University of Texas at San Antonio University Band
Flute / Piccolo
Brandon Davis Brooklyn De La O Kaitlyn Gaddis Isabel Olalde Figueroa Isabella Villareal Mai Vu
Oboe Sophie Havins
Clarinet
Matias Garcia DeShona Jernigan
Ajax Martin Savannah Montoya King Pattain Richard Ytuarte
Alto Saxophone
Bennie Aranda Devin Brown Gabriel Campa Brianna Castilla Mikayla Garza Matthew Hernandez Seth Perez
Tenor Saxophone Esaú Hernandez Marcellas Walker
Baritone Saxophone
Ava Carrasco Alfredo Gonzalez
Horn Benjamin Anzak Johanna Gutierrez Sara McClain
Eloisa Payne Matthew Stevens
Trumpet
Zachary Beesley Jonathan Bridges Kenedy Cardenas Anastacia Cervantez Xavier Contreras Richard Daul
Jay Hidrogo
Jack Jarboe
Gustavo Medrano Daniel Trevino Anthony Valencia Ricardo Vega Trombone Molly Busch Hailey Davis Robert De La Torre Michael Dominguez Logan Galvan Thomas Gonzales Mata Todd Lewis
Bass Trombone Nathaniel Duarte Javier Lopez
Euphonium Dalton Butler Finley Farrar Henry Garcia Alex Guzman Angelyca Meija Aidan Ramos
Tuba Matthew Bruns Shea Fierro Marc Guillen Stefen Oddo Melody Peña Noah Peña Frankie Rodriguez Christian Tapia
Percussion
Matthew Aceves Yohannes Akiel Aleena Bermudez Trent Fallin Lam Mai
Dylan Ruiz
Joshua Tran
Band Staff
Jayland Brown, TA/manager Johanna Gutierrez, manager DeShona Jernigan, manager Sara McClain, manager Richard Ytuarte, manager Jadee Dovalina, music librarian Jaime Viejo, music librarian
Assisting Musicians
James King, bassoon
Personnel roster is listed alphabetically to emphasize the important contribution made by each musician.
Conductors
Jayland Brown has worked as a visual/brass technician for various high school band programs from 1A to 6A classifications such as Brownwood High School, Temple High School, and Rising Star High School. Currently, Mr. Brown works as a private instructor for the San Antonio Independent School District and teaches trombone, euphonium, and tuba. He has also served as a technician for the Howard Payne University Leadership Camp since 2017. Additionally, Mr. Brown has just completed a full season as a graduate teaching assistant for the University of Texas at San Antonio’s “Spirit of San Antonio” Marching Band. Mr. Brown has served as an instructional and administrative staff member for the Guardians Drum and Bugle Corps. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Music from Howard Payne University in December 2020 and is currently pursuing a Master of Music degree with a concentration in instrumental conducting at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
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Hector Garcia is a native of San Antonio, TX currently pursuing a master’s degree in instrumental conducting at UTSA under the mentorship of Dr. John Zarco and Professor Ron Ellis. For three years, Hector taught high school and middle school band prior to attending UTSA. As a band director he taught brass and woodwind beginning band classes, marching band, concert band, and jazz band. In 2019, Hector led the Memorial High School Band to the National Memorial Day Parade in Washington DC. He has a bachelor’s degree in music education from Texas State University in San Marcos, TX and his primary instrument is trumpet. A hobby of his is photography and his favorite food is sushi.
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John Zarco is Director of Instrumental Ensembles and Associate Professor of Music at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he conducts the UTSA Symphonic Band and University Band. His responsibilities also include teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in conducting, wind literature, and music education. Prior to his appointment at UTSA, Dr. Zarco served as Director of Bands at Millersville University in Pennsylvania and as a public school instrumental music teacher at Saratoga High School, in Saratoga, California. Dr. Zarco received a D.M.A. in conducting from the University of Minnesota as well as B.M. (music education) and M.M. (instrumental conducting) degrees from California State University, Sacramento. Dr. Zarco has been inducted with honorary memberships into the national organizations of Pi Kappa Lambda, Sigma Alpha Iota, Kappa Kappa Psi, Tau Beta Sigma, and Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to the following for their ongoing support and dedication to the UTSA Bands:
Dr. Tracy Cowden, Director, School of Music
Dr. Stacey Davis, Acting Director, School of Music
Dr. Kasandra Keeling, Associate Director, School of Music
Naomy Ybarra, Administrative Services Officer 1 Steven Hill, Administrative Associate Wesley Penix, Senior Events Manager
Rolando Ramon, Marketing Coordinator
Mr. Donald Marchand, Music Program Specialist, UTSA Bands Hector Garcia and Jayland Brown, UTSA Bands Graduate Assistants
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Prof. Sherry Rubins and Prof. Paul Millette, Percussion Area Faculty
Dr. Rachel Woolf and Dr. Oswaldo Zapata, Woodwind and Brass Area Coordinators
Prof. Troy Peters, Director of Orchestras
Dr. Yoojin Muhn, Director of Choral Activities
UTSA School of Music Faculty
Jadee Dovalina, Jaime Viejo, and Darion Campbell, School of Music Librarians
UTSA Bands Managers
Program Notes
Compiled and Edited by John Zarco
Katahj Copley holds a bachelor’s degree in music education and composition from the University of West Georgia. Currently, he is pursuing a master's in music composition at the University of Texas at Austin. Copley’s first work, Spectra, was premiered in 2017 by the University of West Georgia’s Saxophone Ensemble. Since then, Copley has written over sixty pieces, including over twenty five for wind band. Aside from composing, Copley is an educator who teaches young musicians the joy of discovering music and why music is a phenomenal language.
