All Campus Orchestra & Concert Band 03.01.2025

Chen Yi wrote Spring Festival for the most important Chinese celebration of the year, New Year or Yüan Tan, a fifteen-day event. Chinese New Year is also called Spring Festival because it marks the time when winter ends and spring is close at hand. This festival begins on the first day of the first month of the lunar calendar. On a western calendar, the date usually falls between the end of January and the beginning of February. The composer drew her melodic ideas from a southern Chinese folk ensemble piece called Lion Playing Ball. The form of music is constructed using a mathematical scheme called the Golden Section – a mathematical construct based on the ratio known as phi. The ratio is equal to 1.61803, and was thought by ancient civilizations to be a perfect proportion most pleasing to the eye. When the ratio of line segments, geometric shapes, objects and nature, or proportions in a building is equal to 1.6, it is called the “golden ratio.”

Math and music work together well in the spirited ringing celebration of the Chinese New Year. Gongs and symbols make it exciting. Crisp articulation, rhythmic syncopation, and uneven phrases enhance the style and spirit of music.

“Flash Fury is a visceral and energetic work for concert band that depicts the blazing speed of fast-moving lightning, in all its beauty and simultaneous chaos. This piece features the brass section primarily, highlighting different virtuosic passages and timbres between the instrument sections, allowing them to have their moment to shine.

Flash Fury was commissioned by Thomas Kober, director of bands at Brennan High School, for the Brennan High School Wind Ensemble in San Antonio, Texas.”

-Program note by composer

“I never saw snowfall as a child growing up in Southern California; it was more a phenomenon that I saw in cartoons or read in children’s books.

I did, however, witness my first ash-fall when I was in elementary school. I looked up into the clouded sky and saw specks of ash falling from it. Excited but puzzled, I looked to my elementary school teacher during recess and held out my hand. “Oh, that’s ash from the wildfires,” she said. At that time, I couldn’t comprehend how an enormous forest fire could create a small flurry of ash-flakes.

Now I have the ominous understanding that something so magical and beautiful comes from something so powerful and destructive.”

-Program note by composer

“Shared Spaces was commissioned by Dr. Eric Laprade and Dr. Colleen Sears for the Wind Ensemble of The College of New Jersey for the Artivism Project: Life After Loss. My goal in writing this piece was to convey some part of my own experience with loss in such a way that might resonate with others. As perhaps an antidote to the loneliness that accompanies loss, the peace insists on its performers coming together. The performers are asked to cross fade on almost every note, essentially handing off their sounds to each other in brief shared moments. These notes coalesce in simple, overlapping harmonies, creating further shared spaces within a piece that I humbly offer as a sanctuary for collective healing.”

-Program note by composer

“Try is a uniquely self-aware and self-referential work for me. It was commissioned by the South Carolina Band Directors Association thanks to SCBDA President Leslie Gilreath—an incredible composer, conductor, educator, and human being whom I am deeply grateful to call my friend and colleague. When I received the commission, I was in a period of heightened stress; it was late in a busy, difficult school semester, I had been feeling quite “stopped up” creatively, and to top it off, I was vicariously stressed for my partner, who was also going through a period of heightened stress with her job and career. The prospect of composing this new piece scared me, and I grew anxious that I’d have to back out of the commission out of an inability to produce anything of quality. But as I acknowledged and worked with the fear I was feeling, I realized that I had began repeating a particular phrase to both myself and my partner during our shared time of stress: “it doesn’t matter whether or not you always succeed; it just matters that you always try”. I was shocked with a fresh consciousness for the fact that my fear and anxiety didn’t have to stop me; that I could not allow them to do so. This phrase became a mantra, reminding me that it’s not the achievement that matters in the end but the human need to strive. Put simply, I needed to try.

In that spirit, Try begins with a musical “attempt”—at what is left up to the listener’s imagination. However, the attempt does not succeed, and we come crashing down and grind to a halt. But that’s okay; we tend to our scrapes and our bruises, brush ourselves off, stand back up, and get to work. We reflect back on our attempt, analyzing our failure, and we practice. We struggle, sure; we get frustrated. But that doesn’t stop us; we acknowledge our feelings and we push forward, doing the best we can with what we have and know. Eventually, we look back on our growth, and we feel ready to try again. We take a second attempt, and this time, making use of all that we have practiced and all that we have learned from our failures, the differences in our attempt lead us to success. It is ecstatic and enrapturing to achieve what we’ve strived so hard to do—but in the end, what matters most is that we set our minds to something and we tried. That is the greatest success we can ever seek to achieve in this life of ours.”

