Music Of The Stars.

Journey Through Orion (Julie Girouix, 1961 – ). Julie Giroux was born in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. She started writing music before she reached her teens. In 1992, with a recent degree in performance from Louisiana State University, she won an Emmy for music direction, the first woman and youngest person so honored. With credits for over 100 films and television programs, she has composed for symphony orchestras, wind ensembles, military bands, soloists, brass and woodwind quintets, and other concert and commercial musical formats. Journey Through Orion was premiered in 2006 at the Association of Concert Bands, with Colonel Arnald D. Gabriel (USAF, ret.) conducting. Images of the Great Orion Nebula, Barnard’s Loop, M78, M43, Molecular Clouds 1 and 2, and the Horsehead Nebula greatly influenced the composer to sketch a musical journey through those astronomical features, using musical notes. Through the music, we can travel 1,500 light-years away to the constellation of Orion the Hunter, into the Molecular Cloud Complex, and through the Great Orion Nebula, where stars and ideas are born. (Note adapted from Palatine Concert Band, Palatine, Illinois – www.palatineconcertband.org)

–oOo–

Excursions for Trumpet and Band (Bruce Broughton). Creating music in the tradition of the great film composers of history, Bruce Broughton is one of the busiest, most versatile, and most successful TV and movie composers currently working in Hollywood. He got an Academy Award nomination for his first major film score, Silverado. His very next assignment, Young Sherlock Holmes, got him a Grammy nomination for the soundtrack album. Besides those, he created the music for JAG, First Monday, Lost in Space, Honey I Blew Up the Kid, The Presidio, Hart to Hart, Dallas, Quincy, Barnaby Jones, Hawaii Five-O, and dozens more movies and television shows. In his aptly named 1996 Excursions for Trumpet and Band, the composer takes a break from the large and small screen to explore the diverse technical and expressive capabilities of the trumpet. About it, Bruce Broughton has commented, “Although not literally a programmatic piece, Excursions is based upon a tune that wanders in and out of various musical situations. After a short introduction by the soloist, the main theme is presented over a lightly ambling accompaniment. The theme travels this way and that, running into some interesting diversions along the way, eventually meeting itself where it began – at the introduction.” Angular melodies and driving rhythms characterize the piece, permeating the “various musical situations” through which the solo trumpet leads the band. Broughton masterfully uses fragments of the opening thematic material – including wide leaps, syncopations and, a rising 16th note figure – in exciting new combinations. The result is a musical journey with an ever-changing view, but in territory that remains familiar. Excursions was premiered by the U.S. Air Force Band, with Chief Master Sergeant Ronald Blais as soloist, at the Florida Music Educators Association convention in January 1996.

–oOo–

Adventures On Earth (John Williams, 1932 – ). John Williams studied composition at UCLA and later attended Juilliard. In 1956, he started working as a recording pianist in film and TV, including the groundbreaking 1958 Peter Gunn soundtrack sessions with Henry Mancini. (He was listed as “Johnny T. Williams” on the album credits.) Williams followed in Mancini’s footsteps, becoming composer and music director for over 70 Hollywood films, including Jaws, Star Wars, Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Schindler’s List, Jurassic Park, Memoirs of a Geisha, Catch Me If You Can, and more. Williams has received two Emmys, five Oscars, and 17 Grammy Awards, plus several gold and platinum records. From 1980 to 1993, Williams was conductor of the Boston Pops. He has written many concert pieces and is also known for the Olympic themes and fanfares he wrote for the 1984, 1988, and 1996 games. In 1982 Stephen Spielberg charmed America and the world with his movie about a friendly extra-terrestrial being stranded on planet Earth. After some exciting adventures with the children who discover him, and several narrow escapes from the authorities, E.T reunites with his spaceship so he can return home. Original soundtrack music by John Williams helped make E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial a special and spectacularly successful Hollywood blockbuster. Adventures on Earth comes from the final reel of the movie. Film director Spielberg allowed musical director Williams to record the Adventures On Earth sequence without a metronomic click track, and then had the closing moments of the feature film re-edited to match the score. The film music is also a spectacular concert piece, arranged for symphonic band by Paul Lavender.

–oOo–

Mars, the Bringer of War (Gustav Holst, 1874-1934). Between 1914 and 1916, after talking with a friend about astrology, Holst composed an orchestral suite of seven tone poems portraying the extraterrestrial planets from Mars to Neptune. (Pluto had not yet been discovered.) To Holst, each planet’s special characteristics suggested contrasting musical moods for a work unlike anything he had yet written. Holst worked hard to refute the idea that Mars, the Bringer of War (first of the seven movements), was written after the outbreak of World War I. The movement is not a comment on war, he said, but a prophetic vision of war – all the more remarkable because Holst had never heard a machine gun, and the tank had not yet been introduced to the battlefield. The concert band arrangement is by Holst himself.

