Yale Concert Band Thomas C. Duffy, Music Director
99th Season Opener Friday, October 7, 2016, at 7:30 pm
Woolsey Hall, Yale University
JOHN ALAN CARNAHAN Centennial Celebration Fanfare (2010) PERCY ALDRIDGE GRAINGER A Percy Aldridge Grainger Triptych: O Mensch, Bewein’ Dein’ Sünde Gross (1942) Irish Tune from County Derry (1909) Molly on the Shore (1907) RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Toccata Marziale (1924) JOHN PHILIP SOUSA The Gallant Seventh (1922) RYAN GEORGE Firefly (2008)
~ INTERMISSION ~
EDWARD GREEN Overture in Eb for Wind Ensemble (2012)* JOEL PUCKETT Avelynn’s Lullaby (2011) RON NELSON Rocky Point Holiday (1966)
*commissioned with funds from the Robert Flanagan Yale Band Commissioning Endowment
About Tonight’s Music Centennial Celebration Fanfare (2010) JOHN ALAN CARNAHAN John Alan Carnahan wrote Centennial Celebration Fanfare in honor of the 100th Anniversary of the Long Beach Municipal Band. The celebratory piece represents cresting waves, warm ocean breezes, and the flourish of sails along the coastline of Long Beach, California. The continual rise and fall of the tide, like the music itself, brings with it the excitement and optimism of another sunny day by the sea. A Percy Aldridge Grainger Triptych Percy Aldridge Grainger, a pianist, composer, and champion of the saxophone, was born in Brighton, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. His architect father was an immigrant from London, England, and his mother, Rose, was the daughter of hoteliers from Adelaide, South Africa. Grainger’s father was an alcoholic, and when Grainger was 11, his parents separated. His mother, a domineering yet cultured figure who recognized his musical abilities, took Grainger to Europe in 1895 to study at Dr. Hoch’s conservatory in Frankfurt. There, Grainger displayed his talents as a musical experimenter, composing in irregular and unusual meters. Grainger lived in London from 1901 to 1914, where he befriended Edward Grieg, and he developed a particular interest in recording the folk songs of rural England. O Mensch, Bewein’ Dein’ Sünde Gross (1942) J.S. BACH; SET FOR WIND-BAND BY PERCY ALDRIDGE GRAINGER (Edited by Keith Brion and Michael Brand) This Chorale-Prelude is taken from Bach’s Orgelbüchlein collection. Grainger created the setting between 1937 and 1942, and while not unusual today, his beautiful realization of the ornamentation was revolutionary in the 1940s. It is the “individualism” of Grainger’s carefully notated interpretive artistry that sets his transcriptions apart from other band arrangements of musical classics. His musical personality sings the lines, stresses harmonic changes, clears the way for important entrances, drops the volume for the next line to come through phrases over bar lines, imparts a natural sense of motion, and balances harmonic and melodic textures. This interpretation of O Mensch, Bewein’ Dein’ Sünde Gross (O, Man, now weep for thy great Sin) is the sort that one hears in a masterful chamber music performance. Irish Tune from County Derry (1909) This work is based on a tune collected by a Miss J. Ross of New Town, Limavaday, County Derry, Ireland, and published in The Petrie Collection of Ancient Music of Ireland in 1885. Grainger wrote his setting in 1909 and dedicated the piece to the memory of Edward Grieg. The “perfect” melody and the rich sonorities of the arrangement have kept the Irish Tune a perennial favorite. Molly on the Shore (1907) In the spring of 1920, Grainger completed his last piece for wind orchestra composed in his “army period,” Molly on the Shore. The piece is based on two reel tunes from Corke: “Temple Hill” and “Molly on the Shore,” both from Charles Stanford Villiers’s The Complete Petrie Collection of Ancient Irish Music. Grainger wrote his first setting of the tune for string quartet (fiddle four-some) as a birthday gift for his mother in 1907.