-Program note by composer

Before there was Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and even Mussorgsky, there was Glinka. The latter is the precursor of all the great Russian composers so familiar to today’s concertgoer, but ironically, in this country, he is known to audiences for only one composition:  the sparkling overture to his opera, Ruslan and Lyudmila. Composer of many songs, chamber works, and other compositions, his major contributions to musical history are both that opera (1842) and his earlier opera, A Life for the Tsar (1836).  Both works are infused with Russian elements–musical and narrative—and are ample evidence of his position as the father of the Russian nationalist school.

In 1834, Glinka came under the literary influence of Russian nationalism, and his opera, A Life for the Tsar, was the perfect vehicle for the official state dogma exalting the tsar, the Russian Orthodox Church, and Russian ethnicity. Glinka’s talents shone brightly in the work—especially his gift for scintillating orchestration. The latter, of course, went on to characterize almost all of our favorite Russian composers.

A Life for the Tsar was a great success, and paved the way for his treatment of Pushkin’s Ruslan and Lyudmila. Pushkin was not able to collaborate with the composer, owing to the poet’s death in an ill-advised duel, but, Glinka worked with others, and the fantastic tale of magic, sorcerers, and the supernatural became his second opera.  It must be said that in it a tradition that leads right through Rimsky-Korsakov and on to Stravinsky was born: innovative harmonies and scales, supernatural tales, brilliant orchestration—all in the service of dramatic music. Unfortunately, the opera was not a great success, its structural weaknesses, complicated plot, and the rising popularity of Italian opera in Russia led to its relative obscurity. The overture did survive, however, and it became a worthy chestnut of orchestral literature.

Cast in the familiar sonata form, it opens with a driving frenzy in the strings serving as the first theme, with the usual broad, lyrical contrasting theme following shortly in the lower strings. Snatches of the tune are developed in an atmosphere that clearly evokes a bit of the mysterious, magical elements of the opera, followed by a recap that spurs the cheerful ferocity even further. A loud, descending (and quite progressive, for the times) whole tone scale in the low brass evokes the opera’s evil sorcerer, as this brilliant curtain raiser careens to a rousing conclusion.

– William E. Runyan (Edited)

Each of Beethoven’s first two symphonies pushed the envelope of the Classical symphony, as defined by Mozart and Haydn, but his Third Symphony was the real game changer. Objectively, it basically doubled the length of previous standards. And if it were possible to measure subjective expectations of the genre, it probably doubled those too, increasing expressive tolerances across the board.
Beethoven began work on it shortly after the premiere of the Second Symphony and completed it in 1804. It was first performed in private at one of the residences of Beethoven’s patron Prince Lobkowitz and publicly premiered April 7, 1805. The work originally was titled “Bonaparte,” but after Napoleon had himself crowned emperor in 1804, Beethoven scratched that indication out on his manuscript. It was published (in 1806) under the title (in Italian) “Heroic Symphony…composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.”
Where Beethoven’s first two symphonies began with a slow introduction, the “Eroica” springs to life from just two brusque chords, launching a seemingly impetuous play of harmonic and rhythmic tension. The slow movement is a polyphonically intensified funeral march of profound grief and fury, which gives way to a massively energized Scherzo.
For his finale, Beethoven recalls another hero, the mythological titan Prometheus. Beethoven takes a theme from his ballet The Creatures of Prometheus and creates an intricate yet immediately engaging set of variations on its bass line as well as a fugue on the theme, capped with further development and a dashing coda.

– Los Angeles Philharmonic (edited)

Camille Saint-Saëns’ hallmark opera Samson et Dalila traces the Biblical story of the man whose strength was found in his hair, and the scorned Philistine woman who attempted to ruin him. After Samson rejects Delilah’s advances, she cuts off his hair while he sleeps. He is then captured and taken to the temple of the Philistine god Dagon, where he is bound and mocked. As the priests prepare a sacrifice to their god, they bring out Samson — now blind — to entertain them. He asks to be placed between two pillars that support the temple, and, using his final breaths, pushes against the pillars, causing the collapse of the temple, and the death of everyone in the temple, including himself. Although the Bible only recounts the priests and guests being ‘in high spirits,’ Saint-Saëns depicted this gathering as an over-the-top, wine-drunk, depraved ceremony, utilizing the Bacchanale: a dance named after the mythological god of wine and fertility.
Saint-Saëns loved exoticism in his music (exoticism, in this case, indicating the Westernizing of a musical language from the East), and incorporated the Arab Hijaz mode, a melodic mode that includes an augmented second between scale degrees 2 and 3, which Saint-Saëns expands by including an additional augmented second between scale degrees 6 and 7. It’s this melody which the listener hears at the very onset of the dance, and carries us through to its final, fatal finale.

– University of Texas Wind Symphony (edited)