News

RETURNING MEMBERS

If you are a member of the Symphonic Winds (or have played in the ensemble for a previous concert), you do not need to re-audition — you are still a member! Please email SDB (Steven.D.Bodner@williams) to confirm that you will be continuing in the ensemble.

NEW MEMBERS

Auditions for the Symphonic Winds will take place on Saturday, September 6, 2008, in Bernhard Music Center room 30. Sign-up sheets are located across from BMC room 28.

The audition is simply for seating purposes and repertoire part assignments — all students who audition for the Symphonic Winds are in!

This one audition, however, is also for the Student Symphony, the Berkshire Symphony, and for chamber music ensembles. As with Symphonic Winds, all students who wish to be considered for the Student Symphony are accepted into the ensemble; for the Berkshire Symphony and chamber music ensembles, the audition is also for membership.

Each student should prepare approximately 5-10 minutes of music of her/his choice, consisting both of something lyrical and something technical. If you have questions about the appropriateness of your selection(s), please email SDB (Steven.D.Bodner@williams.edu.) In addition, studentsÊinterested in being considered for the Berkshire Symphony are required to prepare the repertoire from the first BSO concert: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. Parts may be picked-up by emailing Jenny Dewar, concert manager, at Jenny/Dewar@williams.edu.

Questions or concerns? Please email Steven Bodner, director of the Symphonic Winds, at Steven.D.Bodner@williams.edu.

The first rehearsal for the Symphonic Winds will be:

Sunday, September 7, 2008

7:00-8:00 p.m., Chapin Hall

All students interested in playing in Symphonic Winds during the fall 2008 semester should plan to attend this rehearsal. We will discuss ensemble expectations and the plans for the 2008-2009 year (including the winter study 2009 tour to Argentina), as well as read-through and/or listen to some of the first concert’s repertoire. (Visit the Listening Library to check out recordings of our fall semester repertoire!)

In addition, students who would like to perform Frederic Rzewski’s Les Moutons de Panurge on the first Midweekmusic of the semester (Wednesday, September 10, 12:15 p.m.) should plan to stay for an additional half hour. Everyone is welcome to participate in this concert!

Questions or concerns? Please email Steven Bodner, director of the Symphonic Winds, at Steven.D.Bodner@williams.edu.

On Saturday, November 15, at 8:00 p.m., the Williams College Symphonic Winds, under the direction of Steven Dennis Bodner, will present a concert entitled “Sounds of Place,” exploring the relationships between identity construction, faith, and the concept of place. Continuing the Music Department’s semester-long celebration of the 100th anniversary of Olivier Messiaen’s birth, the Symphonic Winds will perform two works, La ville d’en haut and Bryce Canyon et les rochers rouge-orange, that reveal ways in which the mystic and the natural were related for Messiaen. Also featured will be the premiere of Jonathan Newman’s My Hands Are a City, as well as works by Eve Beglarian, Gustav Holst, John Luther Adams, Ingram Marshall, and Pulitzer Prize winners John Harbison and David Lang.

Program (PDF)

On Friday, May 9, at 8:00 p.m., the Williams College Symphonic Winds, under the direction of Steven Dennis Bodner, will present its final concert of the academic year, entitled “Excavations of Nostalgia and Myth: reclaiming the past, reexamining the present, re-imagining the future.” While in our post-modern (or post-postmodern) era it is virtually impossible to write a musical work that is not situated in some relationship with past (musical or extra-musical) traditions, each of the four works presented tonight takes this relationship as the central theme. With evocations including myths, mariachi bands, Georgian singers, stride pianists, and singing shamans, tonight’s concert attempts to excavate past musical traditions in the hopes of offering new visions for the future.

Program (PDF)

The concert will feature the American premiere of Kyle Gann’s Sunken City (Concerto for Piano and Winds in Memoriam New Orleans) (2007), with Brian Simalchik ‘10 and Noah Lindquist ‘08 as soloists for a movement each. Composer Kyle Gann was new-music critic for the Village Voice from 1986 to 2005, and since 1997 he has taught music history and theory at Bard College. He is the author of The Music of Conlon Nancarrow (1995), American Music in the 20th Century (1997), and Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice (2006). In 2003, the American Music Center awarded Gann its Letter of Distinction, along with Steve Reich, Wayne Shorter, and George Crumb. Gann often writes microtonal music, and he has described his style as largely post-minimalist. Inspired by Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke about the government’s reaction (or lack thereof) to the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina, Kyle Gann has tried to evoke two notions of New Orleans—one before the storm, and one after—in his Sunken City. As he has written:

The first movement is pure fun, the Mardi Gras New Orleans of my imagination, a stylized portrait of the energy level and harmonic language of the 1920s music of Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Bix Beiderbecke. Precedents to this kind of symphonic jazz exist, of course, in Copland, Gershwin, and Milhaud, that are bound to be evoked here, but I hoped that the deliberate naivete would all the better set up the second movement1s desolation… Premonitions of the tragedy cloud the coda, which ends in a hasty retreat. The much longer second movement is a kind of interrupted chaconne, based on its opening 17 chords (spelling out the repeated-note theme). Successive variations suggest stages of grief, outrage, nostalgia, and acceptance, but finally the piano drifts into Jelly Roll Morton’s “Dead Man Blues” (or rather, its chord changes, with some abstracted bits of the tune), which spreads into the orchestra. The last few minutes return to the chaconne chords, no longer in strict order… I had planned to suggest some sort of transcendental acceptance, but as a friend reminded me, there can be no acceptance of what happened in New Orleans; not the natural tragedy, which was so foreseeable (and actually didn’t happen, since Hurricane Katrina devolved into merely a level 3 storm before reaching the shore), but the unforgivable political tragedy: the levees never built to last in the first place, the uncaring abandonment of the population to heat, thirst, and death by drowning, the politicized gutting of government agencies meant to respond to disasters, the turning back at gunpoint of honest citizens trying to escape the city by walking over bridges. My friend was right, and the piece ends as the Katrina debacle itself has so far ended, in bitter inconclusiveness.

Sunken City was commissioned and premiered in October 2007 by Orkest de Volharding with pianist Geoffrey Douglas Madge.

The concert will open with the recently-rediscovered original chamber version of Silvestre Revueltas’s Sensemayá: Chant for the Killing of the Snake (1938). While the work is well-known in its version for large orchestra (no doubt in part to Leonard Bernstein’s 1960s recording of this brilliant showstopper), it was originally conceived for an intimate ensemble of only sixteen musicians. Based on the homonymous work of the Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen, Sensemaya not only captures the atmosphere and mood of the poem, but rather it follows the structure of the poem, at times mirroring the rhythms of certain words or phrases (e.g., the violin theme is a “setting” of the words “¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!”), while also relating the story of the ritualistic killing of a snake and the transference of the snake’s power into the people. While during his brief life, Revueltas (1899-1940) was overshadowed by his Mexican countryman Carlos Chavez, today he is regarded as one of the most significant modernist composers from the first half of the twentieth century for his unique ability to evoke and capture the spirit of indigenous musics without resorting to “normalizing” or trivializing the material.

Likewise, Georgian composer Giya Kancheli has further advanced Revueltas’s view of traditional musics. He has professed to often being overcome by a bitter sense of nostalgia, a longing for the past. When he was living in Berlin, he was asked by the organizers of the music festival in Witten to write a piece containing Georgian folk tunes; he declined, stating that he did not want to use folk music in his work. As he elaborated:

Georgian music is a unique phenomenon. I say this quite consciously, as I believe that it is music created by great people whose names we do not know. For me they remain the great and anonymous. What does “folk music” mean anyway? Has there ever been a “folk” that, one fine day, assembled in the village square and decided to write a “folk song”? I shouldn’t think so. I believe it was the product of a concrete human being with an extraordinary gift. I often imagine a Georgian three-part song being written something like this: one day Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart met and decided to sing a song for three voices. I understand this music as a form of composed music. And the more I admire the composers, the more clearly I understand that I have no right to interfere with what they created. I avoid using folkloric material in my works; my dream, on the other hand, is to come closer to the spiritual sphere of sacred chant.

The Witten festival directors, however, insisted that Kancheli reconsider their offer, and so he agreed to write Magnum Ignotrum (1994), integrating authentic Georgian folk materialÑranging from the High Priest of the cathedral of Anchiskhati reading the Gospel on Christmas Eve, to an archival recording of a polyphonic Gurian song, to a performance of a beautiful male-choral piece Upalo Ghmerto sung by the Tustavi Choir. In the end, though, it is the stirring combination and provocative juxtaposition of the “folk” music with Kancheli’s score (for nine winds and bass) that creates the timeless (eternal) and haunting evocation of both times past and present.

The final work on the program is Michael Colgrass’s Winds of Nagual (1985), based on the writings of Carlos Castaneda about his 14-year apprenticeship with don Juan Matis, a Yaqui Indian sorcerer from Northwestern Mexico. Castaneda met don Juan while researching hallucinogenic plants for his master’s thesis in Anthropology at UCLA; however, Castaneda became Juan’s apprentice, training in techniques of pre-Colombian sorcery, the overall purpose of which was to find the creative selfÑwhat Juan calls the nagual. As Colgrass writes, “[Although] the score is laced with programmatic indications…, the listener need not have read Castaneda’s books to enjoy the work, and I don’t expect anyone to follow any exact scenario. My object is to capture the mood and atmosphere created by the books and to convey a feeling of the relationship that develops as a man of ancient wisdom tries to cultivate heart in an analytical young man of the technological age.” One of the techniques Juan utilizes to enable Carlos to alter his view of the world is to induce experiences of what Carlos labels “states of non-ordinary reality,” through the ingestion of peyote buttons or mushrooms. In Winds of Nagual, Colgrass vividly captures several of these hallucinogenic episodes. As Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe wrote after the work’s premiere, “Winds of Nagual is extraordinarily visual, story-telling music in a way that has gone wholly out of fashion since the great Strauss tone poems like Don Quixote… The music is full of the mystery and the matter-of-fact, it has mountains and rivers and bubbles in it, singing and dancing, meditation and the moon, all precisely, colorfully and imaginatively caught. There is even an audible philosophical point about coexistent worlds of spirit and body.” Just as Carlos was initially caught-up only on the superficial aspects of his experiences, trying to understand every nuance and detail of his hallucinations while missing the deeper message of his mentor don Juan, so does Winds of Nagual overwhelm with the dazzling and intricately-detailed surface of Colgrass’s compositional and orchestrational craft. This is music, though, of great depth and emotional potency which, despite its vastly different language, is not far removed from the Andriessen’s philosophical masterpiece, De Materie, performed by the Symphonic Winds this past February. Winds of Nagual won First Prize in the Barlow and Sudler International Wind Ensemble Competitions in 1985.