YALE CONCERT BAND Toccata Marziale (1924) RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Composed for the Commemoration of the British Empire Exhibition of 1924, the Toccata Marziale is a first-rate work by a composer with an unrivaled skill in scoring for wind band. The opening is somewhat akin to a fanfare, with movement in triads that is especially effective. Its contrapuntal texture involves the juxtaposition of brass and reed tonal masses, and occasional lyric entrances soon give way to the primary brilliance of the basic theme. Another important melody is first sung by the euphonium and then by the cornet, a broad, flowing theme that sings against the constant movement of the basic theme, which is never completely lost. Skillfully woven together into a unified whole, the piece exploits the fundamental properties of the band’s sonority, virtuosity, and color. Toccata Marziale has an immense, non-contrived vigor. The Gallant Seventh (1922) JOHN PHILLIP SOUSA This march, one of Sousa’s finest and most vigorous, was composed while he was recuperating from a broken neck. The march takes it title from the 7th Regiment, 107th Infantry, of the New York National Guard, whose history traces back to the Civil War. The commander of the 7th Regiment Band, Colonel Wade W. Hayes, requested a march from Sousa. Sousa complied and was named honorary bandmaster of the regiment. Firefly (2008) RYAN GEORGE “I’m amazed at how children use their imaginations to transform the ordinary and normal into the extraordinary and fantastic. Just about anything they come across can be used to spark their fantasies and usher their minds into unseen worlds. A stick on the ground becomes a wand with magical powers or a sword to fight off bad guys. A collection of rocks turns into buried treasure and a blanket stretched over two chairs becomes a cave to hide in. And things found in nature; birds, waterfalls, flowers, and even insects take on mythic identities when viewed through the eyes of a child. “The idea for Firefly was born one night as I watched my 4-year old become mesmerized by a firefly that had wandered into our front yard. When I asked her what she thought of the ‘firefly’ she looked at me with a puzzled look and said with a corrective tone, ‘Dad, that is not a firefly…that’s Tinkerbell, and she’s come to take me with her on an adventure!’ “Firefly is dedicated to my daughters Sophia and Nyla, who ignite my imagination and bring awe and wonder into my life every day.” – Ryan George Overture in Eb for Wind Ensemble (2012) EDWARD GREEN In 2004, Edward Green received a Music Alive! Award from the American Symphony Orchestra League, which funded a year-long residency by him with the InterSchool Orchestras of New York. During that residency Dr. Green wrote this overture, and the Concert Winds of ISO premiered it. A few years later, the conductor of the Columbia University Concert Winds, Andrew Pease, proposed that a consortium be created to commission Edward Green to add three more movements to the overture, creating a full-scale symphony. Thirteen of America’s leading wind ensembles joined the consortium – including Yale. The result was the 2012 Symphony in Eb.
The composer has said, “As I wrote this symphony I was inspired by the ideas of the great educator and poet Eli Siegel, founder of the philosophy of Aesthetic Realism. Its central principle is his statement: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” The symphony as a whole is a drama, in musical terms, of opposites everyone can recognize in themselves – and in people as such: tenderness and force; seriousness and light-heartedness; dark, weighty moods and joyous enthusiasm. The opening portion of that drama can be heard in this Overture, which begins quietly, with a long arched melody, and grows to reach climaxes of great power. Edward Green is an award-winning composer whose Piano Concertino was nominated for a 2010 Grammy. His doctorate is from New York University. Since 1980, he has been on the faculty of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, and has been a professor of music history at Manhattan School of Music since 1984. He studied Aesthetic Realism with Eli Siegel in the late 1970s, and has continued that study in the years since in classes taught by the distinguished poet and critic Ellen Reiss, who is Aesthetic Realism Chairman of Education. For several years, Dr. Green was a Fulbright Foundation Senior Scholar in American Music. Under their sponsorship, and with the support of the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, he taught a doctoral seminar in the music of John Cage at the Pontifical University of Argentina in Buenos Aires. He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington (2014), and China and the West: The Birth of a New Music (Shanghai Conservatory Press, 2009). His music can be heard on Albany Records and Arizona University Recordings, and in 2017 Bridge Records will release a CD of three of his chamber works, including the Quintet for Brass, winner of the 1996 Kodaly International Composer’s Award. Avelynn’s Lullaby (2011) JOEL PUCKETT “My daughter, Avelynn, arrived on a spring morning with a pep in her step. Since day one, she has had the energy of three babies [although, to be honest, I’m not sure how that is measured]. “Our nighttime routine has become set in stone. I give her a bath, put her in her pajamas, and we read a book or two. And then we come to my favorite portion of the routine: the lullabies. Doing my part, I sing her slow lullabies while rocking her, and she does her part, fighting the onset of sleep. By far her favorite lullaby is the one my mother used to sing me: ‘Sail Far Away, Sail Across the Sea, Only don’t forget to Sail, back again to me.’ “At least, I thought it was the one my mother used to sing to me. I got curious about the rest of the verses and found that the piece was written in 1898 by Alice Riley and Jesse Gaynor and has only a passing resemblance to the song I remember my mother singing to me. Better yet, it has virtually no resemblance to the lullaby I had been singing to Avelynn! So Avelynn’s Lullaby is both a journey of daddy trying to coax daughter to sleep and a journey of daughter enjoying the song, fighting sleep and eventually succumbing to slumber.” – Joel Puckett Rocky Point Holiday (1966) RON NELSON Ron Nelson’s Rocky Point Holiday was commissioned by and composed for the University of Minnesota Concert Band. The piece is an exciting virtuoso work representative of a great number of American compositions that united elements of jazz and classical construction into a new American style. Rocky Point is a wind-blown seaside resort on the coast of Rhode Island.
