Yale Concert Band, Feb 20

Yale Concert Band Thomas C. Duffy, Music Director

Winter Concert

Friday, February 20, 2015, at 7:30 pm

Woolsey Hall, Yale University

PERCY ALDRIDGE GRAINGER Handel in the Strand (1911) PERCY ALDRIDGE GRAINGER Ye Banks and Braes O’ Bonnie Doon (1936) RICHARD STRAUSS Allerseelen (1885) JOHANN STRAUSS, SR. Radetzky March (1848) LANSING MCLOSKEY What We Do Is Secret (2011) I. Strange Notes II. The Unheard Music III. New York’s Alright (If You Like Saxophones...)

IV. Rise Above

Aaron Krumsieg, Daniel Venora, trumpets;

Reese Farnell, horn; Omar Dejesus, trombone; John Caughman, tuba

~ INTERMISSION ~

GORDON JACOB William Byrd Suite (1924) I. Earle of Oxford’s March II. Pavana III. Jhon Come Kisse Me Now IV. Mayden’s Song V. Wolsey’s Wilde VI. The Bells KURT WEILL Little Threepenny Music for Wind Ensemble (1928) I. Overture II. The Moritat of Mack the Knife III. The Instead-of Song IV. The Ballad of the Easy Life V. Polly’s Song VI. Tango-Ballad VII. Cannon Song VIII. Threepenny Finale

About Tonight’s Music Handel in the Strand (1911) PERCY ALDRIDGE GRAINGER (arr. Richard Franko Goldman)

Percy Aldridge Grainger, a pianist, composer, and champion of the saxophone, was born in Brighton, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. His architect father was an immigrant from London, and his mother, Rose, was the daughter of hoteliers from Adelaide, South Australia. His father was an alcoholic, and when Grainger was 11, his parents separated. His mother – a domineering and possessive, but cultured figure who recognized his musical abilities – took him to Europe in 1895 to study at Dr. Hoch’s conservatory in Frankfurt. There he displayed his talents as a musical experimenter, composing in irregular and unusual meters. From 1901 to 1914, Grainger lived in London, where he befriended Edvard Grieg and developed a particular interest in recovering the folk songs of rural England.

Grainger originally planned to name this piece Clog Dance, but his close friend William Gair Rathbone, to whom the piece is dedicated, suggested the title Handel in the Strand. The piece reminded Rathbone of both Handel’s music and English musical comedy (the “Strand” – a street in London – is the home of London musical comedy) – as if “jovial old Handel were careening down the Strand to the strains of modern English popular music.”

Ye Banks and Braes O’ Bonnie Doon (1936) PERCY ALDRIDGE GRAINGER

It was for the wind band, a “vehicle of deeply emotional expression,” that Grainger made some of his most memorable song settings, several of which are now cornerstones of band repertoire. Ye Banks and Braes O’ Bonnie Doon is a slow, sustained Scottish folk tune about the River Doon, a river that flows between the Lock Doon and the Firth of Clyde in Stirlingshire, Scotland. It was the inspiration for Robert Burns’ poem “The Banks of Doon,” written in 1783, telling of a forsaken young woman of rank who bore a child without the sanction of the Church.

Burns, a scholar of Scottish tunes, set the poem to music a few years later. Grainger’s setting gives continuous harmonic support to the five note melody, implying the steady flow of the river past its banks and hillsides (braes).

Grainger’s original setting of this piece was composed in 1901 for “men’s chorus and whistlers,” and the present version for band was published in 1936.

Allerseelen (1885) RICHARD STRAUSS (arr. Albert O. Davis)

Music was always an intrinsic part of life for Richard Strauss; his father, Franz, was an eminent horn player in the orchestra of the Bavarian court, and Strauss took harp lessons by the time that he was four. Strauss began the serious study of composition and orchestration at age 11. Over the course of his life, Strauss served as director of the Weimar Court Orchestra and the conductor of both the Munich Opera and the Royal Court Opera in Berlin. A master of orchestration, Strauss expressed the entire spectrum of human emotions in his tone poems and art songs.