Michael Colgrass (b. 1932) was first drawn to music when he saw drummer Ray Bauduc in a movie playing Big Noise from Winnetka with the Bob Crosby Band. When he entered the University of Illinois as a percussion student of Paul Price, he had every intention of studying only jazz; in fact, he made his living as a jazz drummer, performing 5-6 nights a week. Eventually, his interests began to widen, encompassing composition studies with Darius Milhaud, Wallingford Riegger, and Lukas Foss. After graduation, he spent twenty-one months as timpanist in the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra in Stuttgart, Germany, before moving to New York City in l956, where he free-lanced as a percussionist with such diverse groups as the New York Philharmonic, Dizzy Gillespie’s band, the original West Side Story orchestra on Broadway, the Columbia Recording Orchestra’s Stravinsky conducts Stravinsky series, and numerous ballet, opera and jazz ensembles.

Colgrass has an uncanny ability to write accessible music that simultaneously challenges the intellect and stirs the emotions. His highly personal compositional technique draws on a diversity of styles, reflecting his widespread interests, and involves a free-flowing mixture of tonal and atonal harmonic language. His compositions have been commissioned and performed by such groups as the Boston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, The Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, the Manhattan and Muir String Quartets, the Brighton Festival in England, and numerous other orchestras, wind ensembles, chamber groups, choral groups and soloists. Colgrass is the recipient of many grants and fellowships, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for Music for Déjà vu and an Emmy Award in 1982 for the Public Broadcasting System documentary “Soundings: The Music of Michael Colgrass.” Besides composing, Colgrass has for twenty-five years been giving workshops throughout North America in performance excellence, combining Grotowski physical training, mime, dance and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). He is the author of My Lessons with Kumi - How I Learned to Perform with Confidence in Life and Work.

PDF version of this press release

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Feb. 1, 2008 - The Williams Symphonic Winds, under the direction of Steven Dennis Bodner, will perform Louis Andriessen’s landmark work De Materie on Saturday, Feb. 16 at 8 p.m. in Chapin Hall on the Williams College campus. There will also be a pre-concert talk in Presser Hall in the Bernhard Music Center at 7:15 p.m. This free event is open to the public. In De Materie (1985-1988)—called “one of the most significant scores produced by a European composer in the last 20 years”—Dutch iconoclast Louis Andriessen explores the porous boundaries between objective and subjective truth (and between material and immaterial realities) by examining relationships between physical matter and atomic physics, religious ecstasy, artistic inspiration, love, and death. With texts ranging from a vision by the 13th-century Dutch mystic Hadewijch to a treatise by the 17th-century Dutch scientist/philosopher Gorlaeus, from Marie Curie’s journal to recollections about Piet Mondrian’s love of boogie-woogie, from a sonnet by Willem Kloos to mathematical and shipbuilding textbooks, De Materie is a non-staged opera in the form of a four-movement symphony.

For this performance, the Williams Symphonic Winds will be joined by tenor Charles Blandy and soprano Jennifer Ashe, who will sing the roles of David Gorlaues and Hadewijch, respectively. Margot Bernstein ‘10 will “rap” Mevrouw van Domselaer-Middelkoop’s recollections of Mondrian over a boogie-woogie piano solo performed by Dan Golub ‘08, while Chair of the Physics Department Dr. Sarah Bolton will read excerpts from Marie Curie’s journal and Nobel Prize- winning speech. Also joining the ensemble will be members of the Williams Chamber Choir. The Williams Symphonic Winds is a 70-member ensemble dedicated to presenting performances of the most significant music written for the chamber and large wind ensemble mediums. Now in his eighth year as Music Director, Steven Dennis Bodner has developed the ensemble’s identity as a leading proponent of the performance of new music on campus. The ensemble has commissioned and premiered a number of works by contemporary composers, including Williams faculty, alumni, and students. Recognized as one of the premier wind ensembles in New England, the Symphonic Winds performed at the 2006 College Band Directors National Association Eastern Division Conference and has received praise from composers such as John Frantzen, Nancy Galbraith, Michael Gandolfi, Judd Greenstein, Karel Husa, David Maslanka, Roberto Sierra, and Michael Weinstein.

