San Jose Wind Symphony

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Program Notes

Sunday, March 2, 2008, 3:00 PM

McAfee Center, Saratoga
Dr. Edward C. Harris, Conductor
Featuring Galen Lemmon, Timpani Soloist

Las Vegas Holiday

Roger Nixon (b. 1921)

Born and raised in California’s Central Valley, Roger Nixon acquired a taste for the rhythms and dances of the early settlers of the state, which appear in many of his works. His musical interests were nurtured in the public school music program, summer camp at Pacific Grove, and Modesto Junior College. He spent the war years in the Navy as a commanding officer of an LCMR in the Atlantic. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied with Roger Sessions, Sir Arthur Bliss, Ernest Bloch, and privately with Arnold Schoenberg. He is Professor Emeritus at San Francisco State University. He has written over 60 compositions for orchestra, band, choir and opera. In 1997, Nixon was honored by the Texas Bandmasters Association as a Heritage American Composer.

Las Vegas Holiday reflects Nixon’s impressions from the 2001 American Bandmasters Association convention in Las Vegas, which was held at the Luxor Hotel, a 30-story replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza. The composer comments: “…our experiences and observations form the basis for the imagery of the seven sections of this piece.”.

The Red Pony: Film Suite for Band

Aaron Copland (1900 - 1990)

Ia.	Dream March
Ib.	Circus Music
II.	Walk to the Bunkhouse
III.	Grandfather's Story
IV.	Happy Ending

Born in Brooklyn, Aaron Copland has been called the “dean of American music.” He first studied with Rubin Goldmark and later with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Returning to the U.S. in 1924, he sought a style “that could speak of universal things in a vernacular of American speech rhythms.” He seemed to know what to remove from the music of the European tradition, simplifying the chords and opening the melodic language, in order to make a fresh idiom. His music evokes visions of the beauty and grandeur of his homeland and of its heroes and workers. He was a great teacher, both to composers and to audiences of laymen. In his later years, he was often called upon to conduct and narrate his own works. It can be said that Copland set America’s soul to music.

Aaron Copland wrote the music for the film The Red Pony during a ten-week period in 1948 on a studio lot in the San Fernando Valley. An orchestral suite was completed that same year, commissioned by the Houston Symphony Orchestra. Four of the original movements were transcribed for performance by the U.S. Navy Band in 1968. John Steinbeck’s story about a ten-year-old boy, Jody, and his life on a California ranch was based on the author’s experiences growing up near King City, and a pony he had once cared for. It is a story that derives its warmth and sensitive quality from the character of the boy, his parents, grandfather, and cowhand Billy Buck. It is filled with the emotions of daily living, from the joy of a boy receiving a pony of his own, to the bitter nature of death and dying. “The Dream March” and “Circus Music” depict two of Jody’s daydreams; he is at the head of an army of knights in silvery armor, or the whip-cracking ringmaster of the circus. “The Walk to the Bunkhouse” shows Jody’s admiration for Billy Buck’s talents, especially with horses. “Grandfather’s Story” tells of how he led the wagon train “clear across the plains to the coast,” but he cannot hide his bitterness that the “Westerning has died out of the people.” The last movement suggests the open air quality of country living and mounts to the climax of a “Happy Ending.”

Variations on “America”

Charles Ives (1874 - 1954), transcribed for band by William E. Rhoads, based on the orchestra version by William Schuman

Charles Ives was born into a tradition of band music. His father, George, had been a respected bandmaster in the Union Army during the Civil War and was a leader of numerous amateur musical groups. Charles was taught to play the drums, cornet, piano, and violin by his father and played in his father’s band at the age of 12. At 13, he was composing simple marches and fiddle tunes. He became the youngest salaried church organist in Connecticut at the age of 14. He studied composition with Horatio Parker at Yale, where he made barely passing grades in his subjects other than music. In 1898, he went to New York to work for the Mutual Life Insurance Company. He formed an insurance business with Julian Myrik in 1902 and saw the business prosper with his innovations (e.g. estate planning). A successful business man by day, Ives would do his composing in the evenings. He wrote only to please his sense of music and didn’t have to depend on it for a living. Ives’ Third Symphony was completed in 1911, but it was not performed until 1946. It earned the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. Ives died in 1954, leaving a legacy that anticipated most of the innovations of the 20th century, including atonality, polytonality, microtones, multiple cross-rhythms, and tone clusters.

Charles Ives composed his Variations on “America” when he was 16 and working as a church organist. Originally composed for organ, the work was later popularized in a 1949 arrangement for orchestra by William Schuman. This composition of five variations represents the earliest known example of musical polytonality. The variations are humorous in character and full of surprises. Ives used his musical unorthodoxy to assert his independence from the genteel musical life of 19th century New England, while demonstrating his ability to be a “cut up” to his male peers. At one concert, Ives’ father would not allow Charles to play the pages which included canons in two and three keys at once, because they were “unsuited to performance in church – they made the boys laugh out and get noisy.”

