Friday, March 24, 2023, 7:30pm
Meyerson Symphony Center + Livestream

Fanfare

(7:15 in the Meyerson lobby)

Silver Fanfare
JaRod Hall

Dallas Winds Brass & Percussion
Ogechi Ukazu, associate conductor

Program

March! [10’00”]
Jennifer Jolley

Just A Closer Walk [6’00”]
Traditional, arr. Drew Hickey
Doreen Ketchens, clarinet

What A Wonderful World [6’00”]
Bob Theile & George David Weiss, arr. Weston Lewis
Doreen Ketchens, clarinet

House of the Rising Sun [4’30”]
Traditional, arr. Drew Dickey
Doreen Ketchens, clarinet

– INTERMISSION –

Symphony No. 7 [35’00”]
David Maslanka

1. Moderate
2. Slow
3. Very Fast
4. Moderately Slow

Dallas Winds Personnel

STRING BASS
Andrew Goins

PIANO
Cameron Hofmann

TIMPANI
Steve Kimple

PERCUSSION
Brandon Kelly, principal
Steve McDonald
Nate Collins
Michael Ptacin
Kirstyn Norris
Jose Uzcategui

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

March!

Jennifer Jolley
(born 1981)

Jennifer Jolley describes herself as a composer, conductor, and professor person. She is also a cat lover and a part-time blogger. She earned degrees from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music. She is now an Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Composition at CUNY Lehman College, and she has been a composition faculty member at Interlochen Arts Camp since 2015. Jolley’s works have been performed by ensembles worldwide. She has received commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Quince Ensemble, and many others.

Her music is often inspired by subjects that are political and even provocative, including such topics as the environment and the #MeToo movement. With MARCH! Jolley chose to focus on the dual history of the musical march: part rousing crowd-pleaser and part anthem of military might and imperial domination. It was John Philip Sousa who took the march off the battlefield and brought it into the concert hall, but even today marches are still written to appease and celebrate dictators around the world.

Jolley calls MARCH! “a dark parody” of such displays of political power. Specifically, she focused on North Korea’s Kim Dynasty, currently led by Kim Jong-un. Jolley’s family has personal connections to Korea—her mother was orphaned during the Korean War—and she wanted to turn the mirror of satire on the despotic regime. Under Jolley’s hand, traditional Korean patriotic melodies sputter, stumble, and fall apart under a barrage of percussion and propaganda. Pomposity implodes in the face of laughter. MARCH! was commissioned by the American Bandmasters Association, and was first performed on August 7, 2021, by the World Youth Wind Symphony in Interlochen, Michigan, under the baton of Steven Davis.

Dixieland Jazz

Just a Closer Walk – What a Wonderful World – House of the Rising Sun

Jazz is recognized as the United States’ most important contribution to the world of music. Characterized by complex harmony, syncopated rhythms, and improvised melodies, there are almost as many styles of jazz as there are jazz musicians. Swing, R&B, Rock, and all that grew out of those styles can trace their heritage back to jazz. And jazz, music historians agree, was born in New Orleans.

One of fledgling America’s earliest and most important seaports, New Orleans was a gateway to the center of the North American continent long before the British colonists of New England ever picked up their muskets and started taking potshots at the Redcoats. Founded in 1718 by French explorers, New Orleans was subsequently controlled by the Spanish, then the French again, before becoming part of the United States of America in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase. Throughout its history, the city was an important meeting place for European explorers, indigenous people, enslaved people from Africa and the Caribbean, lords, adventurers, priests, pirates, romantics, and a wide range of rapscallions hoping to make their fortunes.

As people from all cultures do, the diverse collection of humanity that passed through New Orleans brought their music along. The European settlers brought both folk songs and the more formal music of Bach and Mozart. That music mixed it up with new rhythms and instruments from Africa and indigenous cultures. Like all musicians since the beginning of time, people sat down together, swapped licks, learned new techniques, and took it all out to the streets and music halls to share with a wider audience.

Ragtime, popularized by Scott Joplin’s 1899 composition Maple Leaf Rag, trysted with the blues out of the cotton fields of Mississippi, then enjoyed significant flings with community and military brass band music, as well as music from Sicily, France, Africa, and the Caribbean. By the early 20th century, all this musical mixing gave birth to a distinctive new style people began to call Dixieland Jazz. In 1917 a group called the Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded this emerging style of music for posterity. The music relied heavily on trumpets, trombones and clarinets for its sound, and encouraged improvisation over a two-beat rhythm.

Just a Closer Walk

Although jazz was considered a distinctly secular—even scandalous—form of music, many traditional songs were given a Dixieland makeover, including such hymns as Just a Closer Walk With Thee. Although the song’s origin is likely lost to history, it traces its roots back to the African American churches of the late 1800s, and may be even older than that. It was a favorite at Black church conventions in the 1930s and became widely popular in White gospel circles in the 1940s.

