Tuesday, February 21, 2023, 7:30pm
Meyerson Symphony Center + Livestream

Fanfare

(7:15 in the Meyerson lobby)

Dallas Winds Brass & Percussion
Ogechi Ukazu, associate conductor

Program

Sacred Spaces [4’00”]
John Mackey

Mountain Hymns [8’40”]
John Wesley Gibson

Orbital [20’00”]
Ioannis (John) Psathas
Transcribed for winds by Michael Lebrias
Original film by Annie Fletcher, NYC
Epoch Percussion Quartet, guest artists

– INTERMISSION –

Symphony No. 6 [26’00”]
Julie Giroux

1. The Big Blue Marble
2. Voices in Green
3. Let There Be Life

Dallas Winds Personnel

STRING BASS
Andrew Goins

PIANO
Cameron Hofmann

HARP
Naoko Nakamura

TIMPANI
Joe Ferraro

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

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

LIVESTREAM
George Gilliam – Audio Engineer
Todd Toney – Cues
Adam Ellard – Director, Titles
Harrison Collins – Switcher
Lydia Amstutz – Camera
Savannah Ekrut – Camera
Chris Cook – Remote Cameras
Cameron Conyer – Technical Direction
David Lovrien – Title Design

Program Notes

Sacred Spaces

John Mackey
(born 1973)

John Mackey is a superstar composer in the band world. Born in New Philadelphia, Ohio, he grew up in Westerville, Ohio, composing on an Apple IIe and a Commodore 64. He graduated from Juilliard in 1997. In 2005 he re-orchestrated his Redline Tango, originally written for strings, and was hailed as an exciting new voice in wind ensemble composition.

The Dallas Winds has frequently performed his music, including Hymn to a Blue Hour, Kingfishers Catch Fire, Harvest: Concerto for Trombone and Orchestra-without-strings, and Wine Dark Sea: Symphony for Band.  The Dallas Winds’ recording, Asphalt Cocktail, is entirely devoted to his music.

In his notes on Mackey’s concert overture, Sacred Spaces, musicologist Jake Wallace says:

A sacred space is a place that holds incredible immaterial value in an increasingly material society. It the idea of an environment in which a person can exist authentically and embrace their most sincere beliefs without apprehension. We all cherish our sacred spaces. These can certainly be religious buildings – churches and temples, synagogues and mosques – but they extend beyond these based on the needs of those who inhabit them. A ballpark. A classroom. A home. Even the concert hall in which art comes to life through sound has a spiritual association for many audiences.

In his composition Sacred Spaces, John Mackey celebrates a broad category of such places: the natural expanse of the American landscape that so many of us hold dear. This concert overture for wind band evokes the grandeur of native scenery in an earnest way. Mackey achieves this using an incredible palette of color that dazzles the listener throughout.

Mountain Hymns

John Wesley Gibson
(born 1946)

 John Wesley Gibson is the Resident Composer of the Dallas Winds and has been associated with the group since 1988. Equally at home in traditional forms and innovative compositions, Gibson’s works performed by the Dallas Winds have ranged from the gorgeous seasonal harmonies of Angelic Fanfare and Christmas Presence to the wildly creative invented instruments in the narrative piece Man Dreams in Hardware.  His works for band and orchestra are performed internationally, and he has been commissioned by professional, collegiate, church, and high school groups throughout the United States. He was an assistant dean at the Meadows School of the Arts at SMU before retiring in 2014 to compose full time.

Inspired by Gibson’s travels in the Rocky Mountains one summer, Mountain Hymns weaves tunes drawn from the Native American songs with impressions of cathedral-like mountains covered with the velvet foliage of the forest. Mountain Hymns was composed in 2004 for the Greater Dallas Youth Orchestra (GDYO) Wind Symphony.

Orbital

Ioannis (John) Psathas
(born 1966)

New Zealand-Greek composer John Psathas shot to worldwide attention when his music was heard by an audience of more than a billion during the Opening Ceremony of the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Greece. During the intervening years his music has been commissioned and performed by top musicians around the globe.

Psathas was a popular faculty member at the New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University Wellington for 25 years, before closing the door on that chapter in 2019 to devote all his time to composing, and performing onstage.

