession starts as if approaching from a distance. Debussy described it as "a wholly visionary pageant, passing through and blending with the revelry; the background of the uninterrupted festival persisting; luminous dust participating in the universal rhythms." The music ends with the repetition of the opening measures, fading in the distance.

Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was the most influential French composer of his generation. He was born in St. Germain-en-Laye to a seamstress and a shopkeeper. As a student at the Paris Conservatory for 11 years he won honors for excellence though he found routine work distasteful. He is considered the founder and chief exponent of the school of modern French impressionism, a term he resisted. His compositions employed non-traditional scales and tonal structures, seeming at first, bewildering in their imaginative, atmospheric quality. His music is noted for its sensory component and how it is not often formed around one key or pitch. His compositions, distinctive and appealing, combined modernism and sensuality so successfully that their sheer beauty often obscures their technical innovation. Today, his delicate and poetic harmonies are regarded with great favor.

Onward-Upward March was written in 1930 during a period when the composer was deeply involved in efforts to standardize concert band instrumentation. Only a few months earlier he had organized the American Bandmasters Association to raise wind and music to a higher standard of artistic excellence and to secure the adaptation of universal instrumentation so that band publications of all countries would be interchangeable. At the time, wind bands contained varying numbers of musicians and instruments and little music was composed specifically for band. The title of this composition reflects optimistic conviction that bands would evolve "onward" to a bright and flourishing future and standardized orchestration would enable "upward" progression of the genre.

Edwin Franko Goldman (1878-1956) was born in Kentucky. His father was an amateur musician and member of the legal profession and his mother was an excellent pianist. When Goldman was nine his father died and it was necessary  for him and his brother to enter the Hebrew Orphan Asylum while their mother established herself as a piano teacher in New York. Goldman earned a scholarship to the National Conservatory of Music and studied under Antonin Dvorak. By seventeen he was a virtuoso cornetist playing with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. He went on to found the New York Military Band which became the Goldman Band, one of the greatest bands in history. He was a prolific composer with over 100 published marches and many miscellaneous pieces including cornet solos. His personal visits to schools and colleges during his last twenty years helped raise the standards of bands and band music everywhere.

Blue Shades  The title alludes to the Blues and a jazz feeling is prevalent, but this is not literally a Blues piece (no 12-bar Blues progressions and hardly any swung eighth-notes). It is heavily influenced by the Blues however, with "Blue notes" (flatted 3rds, 5ths, and 7ths); Blues harmonies, rhythms and melodic idioms; and many "shades of blue" depicted: from bright to dark, to dirty, to hot. At times, the piece burlesques some of the cliches from the Big Band era, not as mockery, but as tribute. A slow and quiet middle section recalls the atmosphere of a dark, smoky Blues haunt with fascinating solos by bass clarinet and oboe. An extended, gutsy, clarinet solo recalls Benny Goodman's hot style and ushers in a series of wailing brass chords recalling train whistle effects commonly used during that era. High energy and jazzy sounds build to a critical mass, a pressure cooker of excitement. The final stroke on the splash cymbal reminds the listener that this piece is a friendly tribute to an earlier style.

Frank Ticheli (b.1958) was born in Monroe, LA. He earned a doctorate at the University of Michigan. He lives in Los Angeles where he is a Professor of Composition at the University of Southern California.

Classic Duke  This is an adaptation for concert band of three classic Duke Ellington compositions: "Cotton Tail", "Sophisticated Lady", and "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)." It was originally scored by Luther Henderson for full orchestra and brass quintet and was adapted for band by Paul Murtha.

Edward Kennedy "Duke" Duke Ellington (1899-1974) was a bandleader, pianist and composer. He became one of the most influential figures in jazz. although he preferred to call his music "American Music". Raised by musical parents, he won a scholarship to study art after graduating from high school in Washington, D.C., but he decided instead to play piano in the ice cream parlor where he worked. By the time he was nineteen he had organized a small jazz band and was playing for dances. In 1927 he started a five-year engagement with a twelve-piece band at the Cotton Club in New York and the world of jazz was never quite the same. In spite of many worldwide honors and degrees including a special award citation from the Pulitzer Prize Board, Ellington remained a modest man, a tireless composer and performer, until his death in 1974.