Among these art songs, Allerseelen (All Souls’ Day) became a great favorite.

Allerseelen is part of the musical series that makes up Strauss’s opus 10, a collection of eight songs based on the poetry of Hermann von Gilm, wich he composed at the age of 21. Dedicated to Heinrich Vogl, a singer at the Munich Hofoper, Allerseelen was a staple in the concert repertory of Strauss and his wife, the soprano Pauline (née de Ahna) Strauss. Albert Oliver Davis’ arrangement for symphonic band is faithful to Strauss’ original work, maintaining the importance of the piece’s beautiful melody.

YALE CONCERT BAND Radetzky March (1848) JOHANN STRAUSS (arr. Alfred Reed)

Though historically overshadowed by his son, Johann Strauss, Jr. (“The Waltz King”), Johann Strauss, Sr., was a prolific composer himself with over 150 waltzes of his own published. In 1834, he was appointed bandmaster of the 1st Vienna militia regiment. Radetzky March, his best-known work, was written in honor of the Austrian general Joseph Radetzky, who had rousted the Italian rebellion at Custozza earlier that year. The tone of the piece is more festive than military, matching the dedicatee’s exuberant personality and popularity in the ballroom as well as on the battlefield. At its premiere, the Austrian officers in the audience began clapping along and enthusiastically stomping their feet. This tradition survives today when the march is played in concert halls throughout Vienna. It is traditionally the last piece of music played each year at the world-famous New Year’s morning concert in Vienna.

What We Do Is Secret [concerto for brass quintet and wind ensemble] (2011) LANSING McLOSKEY

Tonight’s brass quintet features Aaron Krumsieg and Daniel Venora, trumpets; Reese Farnell, horn; Omar Dejesus, trombone; and John Caughman, tuba. All are members of the Yale School of Music, class of 2016.

According to the composer, “What We Do Is Secret draws its title from the influential 1978 album by the early punk band, The Germs. Likewise, each movement is titled after the name of a song from an early Los Angeles punk band; respectively, ‘Strange Notes’ by The Germs, ‘The Unheard Music’ by X, ‘New York’s Alright (If You Like Saxophones...)’ by Fear, and ‘Rise Above’ by Black Flag. The concerto is an homage to these groundbreaking bands and countless others like them who, despite being lost in oblivion to the mainstream and having never achieved commercial success, nevertheless gave voice to the frustrations of a generation and ultimately changed the face of popular music. Rising from the ashes of the decadent, self-indulgent ’70s, this was ‘alternative rock’ before the term was co-opted by corporate record labels, MTV, Hot Topics, and Abercrombie & Fitch.”

Lansing McLoskey has been described as “a major talent and a deep thinker with a great ear” by the American Composers Orchestra, “an engaging, gifted composer writing smart, compelling and fascinating music” by Gramophone Magazine, and “a distinctive voice in American music.” His music has an emotional intensity that appeals to academic and amateur alike, defying traditional stylistic pigeonholes.

McLoskey’s music has been performed in sixteen countries on six continents, and has won more than two dozen national and international awards, including the prestigious Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the International Joint Wind Quintet Project Commission Competition, and most recently the 2014 Red Note Festival Composition Competition and a 2013 Aaron Copland Recording Grant. In 2009 he became the only composer in the 45 year history of the ISU New Music Festival to win both the chamber music and orchestral composition awards: both blind-juried national competitions with two independent panels. Recent performances include concerts in Berlin, Finland, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Colombia, the UK, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Miami, and performances at over a dozen music festivals in the past two years alone. Recent commissions include a concerto for Triton Brass and a consortium of wind ensembles, and new works for the Cincinnati Vocal Arts Ensemble, the newEar Ensemble for their 20th anniversary season, Chatham Baroque, the JWQP consortium of wind quintets, the soundSCAPE Festival in Maccagno, Italy, Ensemble Berlin PianoPercussion, and ensemberlino vocale in Berlin. He has been a Guest Composer or Composerin-Residence at Aspen, the Tanglewood Institute, the soundSCAPE Festival, Missouri Chamber Music Festival, Carolina Chamber Music Festival, and the Charlotte New Music Festival (summer of 2015).

