John Mackey has written for orchestras, theater, and extensively for dance, but the majority of his work for the past decade has been written for wind ensembles. His band catalog now receives annual performances numbering in the thousands.
In addition to Mackey celebrating his fiftieth birthday earlier this month and the twentieth anniversary of his first work for band – Redline Tango, Wine-Dark Sea: Symphony for Band celebrates its tenth anniversary this academic year, having premiered in February 2014. Until the Scars is an adaptation of the first movement of this work based on the ancient story of The Odyssey by Homer. In this section of the story, Odysseus, having filled his ship with the spoils of war, leaves for home, but he carried another, more dangerous, cargo: pride. This adaptation opens with a triumphal march and continues as he and his crew maraud through every port of call on their way home.
Sheltering Sky has a folksong-like quality - intended by the composer - and through this an immediate sense of familiarity emerges. Certainly, the band repertoire has a long and proud tradition of weaving folksongs into its identity, from the days of Grainger and Vaughan Williams to modern treatments by such figures as Donald Grantham and Frank Ticheli. Although the melodies of Sheltering Sky have a recognizable quality, the tunes themselves are original to the work, imparting a sense of hazy distance as though they were from a half-remembered dream.
The work unfolds in a sweeping arch structure, with cascading phrases that elide effortlessly. The introduction presents softly articulated harmonies stacking through a surrounding placidity. Though the composer’s trademark virtuosity is absent, his harmonic language remains. Mackey avoids traditional triadic sonorities almost exclusively, instead choosing more indistinct chords with diatonic extensions. Near cadences, chromatic dissonances fill the narrow spaces in these harmonies, creating an even greater pull toward wistful nostalgia.
Of the last piece presented this evening, the composer provides the following:
In the summer of 2020, in the midst of COVID, I desperately felt like I needed to write something joyful. So I started writing, and after about 24 measures, I had this terrible feeling - not uncommon for composers - that maybe the piece I was writing had already been written. And in this case, I feared that I had just plagiarized Frank Ticheli.
I sent the opening to Frank, who was incredibly gracious in his response. He said that he had NOT written this tune - although it’s clear that he could have. This is a Ticheli-esque tune if ever I had written one!
It turns out that if I think “let’s just write 3 minutes of joyful fun,” my brain jumps to “you mean Ticheli with an excessive amount of snare drum and a few extra wrong notes.”
Thank you to Frank Ticheli - to whom the piece is dedicated - for his inspiration.
It has been an exciting cycle preparing these works for performance. The different styles, harmonic languages, and structures sound different, yet still related. Cheers to fifty more years of writing, John Mackey!