http://www.music.williams.edu
concert hotline: 413-597-3146

For building locations on the Williams campus, please consult the map outside the driveway entrance to the Security Office located in Hopkins Hall on Main Street (Rte. 2), next to the Thompson Memorial Chapel, or call the Office of Public Affairs (413) 597-4277. The map can also be found on the web at www.williams.edu/home/campusmap/

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Nov. 13, 2007 — The Williams Symphonic Winds will give a concert on Saturday, Nov. 17, at 8 p.m. in Chapin Hall on the Williams College campus. This free event is open to the public.

This evening of music will explore the ways that composers have treated—literally, metaphorically, and symbolically—the concepts of day and night in music. The concert will juxtapose the five tableaux of Darius MilhaudÕs landmark La Creation du monde against works by Joseph Schwantner, Toru Takemitsu, Gustav Mahler and Williams Music Department Chair David Kechley. The concert will feature Theater professor Omar Sangare reciting speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr. (in Schwantner’s New Morning for the World), Peabody Conservatory professor and Williams alumnus Richard Giarusso ‘00 singing lieder by Gustav Mahler, and student soloists Scott Smedinghoff ‘09 and Augusta Caso ‘09.

The Williams Symphonic Winds is a 70-member ensemble dedicated to presenting performances of the most significant music written for the chamber and large wind ensemble mediums. Now in his eighth year as Music Director, Steven Dennis Bodner has developed the ensemble’s identity as a leading proponent of the performance of new music on campus. The ensemble has commissioned and premiered a number of works by contemporary composers, including Williams faculty and alumni. Recognized as one of the premier wind ensembles in New England, the Symphonic Winds performed at the 2006 College Band Directors National Association Eastern Division Conference.

http://music.williams.edu

For building locations on the Williams campus, please consult the map outside the driveway entrance to the Security Office located in Hopkins Hall on Main Street (Rte. 2), next to the Thompson Memorial Chapel, or call the Office of Public Affairs (413) 597-4277. The map can also be found on the web at www.williams.edu/home/campusmap/

RETURNING MEMBERS

If you are a member of the Symphonic Winds (or have played in the ensemble for a previous concert), you do not need to re-audition — you are still a member! Please email SDB (Steven.D.Bodner@williams) to confirm that you will be continuing in the ensemble.

NEW MEMBERS

Auditions for the Symphonic Winds will take place on Saturday, September 8, 2007, in Bernhard Music Center room 30. Sign-up sheets are located across from BMC room 28.

The audition is simply for seating purposes and repertoire part assignments — all students who audition for the Symphonic Winds are in!

This one audition, however, is also for the Student Symphony, the Berkshire Symphony, and for chamber music ensembles. As with Symphonic Winds, all students who wish to be considered for the Student Symphony are accepted into the ensemble; for the Berkshire Symphony and chamber music ensembles, the audition is also for membership.

Each student should prepare approximately 5-10 minutes of music of her/his choice, consisting both of something lyrical and something technical. If you have questions about the appropriateness of your selection(s), please email SDB (Steven.D.Bodner@williams.edu.) In addition, studentsÊinterested in being considered for the Berkshire Symphony are required to prepare the repertoire from the first BSO concert: Schubert’s Symphony No. 5 and Strauss’s Overture to Die Fledermaus. Parts may be picked-up across from Bernhard 28 (next to the audition sign-up sheets) or by emailing Ernie Clark, concert manager, at Ernest.M.Clark@williams.edu.

Questions or concerns? Please email Steven Bodner, director of the Symphonic Winds, at Steven.D.Bodner@williams.edu.

The first rehearsal for the Symphonic Winds will be:

Sunday, September 9, 2007

7:00-8:00 p.m., Chapin Hall

All students interested in playing in Symphonic Winds during the fall 2007 semester should plan to attend this rehearsal. We will discuss ensemble expectations and the plans for the 2007-2008 year, as well as read-through some of the first concert’s repertoire. (Visit the Listening Library to check out recordings of our fall semester repertoire!)

Questions or concerns? Please email Steven Bodner, director of the Symphonic Winds, at Steven.D.Bodner@williams.edu.

On Friday 11 May, 2007, the Symphonic Winds gave a concert entitled “The Best of All Possible Worlds: Urban Reflections and Pastoral Visions.”

On Saturday, February 17, 8:00 p.m. in Chapin Hall, the Williams Symphonic Winds directed by Steven Dennis Bodner will present a free concert entitled “Feminine Beginnings: Music of Love, Loss, and Sacred Ecstasy.” Inspired in part by Susan McClary’s ground-breaking book Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, the concert will explore various ways “femininity” is expressed or represented musically through works composed by women and music written to be in some way about women.