One element that stands out in Psathas’ career is the sheer variety of his collaborations, from a Billboard classical chart-topping album with System of a Down front man Serj Tankian, to feature-film scores, to jazz in projects with luminaries Michael Brecker and Joshua Redman.  He has collaborated with the Grand Mufti in Paris’s Grand Mosque, and on an e-book project with Salman Rushdie. Few composers cross the boundaries of musical genres to the extent that Psathas does.

Percussion has always been a strong feature of Psathas’ output, with a consistent schedule of new percussion commissions from many of the world’s top players. The emergence of COVID-19 only broadened the scope of Psathas’ work, with the 2020 release of long-distance collaborative albums It’s Already Tomorrow, and Last Days of March.

Psathas wrote Orbital in 2021 as a commissioned work for the Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln and the percussion ensemble Repercussion. Reviewer Daniel Janz said of the work, “These 20 minutes of pure ecstasy really have it all.  Thundering samba rhythms, high tech at its finest, spherical mixed sounds, and even a recurring theme in the bass line.  A thoroughly ingenious work of art that you have to see, hear, feel, and marvel at live.”

Symphony No. 6, “The Blue Marble”

Julie Giroux
(born 1961)

Julie Ann Giroux was born in Fairhaven, Massachusetts in 1961. She started playing piano at 3 years of age and began composing at the age of 8. She has been composing ever since. Southern Music Company published her first work for concert band, written when she was 13.  

Giroux graduated from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge LA in 1984, and began composing commercially that same year when she was hired by Oscar winning composer Bill Conti as an orchestrator.  Her first project with Conti was the score for the mini-series North & South.

Today she has more than 100 film, television, and video game credits.  Giroux has collaborated with dozens of film composers, producers, and celebrities including Samuel Goldwyn, Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Madonna, Liza Minnelli, Celine Dion, Paula Abdul, Michael Jackson, Paul Newman, Harry Connick Jr. and many others. Projects she has worked on have been nominated for Oscars, Emmys, Grammys and Golden Globe awards. She has won individual Emmy Awards in the field of “Outstanding Individual Achievement in Music Direction”. When she won her first Emmy Award, she was the first woman and the youngest person to ever win in that category. She has won it three times. Giroux has been a true force in a male dominated field and has accrued many previously male only awards.

Giroux has also published a large category of classical works with emphasis on original compositions for Wind Band. Her music has been recorded and reviewed internationally and performed at major music festivals the world over.

She is a member of ASCAP, The Film Musicians Fund, Kappa Kappa PSI, Tau Beta Sigma and a member of the American Bandmasters Association. She is a recipient of the Distinguished Service to Music Medal Award, Emmy Awards and was the first female composer inducted into the American Bandmasters Association in 2009.

In notes on her Symphony No. 6: The Blue Marble, she said:

It is often said that the first full imagine of Earth, “Blue Marble”, taken by Apollo 17 in 1972 was the first full picture of the planet Earth. The picture is actually upside down. It happened sometime between 4:59:05 and 5:08:14 hours after Apollo’s launch as they traveled up to 25,000 miles an hour. It is the most reproduced picture in history. It became painstakingly clear to humanity, just how small and vulnerable our one and only home actually is. [The first] movement celebrates that home in a variety of ways; think of it as an abbreviated introduction to planet Earth through music.

Of the second movement of the symphony she said:

I spent hours, simply listening to recordings of the Amazon jungle by the world renown sound engineer, George Vlad. The recordings were made during the rainy season when humidity is at its highest and birds are the most vocal. The sounds transport you into the heart of the jungle. The rain forest has its own music. The density of growth, with every shade of green, is the backdrop for this beautiful, strange opera.

I composed Voices in Green with the Amazon jungle sounds playing as my audio backdrop. It influenced every note and phrase. In my mind and heart, I was there, adding my voice to theirs.

“Violence, death, murder, birth, & life; I wanted to capture that commonality with music in the third and final movement,” Giroux said.

There is a recurring theme throughout the finale.  It evolves, much like life on Earth. It moves through the music, transporting us from one musical setting to the next, ending in a majestic, grandiose way.

The miracle of Earth is life. It is the fragile, silken thread that holds existence together. As with the famous Blue Marble photograph, I hope this symphony reminds people just how frail and beautiful Earth is.

I hope The Blue Marble fills hearts & minds with a renewed loved for our planet,  our one and only home. Earth is the one thing we all have in common. It does not belong to us. We belong to it. It is our only home and we should always treat it as such which every generation leaving it healthier and happier than the way they found it.

–program notes by Gigi Sherrell Norwood