CONCERT BAND
Dr. Michael Stewart, conductor

Whip and Spur
Thomas S. Allen
(1876-1919)
arr. Cramer

The Silent Hills of My Childhood
George Farmer
(1944-2010)

Old Home Days
Charles Ives
(1874-1954)

1. Waltz
2. The Opera House
3. Old Home Day
4. The Collection
5. Slow March
6. London Bridge is Fallen Down

Matthew Waymon, graduate assistant conductor

Xerxes
John Mackey
(b. 1973)

SYMPHONIC BAND
Dr. Fuller Lyon, conductor

First Suite in Eb (for Military Band)
Gustav Holst
(1874-1934)
ed. Matthews

1. Chaconne
2. Intermezzo
3. March

Tyler Hamilton, graduate assistant conductor

Hymn to a Blue Hour
John Mackey
(b. 1973)

Aurora Awakes
John Mackey
(b. 1973)

CONCERT BAND

Whip and Spur

Thomas S. Allen’s music is reflective of his life as a professional musician in the world of entertainment. His performing experiences vary from playing with symphony orchestras, to touring as director of an orchestra for a traveling burlesque show. Although Allen wrote a considerable amount of music for a variety of dances, acrobatic acts, and short dramatic sketches, most are forgotten. Only a few rags and galops are still heard in rodeos, circuses and concerts. Some titles occasionally heard include: General Mixup, U.S.A., Blue Streak Galop, Horse Marines Battle Royal, and Majestic. The Whip and Spur March was written to be played during an old-time rodeo. The recommended galop performance tempo and style is reserved for the most exciting circus acts and rodeo rides.

The Silent Hills of My Childhood

The Silent Hills of My Childhood is the composer’s childhood recollections of his mother’s stories of her youth in Ireland.

The title is a line from Prayer, a poem by Max Ehrmann:

May I still remember the bright hours that found me
Walking over the silent hills of my childhood
Or dreaming on the margins of the quiet river,
When a light glowed within me,
And I promised my early God to have courage
Amid the tempests of the changing years

George Farmer taught high school band and orchestra in Oklahoma, Texas, Georgia, and Florida. He was a 1972 graduate of Oklahoma College of Liberal Arts and received a master’s degree in education from the University of Oklahoma in 1974.

Old Home Days

The songs and sketches assembled in this suite reflect Ives's lifelong love of familiar tunes and home-grown music making.

1. Waltz begins and ends by quoting from Michael Nolan's popular Browery waltz "Little Annie Rooney." Ives's own verses to the song imagine Annie, now a bride, and her festive wedding party at "the old dance ground."

2a. The Opera House is the first part of the song Memories, and the text, also by Ives, recalls a youngster's breathless expectancy as the pit band strikes up the overture.

2b. Just as the curtain rises, a drum roll-off takes our thoughts outdoors again to "march along down Main Street behind the village band," amid the ringing of the church and schoolhouse bells. Old Home Days is the nostalgic title of the song from which this section is taken, and the obbligato line played during the repeat features bits and pieces of The Girl I Left Behind Me, Garryowen, and Auld Lang Syne.

3. The title of The Collection refers to a church offering. This setting of George Kingsley's hymn-tune Tappan introduces first "The Organist," then "The Soprano," and lastly a "Response by Village Choir."

4. Slow March, the earliest surviving song by Ives, was composed for the funeral of a family pet. Inscribed "to the Children's Faithful Friend," it opens and closes with a quotation from the Dead March of Handel's oratorio Saul.

5. London Bridge is Fallen Down! is a tonal and rhythmic "take-off" on the familiar tune, which we may imagine to be typical of young Ives's unruly keyboard improvisations. This arrangement is based on Kenneth Singleton's realization for brass quintet of Ives's sketches for organ or piano, which date from about 1891.

- Program Note from Score by Jonathan Elkus

Xerxes

John Mackey holds a Master of Music degree from The Julliard School and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he studied with John Corigliano and Donald Erb, respectively. Mr. Mackey particularly enjoys writing music for dance and for symphonic winds where he has received numerous performances and recordings of his works throughout the United States and abroad.

