Yale Conert Band

Yale Concert Band

Thomas C. Duffy, Music Director

The Silver Screen: Music for Film and Band Friday, February 10, at 7:30 pm

Woolsey Hall, Yale University

NICK BASKIN

JOHN WILLIAMS arr. Donald Hunsberger

Green Fields: Elegy for Baritone and Chamber Winds (2011)

Dashon Burton, baritone Star Wars Trilogy (1997)

I. The Imperial March (Darth Vader’s Theme)

II. Princess Leia’s Theme

III. Battle in the Forest

IV. Yoda’s Theme

V. Star Wars (Main Theme)

Triptych for Film and Band: MARTIN O’DONNELL arr. Michael Salvatori & Timothy Salzman COSTAS DAFNIS HUCK HODGE

Music from Halo (1996)

Footage from game play Parliament in Flight (2008)

Animation by A. A. Roberts * from the language of shadows (2010) *

I. Prologue in Heaven

II. Tenebrae

III. of signs and erring stars

IV. Inveiglement

V. Epilogue: Now body, turn to air Footage from F.W. Murnau’s Faust (1926) * Specially commissioned for the Yale Concert Band, funded in part by the Robert Flanagan Yale Band Commissions Endowment Fund

About Tonight’s Music Green Fields: Elegy for Baritone and Chamber Winds (2011) Nick Baskin

“In the summer of 2010, I attended the Boston University Tanglewood Institute’s Young Artists’ Composition program, where our first assignment was to set an English-language text for baritone voice and piano. Moved by nothing more than the beauty of the words, I chose to set a text by New York resident Adam Lee. Of the pieces I wrote that summer, the resulting song was by far my favorite, a judgment that has remained unchanged with the passage of time. After the tragic and untimely death of Michele Dufault in April 2011, I decided to re-score the piece for baritone and wind ensemble, and to dedicate it in her memory to the Yale Bands community.

“The piece is a sort of parable, with no clear overarching form. The slow opening, for harp and voice alone, represents an awakening into consciousness, as from a forgotten dream. What follows is a quilted tapestry, stitched together from countless fragmented snapshots from a lifetime of images. They flash up and ebb away quickly, linked only by the thread of the singer’s voice, until all of the separate colors are woven together in an ever-changing tumult. A few dregs remain, and the piece finishes as it began, a lone voice singing over harp.”

– Nick Baskin Star Wars Trilogy (1997) John Williams (Arr. Donald Hunsberger)

The phenomenal success twenty years ago of Star Wars and its two companion films, Return of the Jedi and The Empire Strikes Back, renewed interest in movies as huge spectacles. Although set in futuristic terms for we earthbound travelers, the three films are in many ways actually historical in nature.

Frequently described as “the morality plays of film,” the stories in the trilogy share a common theme of the primary struggle between good and evil and the eventual success of love conquering all.

Created originally to be part of a nine-part series, each film is complete within itself while remaining open-ended for its eventual position in the nine tales. The characters obviously grow older and the production technology develops more and more as each year goes by. The current re-release of the films in the United States has generated massive interest and box-office success for the shows.

Of musical interest, the Star Wars project brought to international prominence the talents of John Williams, one of the most gifted composers for film and television. Williams worked in a totally different compositional style for the late 1970s in that he did not write short “cue music” for individual scenes, but rather composed large free-standing compositions that accompanied large segments of the film.

The five excerpts gathered in the Trilogy are each capable of individual contrast, excitement, and beauty. The themes for Leia and Yoda have received recognition, and the “Darth Vader Death March” and “The Main Title Music” are some of the best known film music performed today. The hidden gem in this set is the third movement, “The Battle in the Forest,” from Return of the Jedi, an extremely humorous Prokofiev-esque vivace which supports the little Ewoks in their fight with huge metallic giants.