Spanning over 800 years, the concert is framed by several chants by the 12th-century nun Hildegard von Bingen and Louis Andriessen’s Hadewiijch (part II of his monumental De Materie, of which the Symphonic Winds performed part III in 2005), a setting of one of the visions of the 13th-century Dutch beguine Hadewijch in which she speaks of her “mystic union” with God. While the musical languages may be as removed from each other as possible, both works seek to communicate deeply passionate, spiritually- and physically-felt love. The Symphonic Winds is excited to be joined for the performance of Hadewijch by soprano Jennifer Ashe, who last sang with the ensemble in December in a performance of Andriessen’s M is for Man, Music, Mozart.

Also on the program will be works by women composers Libby Larsen, Joan Tower, and Elizabeth Maconchy. Larsen’s virtuosic Holy Roller is “a revival sermon captured in the sounds of the alto saxophone and wind ensemble.” For this performance, Berkshires native David Jenkins, a member of “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band, will be the saxophone soloist cum preacher. Former Bennington College professor Joan Tower is one of the most active feminist composers active today. Since 1986, she has composed a series of Fanfare(s) for the Uncommon Woman; we will feature Fanfare No. 5 for four antiphonal trumpets, performed by Brian Bistolfo ‘09, Eva Breitenbach ‘10, Connor Kamm ‘10, and Benjamin Wood ‘08. This year marks the centenary of the birth of Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994), an English composer barely known in this country. Her sublime and majestic Music for Brass and Woodwind, created to make use of the architecture of the Thaxted Church perfectly captures her ideal conception of music as “an intellectual art, a balanced and reasoned statement of ideas, an impassioned argument, an intense but disciplined expression of emotion.”

Not only are works by women composers being featured in this concert, but so are works about women. The music that English Baroque composer Henry Purcell wrote in 1695 for the funeral of Queen Mary II has been called “the most fitting and moving music that has ever been composed for a royal funeral. One feels that in expressing the national mood of mourning, Purcell was also voicing personal feelings of genuine grief.” Transcribing and elaborating upon Purcell’s original music, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Steven Stucky has created in his Funeral Music for Queen Mary a powerful composition described by Glyn Mon Hugues of the Liverpool Daily Post as “dramatic, tense, highly stirring stuff, awesomely beautiful in its simplicity, almost heart-breaking in the intensity of the pleading.” Two short songs of love will round out the concert: first, Emily Bruce ‘07—accompanied by Ian Jessen ‘07, oboe, and Christina Lee ‘08, glockenspiel—will sing Barbie’s love song “Oh, Ken” from Michael Daugherty’s What’s That Spell (“I love you, Ken. You know I do. You know I always only love you. Oh Ken, what can I do? I’m plastic just like you./I love it when we have our talks,/when you and I get put back in the box. Oh, Ken!”); after that, Augusta Caso ‘09 will sing “Dulcissime,” the famous soprano solo of love and submission from Carl Orff’s Camina Burana.

In presenting works by both female and male composers, works about physical love and spiritual ecstasy, the Symphonic Winds’ “Feminine Beginnings” attempts to pose provocative questions as to what the nature of feminism in music is or should be.

Soprano Jennifer Ashe is a member of the faculty at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. Jennifer has been hailed by the Boston Globe as giving a performance that was “pure bravura…riveting the audience with a radiant and opulent voice.” The Boston Phoenix describes her as possessing “rock solid technique” with “the kind of vocal velvet you don’t often hear in contemporary music.” A strong advocate for new music, Jennifer has participated in several premieres and recordings for composers active in the Boston area and beyond and her recent projects include Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire with Firebird Ensemble and Peter Maxwell Davies’ Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot with Callithumpian Consort.

A native of the Berkshires and the son of Carl and Jane Jenkins, David is currently a member of the saxophone section of “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band. His duties with this ensemble have included national tours, saxophone quartet recital tours, and numerous performances at the White House and other distinctive landmarks throughout the Washington, DC area. David earned Bachelors Degrees in Music Performance and Music Education from the University of Massachusetts, a Masters Degree in Performance from Arizona State University, and is currently pursuing his Doctor of Musical Arts Degree from the University of Minnesota. His principal teachers have included Lynn Klock, Joseph Wytko and Eugene Rousseau. Prior to joining “The President’s Own,” David performed with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the United States Military Academy Band at West Point, the Berkshire Symphony Orchestra, the Massachusetts Wind Orchestra and the Amherst (NY) Saxophone Quartet; a number of these performances have been broadcast on nationally syndicated NPR programs such as “Performance Today” and “Saint Paul Sunday.” He has served on the faculty of Keene State College, Deerfield Academy, and, in the spring of 2002, was Visiting Instructor of Saxophone at the University of Massachusetts. In November, 2002, David was a semi-finalist at the International Adolphe Sax Competition in Dinant, Belgium; the only American contestant to achieve this distinction. Additionally, with the Arizona State University Saxophone Quartet, he was a finalist at the Coleman Chamber Music Competition, and a winner of the Carmel Chamber Music Competition in May, 2000. Most recently, David can be heard on Arizona University Recordings’ “America’s Millennium Tribute to Adolphe Sax, volume XI” performing Paul Hindemith’s “Konzertstück fur zwei.”