–oOo–

Stardust (Hoagy Carmichael, 1899-1981). By 1927 Hoagy Carmichael had written a couple of songs – “Washboard Blues” and “Riverboat Shuffle” – but he wasn’t an actor or a singer or a composer. He was a lawyer. It doesn’t take legal training to write “Stardust” but it helps. The song’s lyricist, Mitchell Parish, was himself a law clerk about that time time. “Hoagy studied law,” Parish said, many years later, “and he was practicing in Florida when they had that real estate boom in the 1920s. And he didn’t like the practice of law. It didn’t suit his creative inclination. Something gets into your blood – like lyric writing in mine, popular songs. The same bug got into his blood. He would have done very well as an attorney because he was a very gifted person and very intelligent. But the songwriting, writing music, made him.” So in 1927 Carmichael quit his law practice in Florida and went back home to Bloomington, Indiana. The official version of the creation of “Stardust” is that young Hoagland was in love with a girl called Dorothy Kelly, and one night, strolling across the campus of Indiana University, he came to the so-called “spooning wall.” And, seeing the happy couples and pining for Dorothy, he looked up at the starry sky and started whistling a tune. Which, even in his moony, lovelorn state, he recognized as pretty good. So he hastened over to a joint called the Book Nook that had a piano. “The notes sounded good,” said Hoagy, “and I played till I was tossed out, protesting, still groping for the full content of my music.” Well, that’s the official story. The real story, according to biographer Richard Sudhalter, was that Carmichael had in fact been working on the tune much earlier, and, as the melodic style suggests, with the intention of capturing the essence of a Bix Beiderbecke cornet solo. Bix can stake a claim to being the first great fatality of jazz – dying young years before doing so became a cliché of the industry. Hoagy outlived Bix by half a century, and a great and brilliant man spent the rest of his life trying to live up to a fellow who checked out in his twenties. Hoagy named his son after Beiderbecke, and Carmichael’s very last composition, “Piano Pedal Rag,” which premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1979, was an attempt to write “something that was a little bit like something Bix might have liked.” There have been more than 1,500 recordings of Stardust, and scores of arrangements, including a lush concert band version by Sammy Nestico. (Note adapted from Mark Steyn, http://www.steynonline.com.)

–oOo–

Looking Upward Suite (John Philip Sousa, 1854–1932). Sousa was exceptionally proud of his 11 concert suites and featured them prominently in his band concerts. They are not as well known or as popular as Sousa’s marches, but the suites served an important place in Sousa’s unique programs as a middle ground between the heavier classics he often featured and the many lighter pieces he included as “musical sorbets.” For most of Sousa’s suites, inspiration came from something he experienced or read. Looking Upward was among Sousa’s favorites, and he often recounted for news reporters the inspiration for the work. The first movement had been inspired while looking into the darkening sky one crisp evening while riding a train through South Dakota. The second movement was suggested by an advertisement for a steamship named The Southern Cross. The third came simply by “… gazing into the heavens….” The suite contains largely original music throughout, although Sousa did borrow two brief themes from his operetta Chris and the Wonderful Lamp. Sousa was a master of musical effects, and one of the distinguishing features of Looking Upward is a pair of drum rolls in the third movement, titled “Mars and Venus,” which begin as whispers and slowly swell into thunderous roars before diminishing once again. The score and parts were edited by Col. John R. Bourgeois (USMC, Ret.), former conductor of the United States Marine Band. In The Sousa Band concert programs, the printed notes were usually as follows:

By the Light of the Polar Star: “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way, Oh what fun it is to ride In a one-horse open sleigh.”–Old song.

Under the Southern Cross: Above the slim minaret, Two stars of twilight glow, The lute and bright castanet Sound in the dusk below. Look from thy lattice, Gulnare, Gulnare. Stars of twilight glow, Now through the nearing night Four stars in glory rise– “Two the pale heavens light. Two arc thy shining eyes.” –Macdonough.

Mars and Venus: “He was a soldier off to war. She was a sweet young soul. She sang of love and he of glory, And together they told the same old story. After the drummer’s roll, my lad. After the drummer’s roll.” –Old, old song.

(Note adapted from United States Marine Band, http://www.marineband.marined.mil)

–oOo–

Chorale Prelude: So Pure the Star (Vincent Persichetti, 1915-1987). Philadelphia native Vincent Persichetti was an important composer, musical educator, and writer. He was known for integrating new musical ideas into his own musical composition, as well as for using those ideas in training many noted composers in composition at the Juilliard School. Few 20th century American composers are as universally admired as Vincent Persichetti. His contributions enriched the entire musical literature. His influence in performing and teaching is immense. He is revered as a teacher par excellence and a highly lucid theorist. In both capacities his great artistry was ever clear and impressive, providing an example of dynamic leadership to all who encountered his genius. So Pure the Star was written in 1963, on commission by the Duke University Band. It treats an original chorale melody with contemporary harmonies, resulting in a hauntingly beautiful, lyrical and spiritual piece. (Note adapted from Ridgewood Concert Band, Ridgewood NJ, njwindsymphony.org)

–xXx–