YALE CONCERT BAND Music from Halo (1996) Martin O’Donnell (Arr. Michael Salvatori & Timothy Salzman)

Responsible for revolutionizing the console first-person shooter genre, Halo: Combat Evolved is a science-fiction video game that takes place on a mysterious alien ring-world. Rivaled only by its two sequels, Halo is one of the highest-selling and most critically acclaimed video games in the country. In addition, the Halo soundtracks are some of the best-selling game soundtracks ever released.

Halo just wouldn’t be Halo without its music. The exhilarating yet ancient feel to the musical score has come to define the Halo experience in many ways–people recognize Halo by its iconic music. The music of Halo is evocative and inspiring, both dynamic and interactive. It is designed so that the player feels that their personal game experience was scored. By introducing different types of music based on certain triggers, the music has a very natural progression that results in its grandiose, cinematic sound. Michael Salvatori’s arrangement of this music for band attempts to balance samples of O’Donnell’s “glue” (ambient), “stinger” (momentary highlight), and “percussive” (active, excitement building) music in a way that simulates game play.

Parliament in Flight (2008) Costas Dafnis

Beginning with motives meant to invoke the deep rhythmic “whoos” of the Great Grey Owl, Parliament in Flight falls somewhere between the genres of symphonic tone poem and Discovery Channeldocumentary soundtrack.

The first movement focuses in on the quiet and mysterious beauty of the creature sometimes called “the great grey ghost of the north” while the second pans out to imagine a parliament (collective group of owls) rising majestically into flight. from the language of shadows (2010) Huck Hodge

Several aspects of this piece were inspired by images from F.W. Murnau’s 1926 masterpiece of expressionistic cinema Faust. I was immediately drawn to the striking and stark blending of bright and dark lighting in the film as well as the angularly dramatic imagery. The titles of the movements are taken from Goethe as well as from Christopher Marlowe’s 1604 play Doctor Faustus. Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare, is today comparatively unknown, owing in some part to his death at the age of 29 under mysterious circumstances (he is said to have been a spy).

In “Prologue in Heaven,” Mephistopheles and the angels discuss the fate of mankind and a wager is born to wrest the soul of Faust. “Tenebrae,” Latin for “shadows” and the name of a service held at the height of Lent, recalls the imagery of Murnau’s cinematic plague scene. “Of signs and erring stars” is a line taken from a scene of Marlowe’s, in which Faust summons Mephistopheles. “Inveiglement” evokes a scene in which the devil tempts Faust with the treasures of youth and power. The title of the epilogue is taken from the damnation monologue in Marlowe. Faust reminisces on the lost pleasures of his life. The clock strikes twelve and he exclaims, “O, it strikes! It strikes! Now body, turn to air…”

YALE CONCERT BAND

About The Composers

Born in Canberra, Australia in 1991, Nick Baskin ES ‘13 spent the first half of his childhood in Columbia, Missouri before moving to Amherst, Massachusetts, where he now resides when not at Yale.

He has formally studied piano and bassoon, as well as dabbling in many other instruments. Under the tutelage of Rebecca Eldredge, and now Scott Switzer, his bassooning has taken him to the Kinhaven Music School, the Tanglewood Bassoon Workshop, and four years of Massachusetts All State Festivals.

In addition to his position in the YCB, he enjoys playing in the pits for many of the student productions that go up every year at Yale.

As a composer, Nick Baskin has studied with Nic Scherzinger, Daniel Kennedy, and Martin Amlin, among others, and has attended the Tanglewood Young Artists’ Composition Program. Generally preoccupied with form and tone color, his works often show a particular attention to motivic melodies, replete with constant rhythmic irregularities.

Greek-American Costas Dafnis (b. 1989) holds a Bachelor of Music degree in Theory and Composition from Centenary College of Louisiana, having studied composition under Tom Hundemer and Todd Gabriel. He is a founding member of Noisi Paintr, a collaborative group of three composers with similar goals of advancing repertoire for wind band through writing and travel. When not composing, Costas spends his time playing mandolin poorly and burying himself in all the strange, obscure poetry he pretends to like.