Celebrating the end of the Mozart year, the Williams Chamber Winds—an ensemble of select students from the Williams Symphonic Winds and directed by Steven Dennis Bodner—will present a concert entitled “mozart…NOT MOZART” on Thursday, December 7, 2006, 8:00 p.m., in Chapin Hall. The concert will juxtapose Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s sublime Serenade in B-flat, KV 361 (370a)—also known as “Gran Partita”—with Louis Andriessen’s ironic homage M is for Man, Music, Mozart. As both works have seven movements and are written for ensembles of thirteen musicians, the concert will alternate movements from the two pieces, allowing Mozart and Andriessen to engage in a musical dialogue across more than two centuries. For more information about the ensemble, please visit: http://wso.williams.edu/orgs/symphwinds/.

For the performance of M is for Man, Music, Mozart, Chamber Winds will be joined by soprano Jennifer Ashe, a member of the faculty at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. She has been hailed by the Boston Globe as giving a performance that was “pure bravura…riveting the audience with a radiant and opulent voice.” The Boston Phoenix describes her as possessing “rock solid technique” with “the kind of vocal velvet you don’t often hear in contemporary music”. A strong advocate for new music, Jennifer has participated in several premieres and recordings for composers active in the Boston area and beyond and her recent projects include Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire with Firebird Ensemble and Peter Maxwell Davies’ Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot with Callithumpian Consort.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is regarded as one of the greatest and most significant composers in the history of Western art music. While Mozart’s genius may be most significantly demonstrated in his operas, symphonies, piano pieces, and string chamber works, his serenades and divertiment—his Harmonie—are no less striking or innovative; in fact, his three wind serenades are arguably the finest works of the genre—with the “Gran Partita” the finest of the fine. Harmoniemusik refers to a musical genre written for pairs of woodwind instruments within the period 1750-1835. A typical Harmoniemusik ensemble would consist of 3-4 pairs of wind instruments: bassoons and horns, with either oboes or clarinets, or both. In a sense, these were the popular music ensembles of the time, playing a significant part in the social lives of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Each of the royal courts throughout Europe employed a personal Harmonie, to provide entertainment for themselves and for their distinguished guests, not only during dinner, but also in private and public concerts. In 1782 Emperor Joseph II appointed a Harmonie of the finest available players, including the Stadler brothers on clarinet and Johann Nepomuk Wendt on oboe. Although many composers contributed original works for the medium, the repertoire consisted mainly of full-length transcriptions of operas and ballets. Recognizing both the craze that transcribing operas for winds had become in Vienna and their financially lucrative nature, Mozart himself began arranging selections of his Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, writing to his father on 20 July 1782: “I am up to my eyes in work, for by Sunday week I have to arrange my opera for Harmonie. If I don’t, someone will anticipate me and secure the profits…You have no idea how difficult it is to arrange a work of this kind for Harmonie, so that it suits these instruments and yet loses none of its effect.” Mozart even included Harmonie in two of his operas: first, a Harmonie ensemble offers a serenade during a garden scene in Cosi fan tutte; and second, the dinner music in Don Giovanni (Finale, Act I) contains a transcription of his “Non più andrai” from Le nozze di Figaro, to Leporello’s comment “Questa poi la conosco pur troppo” (“I know this all too well”). The “Gran Partita,” though, is without question the gem in the original Harmonie repertoire. While most divertimenti were written in a light style and were intended for social occasions rather than formal concerts, the “Gran Partita” is striking not just for its seriousness of artistic content (it was presumably written for Anton Sadler for performance in a benefit concert), but also for its length and instrumentation: its seven movements exceed the usual form of most serenades, and at almost 50 minutes in length, it is longer than all of Mozart’s symphonies; and—with four pairs of woodwinds instead of the usual two or three pairs, four horns instead of two, and the addition of a string bass—the “Gran Partita” transcends the conventional limits of the genre and reveals Mozart’s affinity for the graciousness and clarity of wind ensembles.

