Tuesday, April 25, 2023, 7:30pm
Meyerson Symphony Center + Livestream

Fanfare

(7:15 in the Meyerson lobby)

So We Meet Again
Andrew Lawson

Dallas Winds Brass & Percussion
Ogechi Ukazu, associate conductor

Program

In Storm and Sunshine [3’00”]
John Clifford Heed

Losing Earth [26’00”]
Adam Schoenberg
Jacob Nissly, percussion

– INTERMISSION –

Concerto for Wind Ensemble [24’00”]
Kevin Day

1. Flow
2. Riff
3. Vibe
4. Soul
5. Jam

Dallas Winds Personnel

STRING BASS
Andrew Goins
Ben Mitchell

ELECTRIC BASS
Andrew Goins

HARP
Naoko Nakamura

PIANO
Cameron Hofmann

TIMPANI
Joe Ferraro, principal

PERCUSSION
Roland Muzquiz, principal
Michael McNicholas
Drew Lang
Steve McDonald
Brandon Kelly
Nate Collins

PERSONNEL MANAGER
Gigi Sherrell Norwood

MUSIC LIBRARIAN
Chrystal Stevens

TECHNICAL DIRECTOR
Ramon Muzquiz

FOUNDER / EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Kim Campbell
EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT
Grace Lovrien
DIRECTOR OF CONCERT OPERATIONS
Gigi Sherrell Norwood
DIRECTOR OF EDUCATION
Todd Toney
BOOKKEEPER
Lenore Ladwig Scott

Credits

Program Notes

In Storm And Sunshine

John Clifford Heed
(1862-1908)

John Clifford Heed was born in Hackettstown, a small town in a rural section of New Jersey, about sixty miles due west of New York City. Discovering his love of music at a very early age, he joined the Hackettstown Cornet Band around the age of ten, and quickly rose to become the group’s director.

Cornet was not his only instrument, however. He also mastered the piano, violin, and other band instruments, and made his living for many years as a soloist and band director.

Still in his early 20s, Heed attracted the attention of Charles Crobe, a composer and teacher who lived in the Hackettstown area. Crobe recognized Heed’s talent and mentored the young man, teaching him about music theory and composition, and helping him find publishers for his work, which included both original compositions and arrangements of popular works.

In Storm and Sunshine is probably Heed’s best-known work today. Categorized as a “barn burner” (as opposed to a march you can actually march to, or the sort of fast circus march they called a “screamer” back at the turn of the century) In Storm and Sunshine contrasts sections written in a “stormy” minor key against sections in the “sunny” major key.

Heed’s own life saw plenty of both. His heady career as a cornet soloist came to an end around 1900, when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Although he no longer had the lung capacity to play, he continued to compose until he died in 1908 at the age of 46.

Losing Earth

Adam Schoenberg
(b. 1980)

Composer Adam Schoenberg was born into a musical family. He grew up hearing parents Steven and Jane Schoenberg write songs and create educational programs for Sesame Street, among many other projects. Adam quickly turned to composition, too, and earned his undergraduate degree from Oberlin Conservatory of Music before going to The Juilliard School for his Masters and Doctorate in Musical Arts. He studied composition under John Corigliano and Robert Beaser, and wrote his thesis about film composer Thomas Newman. In 2010 he became part of the Atlanta School of Composers, joining a circle of other young American composers championed by conductor Robert Spano of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

In addition to Atlanta, Schoenberg’s works have been performed by the Cleveland Orchestra, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, the Kansas City Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, and many others. He has served as composer-in-residence for the Kansas City Symphony, where he wrote the monumental Picture Studies, which was nominated for a Grammy Award as Best Contemporary Classical Composition in 2018. He has also composed scores for feature-length and short films and documentaries. A committed educator, Schoenberg currently serves as Assistant Professor of Composition at Occidental College, where he runs the composition and film scoring program.

When the San Francisco Symphony and Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas commissioned Schoenberg to write a concerto for the Symphony’s principal percussionist, Jacob Nissly, Schoenberg thought back to a 2018 article he had read in The New York Times Magazine called Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change. He later said:

After reading this haunting article, I could feel myself becoming fearful of our future. We’ve been aware of global warming for quite some time, but I was suddenly beginning to wonder how this would ultimately affect my children. Would they survive? Would the earth survive?

 

I began to think about the history of percussion and how it can be traced back to the beginning of time. [Drums are] the most earthy and grounded of instruments, and in many cultures considered to be the heartbeat of music. With the ability to make rhythm, keep time, and create melody, drums were a way for our ancestors to communicate love and joy, danger and survival. They have also traditionally been at the center of oral history, with percussionists being the storytellers. Second only to the human voice, this instrument has watched the earth endure all of its phases, including the devastation that is now beginning to emerge because of global warming. ‘Losing Earth’ pays  homage to this history.

Concerto for Wind Ensemble

Kevin Day
(b. 1996)

Kevin Day is an award-winning composer, conductor, producer, and multi-instrumentalist who was born in Charleston, West Virginia, and raised in Arlington, Texas. Although his works have been performed by orchestras and wind ensembles around the world, the Dallas Winds takes special pride in his many connections to our ensemble. Day’s fanfare, Fireworks, was selected as one of the winners of the 2015-16 Dallas Winds Fanfare Competition. He studied tuba and euphonium at Texas Christian University, in Fort Worth, under Richard Murrow, husband of long-time Dallas Winds clarinetist Jeanie Murrow. And he has worked with and been mentored by such Dallas Winds favorites as composers Frank Ticheli, John Mackey, and Julie Giroux.

Day is currently serving as assistant professor of composition at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. His Concerto for Wind Ensemble was considered for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for music.

Day recalls that the idea for the concerto began to take shape in 2019, after several conversations with Dr. Cynthia Johnston Turner, who was then Director of Bands at the University of Georgia. He wanted to write “a substantial work to further the wind band repertoire. “I knew off the bat that I wanted to write something that reflected my upbringing as a young black man and the musical culture that I grew up in, which hasn’t always been represented in concert band music,” Day said.

My father was a hip-hop producer in the late 1980s, and my mother was a gospel singer. I grew up listening to hip-hop, R&B, jazz, and gospel music, while simultaneously learning classical music through playing in band, and later orchestra. While these worlds had been separated in my head when I was growing up, in this work I intentionally wanted to merge them together in new fusions, paying homage to my parents, the culture I grew up in, and to the wind band world.

 

What came from this concept is this Concerto for Wind Ensemble, a five-movement work for band that is my most ambitious composition to date. The movements, entitled Flow, Riff, Vibe, Soul, and Jam, reflect the various musical styles I have been immersed in.

The result is a concerto that highlights all the sections of the band, offering juicy solos to instruments of every type. Day dedicated the movements Vibe and Soul to his parents and, with special thanks to Dr. Turner and the consortium members who financed the work, added, “I’m happy to share this contribution and love letter to the wind band and to the culture.”

–program notes by Gigi Sherrell Norwood