He is the Professor of Composition at the University of Miami, Frost School of Music, and his music is released on Albany Records, Wergo Schallplatten, Capstone, Tantara, and Beauport Classics. 2013 saw the release

of three critically acclaimed CDs, including Specific Gravity: Chamber Works by Lansing McLoskey and The Unheard Music, including his multi-award-winning concerto What We Do Is Secret for brass and wind ensemble.

For more about his music, visit www.lansingmcloskey.com

Little Threepenny Music for Wind Ensemble (1928) KURT WEILL

Kurt Weill was born in 1900 in Dessau, Germany. The son of a cantor, Weill displayed musical talent at an early age. By the time he was twelve, he was composing and mounting concerts and dramatic works in the hall above his family’s quarters in the Gemeindehaus (town hall). During the First World War, the teenage Weill was conscripted as a substitute accompanist at the Dessau Court Theater. After studying theory and composition with Albert Bing, Kapellmeister of the Theater, Weill enrolled at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, but found the conservative training and the infrequent lessons with Engelbert Humperdinck to be stifling. Following a season as conductor of the newly formed municipal theater in Lüdenscheid, he returned to Berlin and was accepted into Ferruccio Busoni’s master class in composition. Weill supported himself through a wide range of musical occupations, from playing organ in a synagogue to tutoring students (including Claudio Arrau and Maurice Abravanel) in music theory, and later, by contributing musical criticism to Der deutsche Rundfunk, the weekly program journal of the German radio.

The result of a collaboration between Weill and the German artist Bertold Brecht, The Threepenny Opera was adapted from the original John Gay musical The Beggar’s Opera and was first performed in Berlin in 1928. This tangled plot of beggars, thieves, and whores features a varied cast of characters, the best known of which is Macheath (Mack the Knife), notorious bandit and womanizer. Macheath runs afoul of Jonathan Peachum when he marries Peachum’s daughter, Polly, in a ceremony of doubtful legality. Peachum and his wife devise a series of schemes to ensnare Mack: bribing prostitutes to turn him in, exercising their influence over the police, and ultimately threatening to ruin the coronation of Queen Victoria by convincing all of the beggars in London to line the parade route. Mack is imprisoned, escapes, and is imprisoned again. In a twist of fate, he is pardoned by the Queen and granted a baronetcy and an annual pension of 10,000 pounds.

Eventually banned by the Nazi Government, The Threepenny Opera paints an ugly picture of German society in the 1920s. Although the work was not expected to succeed, it proved to be one of the biggest theatrical successes of the Weimar Republic. The German conductor, Otto Klemperer, commissioned Weill’s Little Threepenny Music for Wind Ensemble a few months after the opera’s premiere. The music is drawn from jazz influences of Weill’s time and features the macabre and decadent “Mack the Knife,” which has been performed by various artists of all genres.

William Byrd Suite (1924) GORDON JACOB

William Byrd (c. 1542–1625) was an English Renaissance composer best known for his choral music, both sacred and secular, and was one of the founders of the English Madrigal School. He was also one of the most active and able of the English keyboard writers. The William Byrd Suite is based on some of his pieces taken from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Collection. The tercentenary of Byrd’s death was celebrated in 1923 and probably led Gordon Jacob to set these excerpts.