Louis Andriessen is, without question, the most significant living Dutch composer—and, by most accounts, he is one of Europe’s most eminent and influential composers. He has explored, in relation to music, the subjects of politics, time, velocity, matter and mortality in five works for large ensemble: De Staat (1976), De Tijd (1981), De Snelheid (1983), De Materie (1985-88), and Trilogy of The Last Day (1996-97). His music blurs the boundaries between “high” and “low” arts, not just in his choice of instruments (often dominated by wind, brass, pianos, and electric guitars), but also in his musical language, which combines a jazz/rock aesthetic with post-WWII intellectualism; in Andriessen’s own words: “From Stravinsky to Steve Reich, from the gamelan to Miles Davis and Stan Kenton, this is all part of my musical language. But one thing is clear: I almost completely shied away from the nineteenth century [Romanticism].” When Andriessen (along with five other composers) was asked by BBC in 1991 to compose a film score that would be part of a television movie (and now DVD), entitled Not Mozart, that would be an irreverent alternative to the respectful homages during the Mozart Bicenntennial, he immediately suggested that his filmmaker-collaborator be Peter Greenaway, known for such avant-garde and controversial films as Prospero’s Books and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover (and with whom Andriessen has since created two operas: Rosa: Death of a Composer and Writing to Vermeer.) Since Andriessen had been planning also to write a work to commemorate the twentieth anniversary for the Orkest de Volharding—created by Andriessen in 1971, Volharding is, in Andriessen’s words, the “Terrifying Orchestra of the Twenty First Century:” a thirteen-member, democratic wind ensemble that, performing standing shoulder-to-shoulder, is dedicated to not only redefining music in socio-political terms, but also to “de-hierarchizing” music by “vigorously and vociferously break[ing] the division between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art”—he decided to write the score with Volharding in mind. Andriessen and Greenaway agreed on a symmetrical form of an alternation of four songs (sung by the jazz singer Astrid Seriese) with three instrumental interludes for their film, entitled M is for Man, Music, Mozart (1991). The elegant logic that underlies this arresting, provocative, highly avant-garde thirty-minute film is, simply:

Stopping at M, the center of the alphabet, the Gods decide to create man. Having created man, it was necessary to give him movement. Having given him movement it follows that he should have music. And having invented Music, it was necessary to invent Mozart in order to have Perfect Music.

In M is for Man, Music, Mozart—with music that quotes Mozart (specifically tow piano sonatas, K. 310 and K. 545), recalls Milhaud (especially La création du monde, a fitting reference for a film about creation), toys with boogie-woogie, and reveals the influence of both Stan Kenton and Stravinksy, but with songs that emphasize the crudeness, vulgarity, and base physicality that defines, at least in scientific terms, what it means to be human—Greenaway and Andriessen chose to paint Mozart not as a god-like creator to be held aloof on a pedestal, but instead as a human: the most gifted of humans. In fact, the final song states describes Mozart as “a man bringing himself, melody, and mathematics into perfect and enviable proportions. Only more so. Much more so.” Perhaps this ironic homage, then, is the most appropriate—both demystifying Mozart and his music while concurrently reflecting its status as a pinnacle human creation.

Recordings of the Williams Symphonic Winds’ November 11 2006 concert Fragmented Memories and the accompanying preconcert piano recital are now online in the concert recordings section.

The Symphonic Winds, directed by Steven Dennis Bodner, will present a concert entitled “Fragmented Memories” on Saturday, November 11, 2006, in Chapin Hall. The program will feature works by three of the most significant living American composers—John Adams (Grand Pianola Music, Jospeph Shippee ‘07 and Scott Smedinghoff ‘09, piano soloists), John Corigliano (Gazebo Dances), and Lukas Foss (Renaissance Concerto, Jeffrey Wessler ‘07, flute soloist)—as well as a transcription for wind ensemble of Charles Ives’s The Alcotts (from his Piano Sonata No. 2, “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860”) and a premiere of Dana Wilson’s When I am gone away.

At 7:15 in Chapin Hall, Stephen Spinelli ‘07, Sean Barker ‘09, McKenna Knych ‘09, Brian Simalchik ‘10, and Scott Smedinghoff ‘09—students of Doris Stevenson, Elizabeth Wright, and Edwin Lawrence—will present a piano recital in Chapin Hall featuring two works—Charles Ives’s The Alcotts and John Corigliano’s Gazebo Dances—that will be performed in wind ensemble versions during the 8:00 Symphonic Winds concert.

As musicologist Jonathan Dunsby has written: “It is impossible to escape from the fact that, without the practice and use of memory, music is literally unthinkable.” The five American composers whose works constitute the program, though, have extended this notion even further: in provocative and divergent ways, each composer has directly confronted ways that music can reveal postmodern concepts of temporality (present utterances juxtaposed with and consciously informed by the memories of past musics, creating music that is simultaneously both “old” and “new”)—or in a word, music can be about memory. As Adams has written about his Grand Pianola Music: “To this day, it has remained a weapon of choice among detractors who wish to hold up my work as exemplary of the evils of Postmodernism—or even more drastic—the pernicious influences of American consumerism on high art. In truth I had very much enjoyed composing the piece, doing so in a kind of trance of automatic recall, where almost any and every artifact from my musical subconscious was allowed to float to the surface and encouraged to bloom. The piece could only have been conceived by someone who had grown up surrounded by the detritus of mid-twentieth century recorded music. Beethoven and Rachmaninoff soak in the same warm bath with Liberace, Wagner, the Supremes, Charles Ives, and John Philip Sousa.”