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth, It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres Love never fails.
Halcyon Hearts is an ode to love and how it affects us all. Halcyon denotes a time where a person is ideally happy or at peace, so in short Halcyon Hearts is about the moment of peace when one finds their love or passion. The piece centers around major 7th and warm colors to represent the warmth that love bring us. The introduction which is sudden and colorful symbolizes the feeling of the unexpected journey it takes to find love. Using the colors and natural energy of the ensemble, we create this sound of ambition and passion throughput the work. No matter what race, gender, religion, nationality or love, we all are united with the common thread of passion from the heart. This piece was written in dedication to those who love no matter which negativity is in the world; do not allow hate and prejudice to guide the way we live our lives. Always choose lover and the halcyon days will come.
Program note from windrep.org and the publisher]
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Gustav Holst was a British composer and educator. He learned piano at an early age, but was stricken with a nerve condition that affected the movement of his right hand, forcing him to give up the piano for the trombone. He received degrees from The Royal College of Music in London, where he met fellow composer (and lifelong friend) Ralph Vaughan Williams. Holst became interested in Hindu mysticism and spirituality, interests that would later shape the course of his compositional output. In 1901, Holst married Isobel Harrison, who would remain with him the remainder of his life. Before Holst became a well known composer, he relied for income from playing the trombone in the Carl Rosa Opera Company and in the White Viennese Band, a popular orchestra specializing in "light music." In 1905, Holst became director of music at the
St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, London, and in 1907, he also became director of music at Morley College, retaining both positions until his death in 1934. Holst's compositions for wind band, although only a small portion of his total output, have made him a cornerstone of the genre.
In 1911, Holst composed the Second Suite in F, but he was so preoccupied (and later fatigued) by the details of supervising a performance by Morley College students of Purcell’s Fairy Queen (the first since the 17th century) that he forgot about the work until asked to compose another suite for military band in 1921. He changed his original tune Young Reilly in the opening of the march to the Morris dance Glorishears and made some slight changes in the instrumentation to comply with the instrumentation adopted by the Kneller Hall Conference of December 1921. The suite was premiered on June 30, 1922, at Royal Albert Hall, London, by the Military School of Music Band conducted by Lt. Hector E. Adkins.
The march movement uses three tunes, set in the pattern A B C A B. After the opening Morris dance, a broad and lyrical folk song, Swansea Town, features the euphonium and is followed by Claudy Banks, which has a lilting, swinging feeling derived from its compound duple meter. In describing the entire suite, Richard Franko Goldman comments that “no more delightful contribution has ever been made by a prominent composer to the band repertory.”
[Program note from windrep.org and the composer
George Percy Grainger an Australian born composer, pianist and champion of the saxophone and the concert band, who worked under the stage name of Percy Aldridge Grainger. Grainger was an innovative musician who anticipated many forms of twentieth century music well before they became established by other composers. As early as 1899 he was working with "beatless music," using metric successions (including such sequences as 2/4, 2½/4, 3/4, 2½/4). In December 1929, Grainger developed a style of orchestration that he called "Elastic Scoring,” a framework in which different instruments could be used to play the musical lines in a composition. He outlined this concept in an essay that he called, "To Conductors, and those forming, or in charge of, Amateur Orchestras, High School, College and Music School Orchestras and Chamber Music Bodies." In 1932, Grainger became Dean of Music at New York University, and underscored his reputation as an experimenter by putting jazz on the syllabus and inviting Duke Ellington as a guest lecturer. Twice he was offered honorary doctorates of music, but turned them down, explaining, "I feel that my music must be regarded as a product of non education."
Country Gardens is an English folk tune that Cecil Sharp collected in 1908 and passed on to Grainger, who played improvisations on it during his World War I tour as a concert pianist for the U.S. Army. According to Grainger, it is a dance version of the tune The Vicar of Bray. Once published in its original piano form, the tune brought Grainger great success. However, it was not among his favorite compositions. Later in life, despite the steady stream of income from its royalties, the fame of Country Gardens and the widespread public association of this work as being his best known piece, the work came to haunt Grainger. Mentally, it became his albatross. He came to think of his own brilliant original music as “my wretched tone art.” He once
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remarked, “The typical English country garden is not often used to grow flowers in; it is more likely to be a vegetable plot. So you can think of turnips as I play it.”