YALE CONCERT BAND Upcoming Yale Bands Performances • Sunday, November 13, 2016: Yale Concert Band Matinee. Southern Harmony (Donald Grantham), Autumn Walk (Julian Work), Endurance (Timothy Mahr), Circus Polka (Igor Stravinsky), Compass (Charles Romano SM 19) [premiere]. 2:00 pm, Woolsey Hall. Free. • Friday, December 2, 2016: “Rhythm and Remembrance” feat. Steve Ross and the Yale Jazz Ensemble “All-Stars.” Thomas C. Duffy, Music Director. New York cabaret artist Steve Ross performs the songs of Fred Astaire and Cole Porter, accompanied by a nine-piece Yale jazz ensemble. A reprise of the May 2016 hit show in New York’s Birdland Jazz Club. 7:30 pm. Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall. Free. • Sunday, December 4, 2016: Yale Concert Band: An Old-Fashioned Christmas Concert. 2:00 pm. Woolsey Hall. Free. • Friday, February 19, 2017: Yale Concert Band Winter Concert. Hiraizumi: Cyberpunk for Wind Ensemble (Simon Hutchinson), Festive Overture (Dmitri Shostakovich), Cartoon (Paul Hart), Les Couleurs Fauves (K. Husa). 7:30 pm, Woolsey Hall. Free. • Monday March 6, 2017: Yale Jazz Ensemble Spring Concert. Thomas C. Duffy, Music Director. 7:30 pm. Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall. Free. • Friday, April 7, 2017: Yale Concert Band Spring Concert. Symphony from Ivy Green (Mark Camphouse), based on writings by Helen Keller, Janna Baty, soprano; Roma (Valerie Coleman); Postcard (Frank Ticheli). 7:30 pm, Woolsey Hall. Free. • Sunday, April 9, 2017: Stan Wheeler Memorial Jazz Concert. Yale Jazz Ensemble, Thomas C. Duffy, Music Director, and the Reunion Jazz Ensemble. 2:00 pm, Levinson Auditorium, Yale Law School, 127 Wall Street. Free. • Sunday, May 21, 2017: Yale Concert Band Annual Twilight Concert. Ceremonial music on the eve of Yale’s Commencement. 7:00 pm, outside on the Old Campus. Free.
Yale University Bands P.O. Box 209048, New Haven, CT 06520–9048 ph: (203) 432–4111; fax: (203) 432–7213 stephanie.hubbard@yale.edu; www.yale.edu/yaleband
YALE CONCERT BAND
About the Music Director Thomas C. Duffy (b. 1955) is Professor (Adjunct) of Music and Director of University Bands at Yale University, where he has worked since 1982. He has established himself as a composer, a conductor, a teacher, an administrator, and a leader. His interests and research range from non-tonal analysis to jazz, from wind band history to creativity and the brain. Under his direction, the Yale Bands have performed at conferences of the College Band Directors National Association and New England College Band Association; for club audiences at NYC’s Village Vanguard and Iridium, Ronnie Scotts’s (London), and the Belmont (Bermuda); performed as part of the inaugural ceremonies for President George H.W. Bush; and concertized in nineteen countries in the course of sixteen international tours. Duffy produced a two-year lecture/performance series, Music and the Brain, with the Yale School of Medicine; and, with the Yale School of Nursing, developed a musical intervention to train nursing students to better hear and identify body sounds with the stethoscope. He combined his interests in music and science to create a genre of music for the bilateral conductor - in which a “split-brained conductor” must conduct a different meter in each hand, sharing downbeats. His compositions have introduced a generation of school musicians to aleatory, the integration of spoken/sung words and “body rhythms” with instrumental performance, and the pairing of music with political, social, historical and scientific themes. He has been awarded the Yale Tercentennial Medal for Composition, the Elm/ Ivy Award, the Yale School of Music Cultural Leadership Citation and certificates of appreciation by the United States Attorney’s Office for his Yale 4/Peace: Rap for Justice concerts – music programs designed for social impact by using the power of music to deliver a message of peace and justice to impressionable middle and high school students. From 1996 to 2006, he served as associate, deputy and acting dean of the Yale School of Music. He has served as a member of the Fulbright National Selection Committee, the Tanglewood II Symposium planning committee, and the Grammy Foundation Music Educators Award Screening Committee, and completed the MLE program at the Harvard University Institute for Management and Leadership in Education. He has served as: president of the Connecticut Composers Inc., the New England College Band Directors Association and the College Band Directors National Association (CBDNA); editor of the CBDNA Journal, publicity chair for the World Association of Symphonic Bands and Ensembles; and chair of the Connecticut Music Educators Association’s Professional Affairs and Government Relations committees. For nine years, he represented music education in Yale’s Teacher Preparation Program. He is a member of American Bandmasters Association, American Composers Alliance, the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, Connecticut Composers Incorporated, the Social Science Club, and BMI. Duffy has conducted ensembles all over the world and most recently was selected to conduct the 2011 NAFME National Honor Band in the Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C.