Huck Hodge writes music that explores the embodied poetics of organized sound, perceptual illusion and the threshold between design and intuition. He is the winner of the Gaudeamus Prize, the Aaron Copland Award from the Bogliasco Foundation and several other awards and commissions from institutions such as the American Composers Forum, Music at the Anthology (MATA), the American Lizst Society, ASCAP, Muziek Centrum Nederland and Musik der Jahrhunderte.

Praised by the New York Times for his “harmonically fresh work with variegated textures full of both sparkle and thunder,” Hodge has had performances at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center and his music has been the subject of live broadcast on numerous international radio stations. His compositions are regularly performed throughout the world at such festivals as Nuova Consonanza, the ISCM World New Music Festival, the Gaudeamus Muziekweek, the Laboratoire Instrumental Europeén, June in Buffalo, the Berliner Festspiele|Maerzmusik, Acanthes and the Daegu International Contemporary Music Festival in South Korea. He has been awarded residencies at the Liguria Center for the Arts and Humanities in Italy, the Camargo Foundation in France and the MacDowell Colony. His work has been supported with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD).

Some of his notable collaborations include those with members of the Ensemble Modern and the Berlin Philharmonic, the ASKO Ensemble, l’Ensemble Aleph, Ensemble SurPlus, the Scharoun Ensemble, the Afiara String Quartet, Majella Stockhausen and video artist Karen Yasinsky. Upcoming engagements include new works for the JACK Quartet and the Talea Ensemble.

Hodge received his MA and DMA from Columbia University where his principal teachers were Tristan Murail and Fred Lerdahl. Prior to this, he studied Music Theory and Computer Music at the Musikhochschule Stuttgart, where his teachers included Georg Wötzer and Marco Stroppa. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Composition at the University of Washington.

Martin “Marty” O’Donnell (b. May 1, 1955) is an award-winning American composer known for his work on video game developer Bungie’s series, such as Myth, Oni, and most predominantly, Halo.

O’Donnell collaborates with his musical colleague Michael Salvatori for many of the scores; he has also directed voice talent and sound design for the Halo trilogy, and is currently Bungie’s Audio Lead.

O’Donnell began his music career writing television and radio jingles as well as scoring for radio and film. O’Donnell moved to composing video game music when his company, TotalAudio, did the sound design for the 1997 title Riven. After producing the music for Myth II, Bungie contracted O’Donnell to work on their other projects, including Oni and the code-named project that would become Halo: Combat Evolved. O’Donnell ended up joining the Bungie staff only ten days before the studio was bought by Microsoft, and has been the audio director for all Bungie projects since.

O’Donnell’s score to the Halo trilogy has been called iconic, and the commercial soundtrack release of the music to Halo 2 became the best-selling video game soundtrack of all time. His most recently released work is the music for Halo 3: ODST, a departure from his previous work for the series.

Arthur. A. Roberts has been writing for over 25 years and has had numerous articles and short stories published in various technical magazines and newsletters. In addition to writing 23 feature film scripts, he has written numerous teleplays, shorts, and animation scripts. He has self-produced one feature film and numerous shorts and animations. His novel, The Sorcerer’s Song and the Cat’s Meow, is available at Amazon.com and other internet retailers in both hardcopy and electronic format.

John Williams (b. February 8, 1932) is an American composer, conductor, and pianist. In a career that spans six decades, Williams has composed many of the most famous film scores in Hollywood history, including Star Wars, Superman, Home Alone, the first three Harry Potter movies, and all but two of Steven Spielberg’s feature films, including the Indiana Jones series, Schindler’s List, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, and Jaws. He also composed theme music for four Olympic Games, the NBC Nightly News, the rededication of the Statue of Liberty, and numerous television series and concert pieces. He served as the principal conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra from 1980 to 1993, and is now the orchestra’s laureate conductor.