When asked in 1950 by Leopold Stokowski to make a new arrangement for Stokowski’s orchestra, Grainger obliged with a wildly satirical version that literally sticks out its tongue at the success of the little tune. In 1953, he rescored that arrangement for band. Reflecting his mood at the time, it is a bitingly sophisticated parody that was to become his only band setting of the music.
[Program note from windrep.org]
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David Biedenbender received the Doctor of Musical Arts and Master of Music degrees in composition from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the Bachelor of Music degree in composition and theory from Central Michigan University. He has also studied at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Sweden with Anders Hillborg and Steven Stucky, the Aspen Music Festival and School with Syd Hodkinson, and in Mysore, India, where he studied South Indian Carnatic music. His primary musical mentors include Stephen Rush, Evan Chambers, Kristin Kuster, Michael Daugherty, Bright Sheng, Erik Santos, Christopher Lees, David Gillingham, José Luis Maurtúa, John Williamson, and Mark Cox. Biedenbender has had the privilege of collaborating with many renowned performers and ensembles, including Alarm Will Sound, the PRISM Saxophone Quartet, the Stenhammar String Quartet (Sweden), the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, the United States Navy Band, the Philharmonie Baden Baden(Germany), VocalEssence, the Eastman Wind Ensemble, the Music from Copland House Ensemble, Detroit Symphony Orchestra bass trombonist Randall Hawes, and the University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Choir.
Of his composition, This Night, Biedenbender writes: This Night is a Christmas hymn that was originally written for Minneapolis based choir VocalEssence. This arrangement for band was created for Alex Kaminsky and the VanderCook College of Music Symphonic Band. The text for the choral version is a setting of the text Dies ist die Nacht, da mir erschienen, (this night is a wondrous revelation), which was written in 1683 by Caspar Friedrich Nachtenhöfer. I used an English translation of the original German poem by Anna B. Hoppe from 1922, which also serves as the text for the Christmas hymn of the same name, commonly set to the tune O Dass Ich Tausen Zungen, written by Johann B. König in 1738.
I chose this text because of the beautifully vivid imagery and metaphors for light in the poetry, and because I really enjoy the simple, common rhyme and phrase structure that encouraged me to write simple, clear music.
This night a wondrous revelation
Makes known to me God's love and grace;
The Child that merits adoration
Brings light to our benighted race;
And though a thousand suns did shine, Still brighter were that Light divine.
The Sun of Grace for thee is beaming;
Rejoice, my soul, in Jesus' birth!
The light from yonder manger streaming
Sends forth its rays o'er all the earth.
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It drive the night of sin away And turns our darkness into day.
This Light, which all thy gloom can banish, The bliss of heaven glorifies; When sun and moon and stars shall vanish, Its rays shall still illume the skies. This light through all eternity Thy heaven and all to thee shall be.
Program note from windrep.org]
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John Mackey holds a Master of Music degree from The Juilliard School and a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he studied with John Corigliano and Donald Erb, respectively. Mackey particularly enjoys writing music for dance and for symphonic winds, and he has focused on those media for the past few years. His works have been performed at the Sydney Opera House; the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Carnegie Hall; the Kennedy Center; Weill Recital Hall; Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival; Italy's Spoleto Festival; Alice Tully Hall; the Joyce Theater; Dance Theater Workshop; and throughout Italy, Chile, Japan, Colombia, Austria, Brazil, Germany, England, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.
Mackey has been recognized with numerous grants and awards from organizations, including: ASCAP, the American Music Center, the American Bandmasters Association (ABA), and National Band Association (NBA). He has held college residencies at Florida State, University of Michigan, Ohio State, Arizona State, University of Southern California, University of Texas, among many others.
Strange Humors represents one of Mackey's works that has been transcribed for wind ensemble. The first version of Strange Humors was a student piece for string quartet and djembe that Mackey wrote while pursuing his graduate degree at The Juilliard School. Its transcription came at the behest of Richard Floyd on behalf of the American Bandmasters Association. The piece represents a merging of musical cultures the modal melodies and syncopated rhythms of middle Eastern music with the percussive accompaniment of African drumming.
At the heart of the work lies the pulse of the djembe, which remains from the original version. The djembe, an hourglass shaped drum played with bare hands, is a major part of the customs of west African countries, such as Mali and Guinea, where djembe ensembles accompany many functional celebrations of society.
The piece opens with a sultry saxophone (English horn) solo, a line laced with Phrygian influence representing the "typical" melodies of the most northeastern parts of the African continent. Later, the saxophones emulate the snaking lines of the English horn. The addition of brass and auxiliary percussion to the original orchestration makes for particular impact during the shout sections of the piece, and the groove of the djembe combined with the quirky rhythms throughout leave an impression that lingers in the listener's mind long after its conclusion.
[Program note from windrep.org]
UTSA RECITAL HALL
OCTUBAFEST TO AVOID FAINTING, KEEP REPEATING "IT'S ONLY A CONCERT...IT'S ONLY A CONCERT!" FEATURING STUDENTS OF GARY POFFENBARGER & JOHN CAPUTO OCTOBER 25TH - 26TH AT 5:00PM UTSA RECITAL HALL