“Fragmented Memories,” then, juxtaposes numerous works which are themselves musical juxtapositions. The first half of the program will feature John Corigliano’s Gazebo Dances, a late twentieth-century reinterpretation of the musics one may have heard in small-town band concert. (One thinks, perhaps, of Vincent Persichetti’s remarks about the associations of this traditional bandstand musical experience: “I know that composers are often frightened away by the sound of the word ‘band,’ because of certain qualities long associated with this medium—rusty trumpets, consumptive flutes, wheezy oboes, disintegrated clarinets, fumbling yet amiable baton wavers, and gum-coated park benches! If you couple these conditions with transfigurations and disfigurations of works originally conceived for orchestra, you create a sound experience that’s as nearly excruciating as a sick string quartet playing a dilettante’s arrangement of a nineteenth-century piano sonata.”) The Dances, though, will be presented in “fragmented” fashion: rather than performing the work in its entirety, the Symphonic Winds will perform each movement separately, with the works of Dana Wilson, Charles Ives, and Lukas Foss interpolated.

While the works on the first half of the concert are concerned with specific memories (or at least memories of certain past musics), in his massive, iconoclastic Grand Pianola Music, John Adams sets his sights much more ambitiously: he is dealing with his memories of the entire tonal Western music tradition. Adams has written about the piece:

But Grand Pianola Music genuinely upset people, doubtless due to the bombastic finale, “On the Dominant Divide,” with its flag-waving, gaudy tune rocking back and forth between the pianos amid ever-increasing cascades of B-flat major arpeggios. I meant it neither as a joke nor a nose-thumbing at the tradition of earnest, serious contemporary music nor as an intended provocation of any kind. It was rather, in its loudest and most hyperventilated moments, a kind of Whitmanesque yawp, an exhilaration of good humor, certainly a parody and therefore ironic. But it was never intended, as has since been intimated, as a “political” statement about the state of “new music.” Nevertheless, I was alarmed by the severity of its reception, and for years I found myself apologizing for it (“I’ve got to take that piece down behind the barn and shoot it”). Now, though, I’m impressed by its boldness.

As with Harmonielehre, which began with a dream of a huge oil tanker rising like a Saturn rocket out of the waters of San Francisco Bay, Grand Pianola Music also started with a dream image in which, while driving down Interstate Route 5, I was approached from behind by two long, gleaming, black stretch limousines. As the vehicles drew up beside me they transformed into the world’s longest Steinway pianos…twenty, maybe even thirty feet long. Screaming down the highway at 90 m.p.h., they gave off volleys of Bb and Eb major arpeggios. I was reminded of walking down the hallways of the San Francisco Conservatory, where I used to teach, hearing the sonic blur of twenty or more pianos playing Chopin, the Emporer Concerto, Hanon, Rachmaninoff, the Maple Leaf Rag and much more.

Despite the image that inspired it, and despite the heft of its instrumentation, Grand Pianola Music is, for the most part, a surprisingly delicate piece. The woodwinds putter along in a most unthreatening fashion while waves of rippling piano arpeggios roll in and out like slow tides. Three female voices (the sirens) sing wordless harmony, sometimes floating above the band in long sostenuto triads while at other times imitating the crisp staccato of the winds and brass.

Grand Pianola Music is in two parts, the first being in fact two movements joined together without pause. Of these the second is a slow serene pasture with grazing tuba. The finale, “On the Dominant Divide”, was an experiment in applying my Minimalist techniques to the barest of all possible chord progressions, I-V-I. I had noticed that most “classical” Minimalist pieces always progressed by motion of thirds in the bass and that in all cases they strictly avoided tonic-dominant relations, relations which are too fraught with a pressing need for resolution. What resulted was a swaying, rocking oscillation of phrases that gave birth to a melody. This tune, in the hero key of Eb major, is repeated a number of times, and with each iteration it gains in gaudiness and Lisztian panache until it finally goes over the top to emerge in the gurgling C major of the lowest registers of the pianos. From here it is a gradually accelerating race to the finish, with the tonalities flipping back and forth from major to minor, urging those gleaming black vehicles on to their final ecstasy.

Auditions

Returning SymphWinds members:

No audition is necessary (unless you are auditioning for the orchestras, too, in which case follow the instructions for new members).

New members:

Auditions are on Sunday, September 10, noon-6:00. Please sign-up for an audition time on the sign-up sheet located outside of room 28 in the Bernhard Music Center. For the audition, please prepare both brief lyrical and technical selections. You will not be asked to sight-read or to play scales! In addition, if you are auditioning for the Berkshire Symphony, you must also prepare the appropriate part to Haydn Symphony No. 99, which can be obtained outside of room 28. If you have questions, please email Steven Bodner: Steven.D.Bodner@williams.edu

First Rehearsal

Our first rehearsal and an organizational meeting will be held Sunday, September 10, 2006, 7:00-8:30 in Chapin Hall. All are welcome (and encouraged) to attend!

Recordings of repertoire for the fall 2006 season are now available in the Listening section. In addition, recordings of previous concerts are available in the Concert Archive. Login is required for both of these sections.