Luther Henderson (1919-2003) was an arranger, composer, orchestrator, and pianist. A graduate of the Juilliard School of Music, Henderson was staff orchestrator for the U. S. Navy School of Music, Washington, D.C. He orchestrated more than 50 Broadway musicals, over 100 songs for The Canadian Brass, and served as orchestrator for Ellington's orchestral works.

Dusk  This simple, chorale-like work captures the reflective calm of dusk,
paradoxically illuminated by the fiery hues of sunset. The composer notes the dual nature of this experience, as if witnessing an event of epic proportions occurring silently in slow motion. It is intended to be a short, passionate evocation of this moment of dramatic stillness.

Steven Bryant (b.1972) was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. He studied composition at Juilliard School of Music, the University of North Texas and Ouachita University. He is an active composer and conductor with a varied catalog, including numerous works for wind ensemble, orchestra, electronic and electro-acoustic creations, music for chamber ensembles, and music for the Web.

Down Home Melody is a cheerful, country-style tune by Dick Hyman, a top studio keyboard recording artist in the 1950s and 1960s. The song was first recorded by his trio on a 1961 album. Hyman later created this arrangement for concert band.

Stan Louiseau has a degree in Music Education from Butler University. A native of International Falls, MN, he has studied trumpet with Max Woodbury, Dan Tetzlaff, Arno Lange, Renold Schilke and Adolph Herseth. He has been a member of the South Bend, Elkhart and Michiana symphonies; and Chicago Symphonic Pops and Chicago Civic Symphony orchestras. He has been principal trumpet and soloist with the St. Joseph (MI) and Waukegan municipal bands, and Indianapolis Philharmonic and Northwest Symphony orchestras. He has performed with the Indianapolis, Milwaukee and Chicago Symphony orchestras. He currently plays in brass quintets, the Harper Symphony, community musical orchestras, and with this band since 1972. Stan recently retired from data processing and teaches privately.

William Tell Overture  The opening to this opera is familiar not only to lovers of classical music but also to a broader audience due to its use in a radio and television series in the fifties, parodies, cartoons and movies. The opera includes the famous incident of the tyrant who condemns Tell to shoot an apple from the head of his little son as punishment for Tell's insubordination. Tell later kills  the tyrant with an arrow from a great distance and is hailed as liberator.

The overture has four parts: Prelude - a serene mountain scene in Switzerland; Storm - dynamic, tempestuous; Ranz des Vaches (call to the dairy cows) - pastoral neatherds singing bits of song between blasts on their horns as they assemble grazing cattle, featuring the English horn and flute; and Finale - ultra-dynamic "cavalry charge" galop with horns and trumpets.

Gioacchino Antonio Rossini (1792-1868) was a popular Italian composer who created 39 operas as well as sacred music and chamber music. A tendency for inspired, songlike melodies is evident throughout his scores, which led to the nickname "The Italian Mozart."

Rossini was born into a family of musicians in Pesaro on the Adriatic coast. His father was a horn player and inspector of slaughterhouses, his mother, a singer and baker's daughter. By the age of six he was playing the triangle in his father's band. While his father was in prison for having supported Napoléon, Rossini was raised in Bologna by a pork butcher and later apprenticed to a blacksmith. Both men encouraged his considerable musical talents as a horn player, cellist and composer. Rossini composed his first opera in his teens and quickly rose to popularity across all of Europe.

Artistic success brought Rossini financial security. Appointed Inspector-General of Singing in France, he began semi-retirement at 32. He settled in Paris and indulged his passions as a gourmand and amateur chef. Today there are a number of "alla Rossini" dishes that were either created by him or specifically for him. Click on www.palconband.org for a link to a recipe for Tournedos Rossini.