Spring Overture by Kenneth Amis
KENNETH AMIS (b. 1970) is a composer and performer of world renown. Amis began his musical journey in his home country of Bermuda where he began playing piano at a young age and tuba in his high school years. He wrote his first published work at the age of fourteen and enrolled at Boston University to major in composition at age sixteen. After graduating from Boston University, he received a master’s degree in composition from the New England Conservatory.
As an active composer Amis has received commissions from several music organizations. He has also undertaken residencies with educational institutions of varying levels ranging from middle school to collegiate. He is a founding member and on the board of directors for the American Composers Forum New England Chapter. In 2007 he was composer-in-residence at the South Shore Conservatory in Massachusetts.
Amis’ music has been performed by groups such as the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, Royal Academy of Music Symphonic Winds, Detroit Symphony Orchestra and National Arts Center Orchestra of Ottawa. In 2003 Amis became the youngest recipient of New England Conservatory of Music’s “Outstanding Alumni Award.”
Spring Overture
“My first contact with Frank Battisti was in 1991 when I was accepted to the New England Conservatory of Music as a composition major. At that time composition majors were not expected and, in my case, discouraged by the administration from auditioning for performance ensembles at the school. A friend recommended that I call the conductor of the wind ensemble, Frank Battisti, directly. I did, and after introducing myself on the phone and telling him how my efforts to schedule an audition time for the school’s ensembles were being met with resistance, he told me to simply walk in after the last person before lunch and start playing. This turned out to be the beginning of a tremendously supportive and motivating relationship. In the years that followed, Mr. Battisti had me judge concerto competitions, commissioned two new works from me (Music for Music, Four Songs from Songfest by Bernstein), and has served as valued counsel on every aspect of my musical career, from conducting and interpretation to artists’ relations and music industry politics. I can honestly say that Frank Battisti gave my career as a professional composer the momentum it needed to get off the ground. His passion, drive and unwavering professionalism still sets a shining example and the bar for me and all who know him.”
— Kenneth Amis
For this commission, Frank Battisti was asked to write a short motif that would serve as inspiration. The motif composed by Mr. Battisti was a series of five notes, F-G-A-F- Gb. These notes served as the basis for the melodic material in Spring Overture. They will sometimes appear consecutively, other times they form the structure of the melody and have other notes in between them and other times they appear transposed or in an accompanying voice.
Breathe by Alex Shapiro
ALEX SHAPIRO (b. New York City, 1962) composes genre-blind acoustic and electroacoustic solo, chamber, choral, and symphonic pieces known for their lyricism and drama. Published by Activist Music LLC, her works are heard daily in concerts and broadcasts across the United States and internationally, and can be found on over thirty commercially released recordings from around the world. Shapiro is known for her seamless melding of live and recorded sounds that often include striking visual and physical elements, and for her innovative uses of technology throughout the composing, rehearsing, and performance of her music.
Shapiro is the symphonic and concert writer member on the board of directors of ASCAP, and a board member of the ASCAP Foundation. She also serves as a board member of The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, and is a former board member of U.S. music organizations including the American Music Center, American Composers Forum of Los Angeles, MacDowell Colony and Society of Composers & Lyricists.
Educated at The Juilliard School and Manhattan School of Music as a student of Ursula Mamlok and John Corigliano, Shapiro moved from Manhattan to Los Angeles in 1983, and in 2007 relocated to Washington state's remote San Juan Island, where she composes in a home perched on the water's edge, surrounded by wildlife. An award-winning nature photographer, Shapiro's images and music can be experienced on her blog www.notesfromthekelp.com and her website www.alexshapiro.org
Breathe in the composer’s words much of the year 2020 is epitomized by the concept of being deprived of breath. From the lung-destroying effects of COVID-19, to the murderous strangulations of police brutality. From the searing, choking walls of wildfire smoke, to the smothering evil of politicians attempting to asphyxiate democracy. It was tempting to title this piece “2020.” But the pandemic, the systemic racism, the climate changes and the abuses of power that churned malevolently as I composed this music, while heightened by a collective awareness, are not new. As quarantine has led millions of people to repeat the same day over and over, a simple theme of twelve notes repeats nine times, painfully slowly, always in the same order. A piano, rather than a wind instrument from which a deadly virus might be spread, offers up one pensive note at a time, paired with an atmospheric soundscape. As people attempt to stay connected to others through the internet, the combination of isolation and technology are a familiar theme. The static bleakness begins in grayness, becoming only more grim as time passes. Three quarters through, the orchestration begins to fill with sounds made from humans, not computers. The electronic track stops. The technology stops. All we hear are live musicians as the conductor, formerly tethered to unrelenting demands of a metronomic click track, becomes free to allow the ensemble breathe freely. Phrases climb upward from uncertainty, but of course there is no resolution. There can never be a resolution, because humans are not capable of such. But there can be hope, and breath.