With 45 Academy Award nominations, Williams is, together with composer Alfred Newman, the second most nominated person after Walt Disney. He was inducted into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame in 2000, and was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 2004.

About Tonight’s Guest Performer Bass-baritone Dashon Burton is a native of Bronx, NY. Praised for his “nobility and rich tone,” (New York Times) and hailed as “excellent,” (Akron Beacon Journal) and “robust,” (Cleveland Plain Dealer) he is active in a wide range of repertoire and feels privileged to have worked with artists and ensembles all across the U.S. as well as in Cameroon, Canada, Italy and Germany. Recent collaborations include Pierre Boulez, Masaaki Suzuki and Steven Smith. He began his professional studies at Case Western Reserve University and graduated from the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. Immediately upon graduation, he was invited to join Cantus, a professional men’s classical vocal ensemble based in Minneapolis. The nine-member ensemble travels across the United States performing concerts, teaching clinics about ensemble singing to students of all ages, and collaborating with renowned organizations and artists including the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Boston Pops, James Sewell Ballet and Bobby McFerrin. He appears on albums recorded with the ensemble, including the eponymous album, “Cantus,” which was singled out by National Public Radio as a top ten recording of 2007. After completing his tenure with Cantus in 2009, Dashon completed his Master of Music at Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music, studying voice with Professor James Taylor. His solo repertoire includes such diverse works as Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610, Jesus in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, Superintendent Bud in Britten’s opera Albert Herring, and Ned Rorem’s song cycle, War Scenes. Dashon is also an avid performer of new music; he has premiered works by Edie Hill, William Brittelle, and is a founding member of Roomful of Teeth (under the direction of Brad Wells), an ensemble devoted to new compositions using the fullest possible range of vocal techniques.

About The Flanagan Commissions Endowment The Robert Flanagan Yale Band Commissions Endowment Fund makes it possible for the Yale Bands to commission new works on an ongoing basis. To date, the following pieces have been supported, in part, by this endowment fund: Sicut Incipiat by Robert Parker, Day Trips by Paul Lansky, Parliament in Flight

by Costas Dafnis, and from the language of shadows by Huck Hodge.

YALE CONCERT BAND

About the Music Director Thomas C. Duffy (b. 1955), composer and conductor, is Professor (adjunct) of Music and Director of Bands at Yale University. He served as Acting Dean of the School of Music in 2005-2006, having served as Associate Dean since 1996 and Deputy Dean ­­ since 1999. He has served as a member of the Fulbright National Selection Committee and was a member of the historic Tanglewood II Symposium (2007). He attended the Harvard University Institute for Management and Leadership in Education in 2005. He has served as president of the College Band Directors National Association (CBDNA) and the New England College Band Association (NECBA), 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, and has represented music education in Yale’s Teacher Preparation Program. He is member of American Bandmasters Association, American Composers Alliance, Connecticut Composers Inc., the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, and BMI. An active composer with a D.M.A. in composition from Cornell University, where he was a student of Karel Husa and Steven Stucky, he has accepted commissions from the American Composers Forum, the United States Military Academy at West Point, the U.S. Army Field Band, and numerous bands, choruses and orchestras. He joined the Yale faculty in 1982.

In 2009 he received an award from the United States Attorney’s Office for his innovative program with the Yale Concert Band (Yale 4Peace Rap for Justice) which, through the integration of classical and rap music, addressed gangs, crime and violence in Connecticut’s cities.

Upcoming Yale Bands Performances • Wednesday, February 29, 2012 – Yale Jazz Ensemble: Homegrown: Jazz by Yale Composers. Compositions by Garth Neustadter, Hanoi Hantrakul, Jeff Fuller, Tom Bergeron, Mike Paulsen, and Tim Olsen. 7:30pm, Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall. Free.

• Friday, March 30, 2012 – Yale Concert Band with the Yale Band Percussion Ensemble. Harvest: Trombone Concerto (J. Mackey), with soloist Scott Hartman; Blue Shades (F. Ticheli); Serenade for Winds (R. Strauss). 7:30pm, Woolsey Hall. Free.