YALE CONCERT BAND 2016-2017 THOMAS C. DUFFY, Music Director STEPHANIE HUBBARD, Business Manager
Piccolo Rona Ji MC 18 Flute Beatrice Brown PC 19 Principal Neyén Romano BK 18 Monica Barbosa DC 19 Catherine Lacy BR 18 Julia Cai BR 20 Hayley Kolding SY 17 Matthew Le JE 20 Joan Gomez-Aguilar BK 20 Seungjung Sohn ES 19 Oboe Jake Houston CC 19 Principal Noah Kay MUS 18
Bass Clarinet Libby Dimenstein MC 17 Principal
Trombone Luke Benz SM 19 Principal William Burns MC 20 Matthew Kegley PC 19
Contrabass Clarinet Anson Wang DC 17
Euphonium Kevin Truong SM 20
Bassoon Bradford Case SM 20 Principal Jorge Nunez MC 20
Tuba Josef Lawrence TC 20 Principal Alison Ross CC 20
Alto Saxophone Antonio Medina SM 19 Principal Onyx Brunner MC 20
String Bass Jordan Calixto MUS 18
Tenor Saxophone Karina Franke TD 20
Harp Shin Young Yu MUS 17
English Horn Noah Kay MUS 18
Baritone Saxophone Sara Harris SY 19
Piano/Celeste Julia Weiner BK 19
Eb Clarinet Andrew Brod BK 17
Cornet/Trumpet (rotating) Eli Baum JE 19 Principal Christoph Funke ES 19 Noah Montgomery CC 19 Holt Sakai BR 18 William Thompson GSAS 21 Jacob Zavatone-Veth SM 19
Timpani Rebecca Leibowitz TC 18
French Horn (rotating) John McNamara CC 17 Principal Derek Boyer BR 18 Allison Hammer DC 20 Michael McNamara TD 20 Nishwant Swami SM 17 Brandon Wanke MC 17
Music Librarian Derek Boyer BR 18
Clarinet Christopher Zhou PC 19 Keith L. Wilson Principal Clarinet Chair* Alexander Ringlein BR 18 Alison Ho CC 20 Jessica Oki TC 20 Anson Wang DC 17 Christian Fernandez TC 20 Jacob Neis SY 17 Alex Brod BK 19 Madeline Bender TD 20 Heather McClure ES 20 Ellie Handler ES 18 Betsy Li SY 18
Percussion Melina Delgado TD 19 Nasser Odetallah BR 20 Jonathan Roig ES 18 David Zuckerman DC 20
* Friends of Keith Wilson (Director of Yale Bands
from 1946–1973) honored him by endowing the principal clarinet chair in the Yale Concert Band in his name. If you would like information about naming a Yale Concert Band chair, please contact the Yale Bands office.
YALE CONCERT BAND OFFICERS
President: Catherine Lacy Personnel Manager: Rona Ji General Managers: Melina Delgado, Christopher Zhou Publicity Chair: Beatrice Brown Social Chairs: Hayley Kolding, Antonio Medina
Yale Concert Band Italy/Greece Tour Highlights (May 24-June 4, 2016)
Athens, Greece
Bologna, Italy
Director Duffy invites the children to take turns conducting during the Band’s performance at the Eleonas Refugee Camp.
The Band rehearses with the Coro del Collegium Musicum at the Church of Santa Cristina.
Rome, Italy
Athens, Greece
After a tour of the Vatican.
In classic Y formation atop the Acropolis.