Tuesday, November 17, 2026, 7:30pm
Meyerson Symphony Center + Livestream

Fanfare

7:15pm, Meyerson lobby

Ascent
James Quinn
Southern Methodist University Brass & Percussion
Charles Aguillon, Director of Athletic Bands, conductor

Program

American Prelude
Johan De Meij

Symphony No. 1, The Lord of the Rings
Johan De Meij

I.    Gandalf (The Wizard)
II.   Lothlorien (The Elvenwood)
III.  Gollum (Sméagol)
IV.   Journey in the Dark
a. The Mines of Moria
b. The Bridge at Khazad-Dûm
V.    Hobbits

— INTERMISSION —

Leaves of Grass, for trumpet & wind orchestra
Johan De Meij
*World Premiere*
Inspired by the poems of Walt Whitman

I.    Song of the Open Road
II.   At Night at the Beach Alone
III.  Sparkles of the Wheel
IV.  Song for all Seas, all Ships
V.    Manahatta

Jens Lindemann, soloist
(C trumpet, flugelhorn, B♭ trumpet, E♭ piccolo trumpet)

Dallas Winds Personnel

Program Notes

Danzón No. 2 (1994)

Arturo Márquez (b. 1950), transcribed by Oliver Nickel

Arturo Márquez was born in Sonora, Mexico in 1950. Both his father and grandfather were musicians (performing both folk and mariachi music). He is one of the most well-known and widely performed living Mexican composers.

The danzón is a traditional dance originating in Cuba. It is descended from the contradanza or habanera, as the dance is known outside of Cuba. We may be able to hear hints of the most well-known habanera, that from Bizet’s Carmen, in the danzón. Early contradanzas and danzóns made their way to New Orleans, and their rhythm became part of the musical gumbo that led to jazz. The danzón also made its way to the Mexican state of Veracruz and eventually to Mexico City, where it was a prominent style heard at the famous club El Salón México, the namesake of the work by Copland.

Márquez has written nine Danzóns, but by far the most well-known is No. 2. In fact, Danzón No. 2 has become one of the most widely performed works of contemporary classical music in both its original orchestral version and the band transcription we will hear tonight. Its popularity is due to its infectious rhythms, beautifully memorable melodies, and a sense of joy that makes every listener grin from ear to ear.

(Bret Newton)

La Fiesta Mexicana: A Mexican Folk Song Symphony

H. Owen Reed (1910 – 2014)

In Reed’s long and productive life, he worked with and studied with many of the most important figures in American music, including Howard Hanson, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Roy Harris, and Arnold Schoenberg. He was the longtime professor of composition at Michigan State University, and while there he taught many students who would go on to be influential composers in their own right, such as David Maslanka, David Gillingham, and Adolphus Hailstork.
After World War II, Reed began an ethnomusicological study of music from the Americas. This included musical styles of Native Americans, Mexicans, Anglo Americans, and African Americans. Through a Guggenheim Fellowship, he was able to travel to Mexico for six months and document the musical culture there. The music he heard on that trip became the foundation for his most well-known work, La Fiesta Mexicana. This piece, subtitled “A Mexican Folk Song Symphony,” blends the sounds of imagined Aztec ceremonies, Roman Catholic masses, and street musicians playing mariachi music. The work is in three movements.

1. Prelude and Aztec Dance
   The piece opens with the pealing of bells and the blaring of Horns. This signals the beginning of the fiesta. The huge hits on the bass drum are representative of the sonic booms of fireworks. The music dies down, and the festival-goers meander into the town plaza. Listen closely for the sound of the Contrabass Clarinet in the first soloistic passage ever written for that instrument in a band composition. The music slowly waxes and wanes, the bells fade away, and suddenly a mariachi band starts playing in the distance. The party is in full swing, and the parade is full of colors and life. An Aztec dance troupe follows the mariachi band. Their performance builds to a frenzy, and the movement ends with the crashing of a gong.
2. Mass
   The bells call again. All festivals have their beginnings in the church calendar. This one is no exception. All gather within the walls of the cathedral to worship.
3. Carnival
   The party is back on. The streets are buzzing with commotion and music is everywhere. The circus is in town to entertain one and all. Mariachis play on every street corner. The world is a fiesta.

(Bret Newton)

Sinfonía Nómada (Nomadic Symphony)

Arturo Márquez (b. 1950)

Sinfonía Nómada (Nomadic Symphony) is a work centered on migration, approached not as a single narrative but as a series of perspectives. Across its three movements, the symphony moves from the natural world to the human experience, ultimately confronting one of the most urgent issues of our time: immigration. Framing the entire work is a recurring batucada-inspired rhythmic language that opens each movement and returns with heightened meaning in the finale, where its character is revealed in full.

The first movement, Marcha Natura: Pole to Pole (Natural March), reflects the vast cycles of natural migration that define life on earth. Its steady, processional character evokes the movement of species across great distances: caribou traversing the tundra, salmon returning upstream to the waters of their birth, and the Arctic tern’s extraordinary annual journey between the poles. The music unfolds with patience and inevitability, suggesting motion not as urgency, but as necessitvy, embedded in the rhythms of the natural world.

The second movement, Faro Verde: Sahuaro (Green Lighthouse), draws inspiration from the poem Saguaros by Salvadoran poet Javier Zamora. In Saguaros, Javier reflects on his journey on foot from El Salvador through the Sonoran Desert into the United States. Undertaken in an effort to be reunited with his parents, the journey took two months, with the poem set at the moment of his arrival at the U.S. border. In the Sonoran Desert, the composer’s birthplace, the towering saguaro cactus stands as both witness and guide. These behemoths grow slowly, approximately one meter every sixty years, with some living for centuries and reaching heights of over sixty feet. Márquez translates this imagery into sound through a gradual unfolding of musical material: a long crescendo shaped by shifting meters that mirrors the slow growth of the saguaro. This rise is later reversed, the music fading as if the landscape itself is falling away. This expansion and decay can be heard as the life cycle of the cactus, a reflection on environmental loss, or perhaps the saguaros serving as sentinels, rising before by Javier Zamora, only to recede as he leaves them behind him.

The final movement, Looking South, addresses contemporary human migration directly. Márquez, himself an immigrant during his studies in California, has described this subject as inescapable: “How could I write anything else?” Yet rather than framing the movement in present-day rhetoric, he turns to the words of William Shakespeare, written over four centuries ago. The movement is structured around “The Stranger’s Case” speech from The Book of Sir Thomas More, in which Sir Thomas asks his listeners to imagine themselves as the very strangers they seek to expel. Though the text is never spoken, it is embedded musically, first in the trumpets and later in the clarinets. The final word of the speech, “inhumanity,” is revealed as the fundamental motive, not only of the movement, but of the batucada drumming that frames the entire symphony. Here, in the third movement, the drumming is accompanied by whistles. These whistles are not – as I first believed – the police responding to rioters, but rather, a warning call to the community that dangerous, inhuman forces are descending.

(Brian Messier)