Xerxes takes its name from Xerxes the great, the King of Persia from 485-465 BC.  The music, unexpectedly, is a concert march. Whereas most marches are for concert band – at least the ones the composer is familiar with – are cheerful and in many cases patriotic. Mackey wanted to write a sort of “anti-march”: an angry, nasty march, that still follows the traditional structure expected from a military march. Xerxes, as the music hopefully suggests, was known as a nasty ruler, even by ancient standards. His claim to “fame” was invading and burning Athens to the ground. Xerxes was assassinated by Artabanus, who in turn was murdered by Xerxes’ son, Artaxerxes I.

SYMPHONIC BAND

First Suite in Eb

Gustav Holst’s First Suite in E-flat for Military Band occupies a legendary position in the wind band repertory and can be seen, in retrospect, as one of the earliest examples of the modern wind band instrumentation still frequently performed today. Its influence is so significant that several composers have made quotation or allusion to it as a source of inspiration to their own works.

Holst began his work with a Chaconne, a traditional Baroque form that sets a series of variations over a ground bass theme. That eight-measure theme is stated at the outset in tubas and euphoniums, and in all, fifteen variations are presented in quick succession. The three pitches that begin the work -- E-flat, F, and B-flat, ascending -- serve as the generating cell for the entire work, as the primary theme of each movement begins in exactly the same manner. Holst also duplicated the intervallic content of these three pitches, but descended, for several melodic statements (a compositional trick not dissimilar to the inversion process employed by the later serialist movement, which included such composers as Schoenberg and Webern). These inverted melodies contrast the optimism and bright energy of the rest of the work, typically introducing a sense of melancholy or shocking surprise. The second half of the Chaconne, for instance, presents a somber inversion of the ground bass that eventually emerges from its gloom into the exuberant final variations.

The Intermezzo which follows is a quirky rhythmic frenzy that contrasts everything that has preceded it. This movement opens in C minor and starts and stops with abrupt transitions throughout its primary theme group. The contrasting midsection is introduced with a mournful melody, stated in F Dorian by the clarinet before being taken up by much of the ensemble. At the movement’s conclusion, the two sections are woven together, the motives laid together in complementary fashion in an optimistic C major.

The March that follows immediately begins shockingly, with a furious trill in the woodwinds articulated by aggressive statements by brass and percussion. This sets up the lighthearted and humorous mood for the final movement, which eventually does take up the more reserved and traditional regal mood of a British march and is simply interrupted from time to time by an uncouth accent or thunderous bass drum note. The coda of the work makes brief mention of elements from both the Chaconne and Intermezzo before closing joyfully.

Hymn to a Blue Hour

The blue hour is an oft-poeticized moment of the day - a lingering twilight that halos the sky after sundown but before complete darkness sets in. It is a time of day known for its romantic, spiritual, and ethereal connotations, and this magical moment has frequently inspired artists to attempt to capture its remarkable essence. This is the same essence that inhabits the sonic world of John Mackey's Hymn to a Blue Hour.

Programmatic content aside, the title itself contains two strongly suggestive implications - first, the notion of hymnody, which implies a transcendent and perhaps even sacred tone; and second, the color blue, which has an inexorable tie to American music. Certainly, Hymn to a Blue Hour is not directly influenced by the blues, per se, but there is frequently throughout the piece a sense of nostalgic remorse and longing - an overwhelming sadness that is the same as the typically morose jazz form. Blue also has a strong affiliation with nobility, authority, and calmness. All of these notions are woven into the fabric of the piece - perhaps a result of Mackey using what was, for him, an unconventional compositional method:

"I almost never write music 'at the piano' because I don't have any piano technique. I can find chords, but I play piano like a bad typist types: badly. If I write the music using an instrument where I can barely get by, the result will be very different than if I sit at the computer and just throw a zillion notes at my sample library, all of which will be executed perfectly and at any dynamic level I ask. We spent the summer at an apartment in New York that had a nice upright piano. I don't have a piano at home in Austin - only a digital keyboard - and it was very different to sit and write at a real piano with real pedals and a real action, and to do so in the middle of one of the most exciting and energetic (and loud) cities in America. The result - partially thanks to my lack of piano technique, and partially, I suspect, from a subconscious need to balance the noise and relentless energy of the city surrounding me at the time - is much simpler and lyrical music than I typically write."