A Tribute to Stephen Foster

Stephen Foster (1826 - 1864), arranged by Sammy Nestico

Known as the “father of American music,” Foster was the pre-eminent songwriter in the United States during the 19th century. He was born in Pennsylvania, the youngest of ten children. Foster’s education included little formal music training, and only one month of college. Rather than writing nostalgically for the South or trivializing the hardships of slavery, Foster sought to humanize the characters in his songs and to convey a sense that all people share the same longings for family and home. He instructed white performers of his songs not to mock slaves, but to get their audiences to feel compassion for them. In his own words, he sought to “build up taste...among refined people by making words suitable to their taste, instead of the trashy and really offensive words which belong to some songs of that order.” Familiar songs featured in this tribute include Oh! Susanna, Camptown Races, My Old Kentucky Home, Beautiful Dreamer and Old Folks at Home (Swanee River)..

Sun Flower Slow Drag

Scott Joplin and Scott Hayden, arranged by D.S. DeLisle, edited by Gunther Schuller

Maple Leaf Rag

Scott Joplin, arranger unknown, edited by Gunther Schuller

Scott Joplin was the second of six children. His father was a former slave who worked as a laborer and played the violin, and his mother sang and played the banjo. Anecdotes relate that she cleaned the homes of white people in Texarkana to give Scott access to a piano. At the age of 23, he led a band and played the cornet in Chicago. When not traveling with his vocal group the Texas Medley Quartette, he worked in Sedalia, Missouri as a pianist in the Maple Leaf and Black 400 clubs. By 1899, he had already published several songs, rags, and a waltz. Joplin was posthumously awarded the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for his opera Treemonisha. He died on April 1, 1917, the same day that the United States entered World War I.

In Maple Leaf Rag (presumably named for a short-lived Sedalia social club), he gave the genre its iconic masterpiece. It was also ragtime’s biggest hit, and about one-half million copies had been sold by 1909. The phenomenal success of Maple Leaf Rag sparked a nationwide ragtime craze. Hundreds and hundreds of rags were published. One entrepreneur even opened a chain of ragtime instruction schools. Joplin left little doubt as to how his compositions should be performed. As a precaution against the prevailing tendency of the day to speed up the tempo especially on Maple Leaf, he explicitly wrote in many of his scores that “ragtime should never be played fast.” The popularity of Maple Leaf Rag earned Joplin a small but steady income for the rest of his life. He contacted a young lawyer to draft a contract with the local publisher for Maple Leaf, and rather than being paid an outright sum of $10 to $20, Joplin earned a one-cent royalty for each sale

Raise the Roof, for Timpani and Symphonic Band

Michael Daugherty (b. 1954)

Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Daugherty is the son of a dance band drummer and the oldest of five brothers, all professional musicians. He studied music composition at North Texas State University, the Manhattan School of Music and Yale University. He taught music composition at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and is currently Professor of Composition at the School of Music at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). Daugherty is one of the most performed and commissioned American composers of his generation. He came to international attention when his Metropolis Symphony, a tribute to the Superman comics, was performed in 1995 at Carnegie Hall. Daugherty’s other music includes Sing Sing: J.Edgar Hoover, Elvis Everywhere, Hell’s Angels for Bassoon Quartet and Orchestra (recently performed by the Livermore-Amador Symphony), and the opera Jackie O.

Raise the Roof (2003) was commissioned by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra for the opening of its Max Fisher Music Center in 2003. It was inspired by the grand architecture of buildings such as the Empire State Building and Notre Dame Cathedral. According to the composer, “Raise the Roof brings the timpani into the orchestral foreground as the foundation of a grand acoustic construction. I have composed music that gives the timpanist the rare opportunity to play long expressive melodies, and a tour de force cadenza. The timpanist uses a wide variety of performance techniques: extensive use of foot pedals for melodic tuning of the drums, placement of a cymbal upside down on the head of the lowest drum to play glissandi rolls, and striking the drums with regular mallets, wire brushes, maraca sticks, and even bare hands. Another compositional building block in Raise the Roof is a brooding theme reminiscent of a medieval plain chant, first heard in the timpani and the flutes, and later in the strings and tuba. This theme is repeated and passed around in canons and fugues and other permutations throughout the orchestra, to create elaborate patterns as in a gothic cathedral. I have also composed a lively, pulsating melody for the orchestra combining rock and Latin rhythms. The music is a cascade of major and minor triads, like laying down bricks and stones to build up a ‘wall of sound.’ Raise the Roof rises toward a crescendo of polyrhythms and dynamic contrasts, allowing the orchestra to construct a grand new space for performing music of the past, present, and future.”

The Gallant Seventh March

John Philip Sousa (1854 - 1932), edited by Loras John Schissel

Sousa wrote this march for the 7th Regiment, 107th Infantry, of the New York National Guard. Its band’s conductor, Major Francis Sutherland, had been a cornetist in Sousa’s band before joining the Army during the First World War. The march was premiered by Sousa’s band with members of the 7th Regiment band at the New York Hippodrome in November 1922. Written during the last decade of Sousa’s career, it is considered one of his best.