Lincolnshire Posy by Percy Aldridge Grainger
PERCY ALDRIDGE GRAINGER (1882–1961) was a native of Brighton, Australia. He began studying piano at a young age with his mother, who was a professional teacher. At age thirteen Grainger left Australia to attend the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, Germany. Between 1901 and 1914 he was based in London where he established himself first as a society pianist and later as a concert performer, composer and collector of original folk melodies. As his reputation grew he met many of the significant figures in European music, such as Frederick Delius and Edvard Grieg. He became a champion of Nordic music and culture, and he expressed his enthusiasm through private letters. In 1914, he moved to America where he would live the rest of his life. At the outbreak of World War I Grainger enlisted as a U.S. Army bandsman, shortly after he was promoted to the Army Music School. In 1919, he became a U.S. citizen and made a worldwide concert tour. After his mother’s death in 1922 he became increasingly more involved in education, he became a professor and eventually served as the head of the music department at New York University. He also experimented with music machines that he hoped would supersede human interpretation. In his later years he wrote little new music but continued to give concerts that served to revise and rearrange his compositions. After World War II his health declined reducing his levels of activity, and he considered his career a failure. He gave his last concert in 1960, less than a year before his death.
Lincolnshire Posy as described by Grainger is “a bunch of musical wildflowers” based on folksongs collected in Lincolnshire England, mainly in the years 1905 to 1906, and the work is dedicated to the old folksingers who sang so sweetly to me. For these folksingers were the kings and queens of song! Indeed, each number is intended to be a kind of musical portrait of the singer who sang its undying melody — a musical portrait of the singer’s personality no less than of his habits of song — his regular or irregular wonts of rhythm, his preference for gaunt or ornately arabesque delivery, his contrasts of legato and staccato, his tendency towards breadth or delicacy of tone.”
Lisbon is a “Sailors Song” that tells the story of William, who is about to set sail for battle, and his love, Nancy who is carrying William’s baby. After pleading for his to stay and marry her, she sings how she would follow her lover into battle, “through France and Spain all for to be your bride.” The singer, Mr. Deane, was extremely old and too weak when Grainger first asked him to sing. Unable to write it all down the first time, Grainger returned the next year “to get Mr. Deane’s tune ‘alive or dead.’ I thought he might as well die singing it as die without singing it.”
Horkstow Grange is a narrative of local history and subtitled, The Miser and his Man- a local Tragedy. The story focuses on a falling out and ensuing fight between Steeleye Span, the miser and his man John Bowlin’. This was sung to Grainger by George Gouldthorpe, an impoverished English peasant who had spent his life working on the roads, and described by the composer ad having “a life of drudgery, ending, in old age, in want and hardship.” Grainger wrote, “In recalling Mr. Gouldthrope I think most of the mild yet lordly grandeur of his nature, and this is what I have tried to mirror in my setting of “Horkstow Grange.”
Rufford Park Poachers is a song about an attack on “forty bold poachers that night in Rufford Park.” Joseph Taylor, Grainger’s source, was described as “the perfect type of English yeoman: sturdy and robust, yet the soul of sweetness, gentleness, courteousness and geniality. Grainger had two different recordings of Taylor’s “cheery voice.” To reconcile the divergencies in Taylor’s two versions, Grainger combines them so that “practically all of Mr. Taylor’s variants appear in my setting.”
The Brisk Young Sailor was sung by the “proper Mrs. Thompson.” After seven long years, the brisk young sailor returns to wed his true love: “Now to the church they went together, and they got married there with joy.”
Lord Melbourne is a genuine English War Song. George Wray was eighty years old when he sang it to Grainger. Wray had a tough personality, and “he lived alone, surrounded by evil-smelling cats.” Grainger describes his singing as “more irregular in rhythm than any I ever heard.” The resultant setting uses “Free Time” with instructions, “The bandleader should give free rein to his rhythmic fancy, just as folk-singers do.”
The Lost Lady Found is a “dance-song-come down to us from the days when voices, rather than instruments, held village dances together.” This tune was collected not by Grainger, but by Miss Lucy E. Broadwood. Grainger’s score carries the instructions for the “dance-action” with the added direction, “and, if possible, demonstrated to the band by the bandmaster.” Stolen by Gypsies from her uncle, a fair maid was found fortuitously years later by “a young squire who loved her so.” They returned to town just as the unjustly-accused uncle was about to be hung for her disappearance. With the uncle saved and the “lost lady found,” their bells they did ring and their music did play, ev’ry house in that valley with mirth did resound.”