• Sunday, April 15 – Yale Jazz Ensemble: Fifth Annual Stan Wheeler Memorial Jazz Concert. With the Reunion Jazz Ensemble. Program TBA. 2:00pm, Levinson Auditorium, Yale Law School (127 Wall Street, New Haven). Free.

• Sunday, May 20 – Yale Concert Band: Annual Twilight Concert. Ceremonial music on the eve of Yale’s Commencement. 7:00 PM, outside on the Old Campus. Free.

For further information please contact: Yale University Bands P.O. Box 209048, New Haven, CT 06520–9048 ph: (203) 432–4113; fax: (203) 432–7213 stephanie.hubbard@yale.edu; www.yale.edu/yaleband

YALE CONCERT BAND 2011-2012 THOMAS C. DUFFY, Music Director STEPHANIE T. HUBBARD, Business Manager Piccolo Joohee Son SY 15 ° Flute Leah Latterner CC 14 ° Principal Hannah Perfecto SY 12 Jonathan Liu TC 15 Monica Ague SM 14 ° Hayden Hashimoto CC 12 Shira Calamaro GSAS 14 Alto Flute Monica Ague SM 14 Oboe Rachel Perfecto SY 15 ° Rebecca Kim YSM 12 ° English Horn Rebecca Kim YSM 12 Eb Clarinet Wai Lau YSM 12 Clarinet Anthony Hsu ES 12 ° Keith L. Wilson Principal Clarinet Chair Kate Carter SM 12 ° Molly Haig DC 14 ° Acshi Haggenmiller MC 15 Nathan Prillaman JE 13 James Mandilk SY 13 Carrie Cao MC 15 ° Liz Jones BR 15 Melinda Becker TC 15 Rachel Yen SM 14 Bass Clarinet Jared Bard BK 12 °

Bassoon Nick Baskin ES 14 Principal Bilal Siddaqui MD 15 ° Ellie Killiam DC 15 ° Soprano Saxophone Alyssa Hasbrouck MC 14 Alto Saxophone Alex Pappas SM 15 ° Principal Alyssa Hasbrouck MC 14 ° Tenor Saxophone William Gearty BR 14 ° Baritone Saxophone Kelsey Sakimoto ES 12 ° Trumpet Jean Laurenz YSM 13 ° Principal Benjamin Long JE 12 ° Connor Moseley BK 14 ° Sagar Setru BR 13 ° Joshua Stein TD 13 ° French Horn Daniel Rigberg BK 15 ° Katherine McDaniel JE 14 Austin Long CC 15 ° David Bruns-Smith BR 15 Trombone Melvin Loong SY 14 ° Principal Hope Wilson SY 15 ° Emily Massey JE 14 °

Euphonium Tim Gladding SY 13 ° Tuba Christofer Rodelo JE 15 James Volz SY 15 Quinn White BR 14 ° String Bass John Greenawalt SY 12 Jonathan McWilliams YSM 13 * Jim Andrews YSM 84 * Electric Bass John Greenawalt SY 12 Electric Guitar Nathan Prillaman JE 13 Percussion Samuel Anklesaria ES 15 ° Kate Gonzales CC 11 Leonardo Gorosito YSM 12 Erin Maher SM 14 Alex Roth ES 15 Anne Schweikert BK 15 ° Chase Young CC 13 Harp Lara Zipperer MC 14 ° Piano David Molina TD 15 Andi Zhou JE 13 * Music Librarian Nick Baskin ES 14

° performing on Baskin * performing on Hodge only

YALE CONCERT BAND OFFICERS

President: Sagar Setru Personnel Manager: Katherine McDaniel General Managers: Monica Ague, Erin Maher Media Specialist: Rachel Yen Social Chairs: Melinda Becker, Annie Schweikert