The suite’s first movement, Earle of Oxford’s Marche, is taken from a collection of keyboard pieces, which Byrd conceived of as a single work titled “The Battell.” The stately magnificence of this steadily measured music captures the great dignity of a distinguished personage. Movement two, Pavana, is slow and sustained with long, arching lines and contains especially eloquent writing for the winds. Movement three, Jhon Come Kisse Me Now, is

YALE CONCERT BAND a set of seven variations on an eight-bar tune; it has the harmonic charm and rhythmic vitality that is so much a part of the English madrigal and keyboard style of Byrd’s time. The fourth movement, The Mayden’s Song, begins simply enough for a unison of brasses and then unfolds its steady contrapuntal and figurative development toward a masterful agglomeration of sounds that Jacob distributes with affectionate regard for the original. Movement five, Wolsey’s Wilde, displays the suppleness that Byrd often brought to pieces of limited harmonic possibilities through skillful and imaginative play. Jacob adds the element of instrumental texture to point out Byrd’s implied dynamic contrasts. The suite concludes with The Bells (Variations on a Ground), in which a simple two-note rising figure persists without interruption and above which a set of variations on the sounds of bells gathers momentum.

Upcoming Yale Bands Performances • Sunday, March 1, 2015: Yale Jazz Ensemble: Stan Wheeler Memorial Jazz Concert. With the Reunion Jazz Ensemble. 2:00 pm, Levinson Auditorium, Yale Law School, 127 Wall Street, New Haven. Free.

• Saturday, April 11, 2015: Yale Concert Band: Spring Concert. Emblems (Copland); Corpus Callosum (Duffy); Adagio (Rodrigo). 7:30 pm, Woolsey Hall. Free.

• Sunday, May 17, 2015: Yale Concert Band: Annual Twilight Concert. Celebratory music on the eve of Yale’s Commencement. 7:00 pm, outside on the Old Campus. Free.

Harold Shapiro

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, 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 2014-2015 THOMAS C. DUFFY, Music Director STEPHANIE T. HUBBARD, Business Manager Piccolo Joohee Son SY 15

Bass Clarinet Libby Dimenstein MC 17

Flute Neyén Romano MC 16* Principal Paige Breen SY 16* Emma Platoff MC 17 Catherine Lacy BR 18 Jamar Williams SY 17

Bassoon Benjamin Lawrence ES 17* Principal Lily Sands BR 18* Grant Laster JE 18

Alto Flute Neyén Romano MC 16* Oboe Mason Ji MC 16 Principal Ron Cohen Mann YSM 16 English Horn Ron Cohen Mann YSM 16 Eb Clarinet Andrew Brod BK 17 Clarinet Eugene Kim BK 16* Keith L. Wilson Principal Clarinet Chair Alexander Ringlein BR 18* Jacob Neis SY 17 Anson Wang DC 17 Daniel Hwang TC 16 Ellie Handler ES 18 Liz Jones BR 15 Betsy Li SY 18 Andrew Brod BK 17

Soprano Saxophone Alex Pappas SM 15* Alto Saxophone Alex Pappas SM 15* Principal Michael Hoot BR 17

Trombone Richard Liverano YSM 16* Omar Dejesus YSM 16 Johnathan Weisgerber YSM 16 Euphonium Tristan Glowa MC 18 Tuba James Volz SY 15* Piano Anson Wang DC 17* Harmonium Stephan Sveshnikov SY 18**

Tenor Saxophone Hayley Kolding SY 17*

String Bass Luke Stence YSM 16

Baritone Saxophone Alec Mukamal SY 18

Guitar/Banjo Trevor Babb YSM 14*

Cornet/Trumpet Adé Ben-Salahuddin PC 18* Steve Moskowitz* Benjamin Rudeen MC 17 Holt Sakai BR 18 Katie Trimm BK 18

Percussion Jonathan Roig ES 18* Rebecca Leibowitz TC 18* Colum O’Connor BR 18* Benjamin Wallace YSM 14

French Horn John McNamara CC 17 Principal Nishwant Swami SM 17 Derek Boyer BR 18 Brandon Wanke MC 17

Music Librarian Jacob Neis SY 17 *performing in Little Threepenny Music **performing in Ye Banks and Braes O’ Bonnie Doon only

YALE CONCERT BAND OFFICERS

President: Libby Dimenstein

General Managers: Rebecca Leibowitz, Brandon Wanke Social Chairs: Ellie Handler, Anson Wang

Personnel Manager: Catherine Lacy

Publicity Chair: Mason Ji

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