Though not composed as a companion work to his earlier Aurora Awakes, Hymn to a Blue Hour strikes at many of the same chords, only in a sort of programmatic inversion. While Aurora Awakes deals with the emergence of light from darkness, Hymn to a Blue Hour is thematically linked to the moments just after sundown – perhaps even representing the same moment a half a world away. The opening slow section of Aurora Awakes does share some similar harmonic content, and the yearning within the melodic brushstrokes seem to be cast in the same light.

The piece is composed largely from three recurring motives – first, a cascade of falling thirds; second, a stepwise descent that provides a musical sigh; and third, the descent’s reverse: an ascent that imbues hopeful optimism. From the basic framework of these motives stated at the outset of the work, a beautiful duet emerges between horn and euphonium – creating a texture spun together into a pillowy blanket of sound, reminiscent of similar constructions elicited by great American melodists of the 20^th century, such as Samuel Barber. This melody superimposes a sensation of joy over the otherwise “blue” emotive context – a melodic line that over a long period of time spins the work to a point of catharsis. In this climactic moment, the colors are at their brightest, enveloping their surroundings with an angelic glow. Alas, as is the case with the magical blue hour, the moment cannot last for long, and just as steadily as they arrived, the colors dissipate into the encroaching darkness, eventually succumbing at the work’s conclusion with a sense of peaceful repose. 

- Program note by Jake Wallace

Aurora Awakes

Aurora now had left her saffron bed,
And beams of early light the heav’ns o’erspread,
When, from a tow’r, the queen, with wakeful eyes,
Saw day point upward from the rosy skies.
 - Virgil, The Aeneid, Book IV, Lines 584-587 

Aurora – the Roman goddess of the dawn – is a mythological figure frequently associated with beauty and light. Also known as Eos (her Greek analogue), Aurora would rise each morning and stream across the sky, heralding the coming of her brother Sol, the sun. Though she is herself among the lesser deities of Roman and Greek mythologies, her cultural influence has persevered, most notably in the naming of the vibrant flashes of light that occur in Arctic and Antarctic regions – the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis.

John Mackey’s Aurora Awakes is, thus, a piece about the heralding of the coming of light. Built in two substantial sections, the piece moves over the course of eleven minutes from a place of remarkable stillness to an unbridled explosion of energy – from darkness to light, placid grey to startling rainbows of color. The work is almost entirely in the key of E-flat major (a choice made to create a unique effect at the work’s conclusion, as mentioned below), although it journeys through G-flat and F as the work progresses. Despite the harmonic shifts, however, the piece always maintains a – pun intended – bright optimism.

Though Mackey is known to use stylistic imitation, it is less common for him to utilize outright quotation. As such, the presence of two more-or-less direct quotations of other musical compositions is particularly noteworthy in Aurora Awakes. The first, which appears at the beginning of the second section, is an ostinato based on the familiar guitar introduction to U2’s “Where The Streets Have No Name.” Though the strains of The Edge’s guitar have been metamorphosed into the insistent repetitions of keyboard percussion, the aesthetic is similar – a distant proclamation that grows steadily in fervor. The difference between U2’s presentation and Mackey’s, however, is that the guitar riff disappears for the majority of the song, while in Aurora Awakes, the motive persists for nearly the entirety of the remainder of the piece:

“When I heard that song on the radio last winter, I thought it was kind of a shame that he only uses that little motive almost as a throwaway bookend. That’s my favorite part of the song, so why not try to write an entire piece that uses that little hint of minimalism as its basis?”