At about that same time, jazz traditionalists in New Orleans began to feel their style of music had gotten lost in all the innovations of big band swing. They mounted a revival of the original Dixieland sound, cementing it as a distinct style amidst the ever-evolving swirl of new forms of jazz. Just A Closer Walk became a Dixieland standard, and today it’s frequently played at New Orleans jazz funerals.

What a Wonderful World

Unlike the murky origins of Just a Closer Walk, we know exactly when What a Wonderful World was written, and who it was written for. Louis Armstrong, a New Orleans native, was a trumpeter and cornet player who became a prominent influence in jazz as early as the 1920s and enjoyed a career that spanned five decades.

At a time when the United States was torn by the Civil Rights movement, protests against the war in Vietnam, and an emerging wave of feminism, record producer Robert Thiele and arranger George David Weiss were impressed by Armstrong’s ability to bring audiences from all segments of society together with his music. They wanted to write an anthem that would allow him to work his magic with their words, so they joined forces to write the song and help Armstrong record it in 1967. Armstrong quickly added What a Wonderful World to his live performances, and audiences loved it, but petty industry grievances kept it off the radio for many years. While it gained popularity overseas, it didn’t become a hit in the United States until 1988.

House of the Rising Sun

The term “traditional” can cover a lot of ground when it comes to music. Many hymns, like Just a Closer Walk, fall into the traditional category, but some traditional songs are distinctly—well, NOT hymns. Take House of the Rising Sun for example.

Musicologists and folklorists have traced this one all the way back to France under the rule of Louis XIV, and maybe even further back to English broadside ballads of the sixteenth century. They’re all pretty sure the Rising Sun was a tavern. Or a brothel. Or both. The protagonist in the early versions was a woman, warning other girls to avoid the life she had fallen into. But by the time European immigrants brought the song to America, sometime before the Civil War, the protagonist had become a man who had succumbed to bad company and ruinous ways.

The earliest recorded version of the song was called Rising Sun Blues, and dates back to 1933, but the best-known recording was done by the British rock band, The Animals, in 1964. That one was called The House of the Rising Sun and used lyrics from American folk music collections. It became a number one hit in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. Since the American variations on the  original folk song place the Rising Sun in New Orleans, the city happily adopted it, despite the song’s European roots.

Symphony No. 7

David Maslanka
(1943-2017)

One of the most admired contemporary composers for wind ensemble, David Maslanka wrote on a grand scale, dealing with epic themes of life, death, and the interconnectedness of all being in the universe. Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Maslanka studied composition with Joseph Wood at the Oberlin College Conservatory in Ohio, and spent a year at the Mozarteum in
Salzburg, Austria. He did his masters and doctoral studies in composition at Michigan State University where his principal teacher was H. Owen Reed. Although he taught on the college level for many years, in 1990 he retired from academia and devoted the last twenty-seven years of his life to his commissioned compositions.

Among his 150 works are more than 50 pieces for wind ensemble, including eight symphonies, seventeen concertos, a Mass, and many concert pieces. His chamber music includes four wind quintets, five saxophone quartets, and many works for solo instrument and piano. In addition, he has written a variety of orchestral and choral pieces. His works have been performed around the world, including in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan.

Conductor Jerry Junkin and the Dallas Winds have been strong proponents of Maslanka’s music, having performed and recorded many of his works, including his Symphony No. 4, and the collection of tone poems, A Child’s Garden of Dreams. Tonight’s concert is the first time the Dallas Winds has performed Maslanka’s Symphony No. 7.

In his program notes on the symphony, Maslanka said:

I am strongly affected by American folk songs and hymn tunes, and I think of this Symphony as “old songs remembered”. With one exception all the tunes are original, but they all feel very familiar. The borrowed melody is from the 371 Four-Part Chorales by J.S. Bach. Each song has a bright side and a dark side, a surface and the dream underneath. Each is a signal or
call which evokes an inner world of associations.

He further characterized each of the symphony’s four movements. The first movement, titled “Moderate” in the score, recalled the “Sunday night church services from my youth. Mrs. Smith played the piano. The opening piano solo is marked “enthusiastically” in the score.”

The second movement, marked “Slow,” should be performed “in the manner of an American folk song, with a setting that might have come out of the 19th or early 20th centuries,” according to Maslanka. Many of the melodies in this movement may sound familiar, but never develop into the song you think they are going to be.

The third movement, “Very Fast,” provides a real workout for the ensemble. Maslanka called it “ferocious, fast music, unrelenting, determined to get a grip on chaos,” adding, “Toward the end a fractious quote of the Bach Chorale melody “Du Friedensfurst Herr Jesu Christ” (Prince of Peace Lord Jesus Christ)” may be heard.

But in the fourth and final movement Maslanka returned to the “Moderately Slow” tempo of the beginning movements in what he characterized as “A simple song of peace and healing.”

Symphony No. 7 was commissioned by a consortium of 33 university wind ensembles and premiered in 2005.

 – Program notes by Gigi Sherrell Norwood