The other quotation is a sly reference to Gustav Holst’s First Suite in E-flat for Military Band. The brilliant E-flat chord that closes the Chaconne of that work is orchestrated (nearly) identically as the final sonority of Aurora Awakes – producing an unmistakably vibrant timbre that won’t be missed by aficionados of the repertoire. This same effect was, somewhat ironically, suggested by Mackey for the ending of composer Jonathan Newman’s My Hands Are a City. Mackey adds an even brighter element, however, by including instruments not in Holst’s original:

“That has always been one of my favorite chords because it’s just so damn bright. In a piece that’s about the awaking of the goddess of dawn, you need a damn bright ending — and there was no topping Holst. Well… except to add crotales.”

- Program note by Jake Wallace

Dr. Michael Stewart, conductor

* principal
+ co-principal

Names listed alphabetically

Flute
Joanna Gardner
Elizabeth Hamilton
Jordyn Robbins
Abby Smith
Maddie Stewart *
Shelby Wilkerson

Oboe
Caroline Storch

Clarinet
Skye Agard
Jackson Banks
Grant Barron
Tyler Best
Patrick Flaherty
Jose Lucas Francisco *
Courtney McHan
Evan Norris
Dylan Smith
Elle Wlas

Bass Clarinet
Christiana Campbell
Ploomie Messer

Bassoon
Macy Porter *
Patrick Sealy
Will Suydam

Alto Sax
Dylan Colston
Luke Robertson
Brady Vermillion *

Tenor Sax
Jordan Cannon
Sarah Vernetti

Bari Sax
Matthew Sexton

Trumpet
Aidan Amphonephong
Shandi Dice
Bryson Goss
Thomas Hooper
Kamden Lindsay
Koehl Lindsay
Jacob Long
Ethan Samuelson *
Kara Ussery

French Horn
Emily Baker
Garrett Booth
Sydney Flenniken
Xander Harms
Chase Hart
Alex Medearis
Sam Shoemaker*

Trombone
David Hernandez
Terrance Jones +
Thomas Kenner
Austin Kerr
Tagen Lowery
Luke Mercado
Ian Myers
Ian Searcy
Emily Stewart +

Euphonium
Mustafa Arkawazi *
Eli Atkin
Constance Baker

Tuba
Tommy Bond
River Cox
Jacob Schafer *
Isaiah Towns

Percussion
Hunter Franklin
Carson Hudson
Kayla King
Sadiq Mohammed
Shelton Skaggs *

Dr. Fuller Lyon, conductor

* principal
+ co-principal

Names listed alphabetically

Piccolo
Emily Piedot

Flute
Madalynn Adkerson *
Ava Chambers
Sarah Cox
Julianne Moss
JJ Nauman

Oboe
Aubrey Holland
Katherine Means *

Clarinet
Andrew Bassett
Ethan Cheatwood
Absa Dia
Asher Dunlap
Matthew Mihalic
Jack Myers
Brayden Payne +
Andrei Sabula +

Bass Clarinet
Joshua Adedokun
Natalie Rundblade

Contrabass Clarinet
Ashley Melvin

Bassoon
Austin Hill *
Peyton Morgan
Daniel Sippel

Contrabassoon
Daniel Sippel

Alto Sax
Anna Caten
Tristan Cook
Dawson May *

Tenor Sax
Gavin Morris

Bari Sax
Preston Turner

Trumpet
Hope Butler
Christian Carroll *
Gwen Hutchinson
Ian Krueger
Eli Oliver
Carlos Ortiz
Micah Purvis
Dylan Sacksteder

French Horn
Rylie Allen +
Duncan Clever
Carson Duckworth
Grace Estes
Rocky Foster
Cole McFarland +

Trombone
Noah Allard
Jack Cowart *
Tyler Guthrie
Jacob Ross
Nathan Whittington

Bass Trombone
AJ Duhaime

Euphonium
Sammie Beverley
Zack Donovan
Levi Gayso *

Tuba
Elijah Ailey
Paul Muirhead *
Hudson Scott

Percussion
Elliot Baldwin
Jackson Boeskool
Brooke Duez
Colston Oldham
Zac Swafford *
Chandler Webb

Piano
Stephanie Hensley

Assisting Musician
Freddy Morales

October 24, 2024
Wind Ensemble @ World’s Fair Park

November 21, 2024
Symphonic and Concert Band Concert

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