2025 Spring Concert Richland county high school bands

A timeless collection of endearing songs familiar to all, this Mike Story arrangement is a lesson in how to arrange for young bands. Featuring If I Only had a Brain; We're Off to See the Wizard; Ding-Dong! the Witch Is Dead and, of course, Over the Rainbow, these highlights are just as enjoyable as when you first heard them.

-Program note by publisher

Edgar Yipsel Harburg (born Isidore Hochberg; April 8, 1896 – March 5, 1981) was an American popular song lyricist and librettist who worked with many well-known composers. He wrote the lyrics to the standards "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" (with Jay Gorney), "April in Paris", and "It's Only a Paper Moon", as well as all of the songs for the film The Wizard of Oz, including "Over the Rainbow". He was known for the social commentary of his lyrics, as well as his leftist leanings. He championed racial, sexual and gender equality and union politics. He also was an ardent critic of high society and religion.

-Program notes from Wikipedia

Harold Arlen (15 February 1905, Buffalo, N.Y. – 23 April 1986, New York City) was an American composer of popular music, having written over 500 songs, a number of which have become known worldwide.

Arlen was born Hyman Arluck, in Buffalo, New York, United States, the child of a Jewish cantor. His twin brother died the next day. He learned the piano as a youth and formed a band as a young man. He achieved some local success as a pianist and singer and moved to New York City in his early 20s. He worked as an accompanist in vaudeville. At this point, he changed his name to Harold Arlen. Between 1926 and about 1934, Arlen appeared occasionally as a band vocalist on records by The Buffalodians, Red Nichols, Joe Venuti, Leo Reisman and Eddie Duchin, usually singing his own compositions.

In 1929, Arlen composed his first well-known song: Get Happy (with lyrics by Ted Koehler). Throughout the early and mid-1930s, Arlen and Koehler wrote shows for the Cotton Club, a popular Harlem night club, as well as for Broadway musicals and Hollywood films. Arlen and Koehler's partnership resulted in a number of hit songs, including the familiar standards Let's Fall in Love and Stormy Weather. Arlen continued to perform as a pianist and vocalist with some success, most notably on records with Leo Reisman's society dance orchestra.

Arlen's compositions have always been popular with jazz musicians because of his facility at incorporating a blues feeling into the idiom of the conventional American popular song. In the mid-1930s, Arlen married, and spent increasing time in California, writing for movie musicals. It was at this time that he began working with lyricist E.Y. "Yip" Harburg. In 1938, the team was hired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to compose songs for The Wizard of Oz. The most famous of these is the song Over the Rainbow for which they won the Academy Award for Best Music, Original Song. They also wrote Down with Love (featured in the 1937 Broadway show Hooray for What!), a song later featured in the 2003 film Down with Love.

In the 1940s, he teamed up with lyricist Johnny Mercer, and continued to write hit songs like Blues in the Night, Out of this World, That Old Black Magic, Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive, Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home, Come Rain or Come Shine and 'One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).

Arlen composed two defining tunes which bookend Judy Garland's musical persona: as a yearning, innocent girl in Over the Rainbow and a world-weary, "chic chanteuse" with The Man That Got Away, the latter written for the 1954 version of the film A Star Is Born. In addition to composing the songs for The Wizard of Oz, including the classic 1938 song, Over the Rainbow, Arlen is a highly regarded contributor to the Great American Songbook. Over the Rainbow was voted the twentieth century's No. 1 song by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

-Program notes from the Wind Repertory Project

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by John Williams, arranged by Michael Story

Relive the magic of all eight films with this medley from each of the exciting film scores. The themes included are Hedwig's Theme and Nimbus 2000 from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Fawkes the Phoenix from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Double Trouble from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Hogwarts' Hymn from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Dumbledore's Army. This medley will ensure that Harry's conjuring enchantment lives on for generations to come.

-Program Note from publisher

Refer to the program notes on STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER for the biography of John Williams.

Malagueña by Ernesto Lecounia, arranged by Bob Lowden

Malagueña is a song by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona. It was originally the sixth movement of Lecuona's Suite Andalucía (1933), to which he added lyrics in Spanish. The song has since become a popular, jazz, marching band, and drum and bugle corps standard and has been provided with lyrics in several languages. In general terms, malagueñas are flamenco dance styles with paso doble elements from Málaga, in the southeast of Spain.

-Program notes from Wikipedia

Ernesto Lecuona y Casado (August 7, 1895 – November 29, 1963) was a Cuban composer and pianist, many of whose works have become standards of the Latin, jazz and classical repertoires. His over 600 compositions include songs and zarzuelas as well as pieces for piano and symphonic orchestra.

In the 1930s, he helped establish a popular band, the Lecuona Cuban Boys, which showcased some of his most successful pieces and was later taken over by Armando Oréfiche. In the 1950s, Lecuona recorded several LPs, including solo piano albums for RCA Victor. He moved to the United States after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, and died in Spain in 1963.

-Program notes from Wikipedia

How High The Moon by Nancy Hamilton & Morgan Lewis, arranged by Michael Sweeney

On February 8, 1940, Alfred Drake and Frances Comstock introduced “How High the Moon” during the Broadway revue Two for the Show. The musical would run at the Booth Theatre for 124 performances. An instant hit, Benny Goodman’s recording of “How High the Moon,” featuring vocalist Helen Forrest, entered the pop charts a few weeks after the show opened, rising to number six. Subsequent hit recordings include:

Mitchell Ayres and His Fashions in Music (1940, Mary Ann Mercer, #18)

Stan Kenton and His Orchestra (1948, instrumental, #20)

Les Paul and Mary Ford (1951, #1)

Two for the Show comprised a series of song and dance numbers set in wartime London. It was just one of several Hamilton and Lewis collaborations which include the related One for the Money and Three to Get Ready. Two for the Show starred Alfred Drake, Keenan Wynn, Eve Arden, Richard Haydn, and Betty Hutton in her Broadway debut.

In 1951 guitar legend Les Paul and his vocalist wife Mary Ford hit the top of the charts with “How High the Moon” remaining there for nine weeks. The landmark recording was accomplished by using a multi-track tape recorder to overdub the guitar and vocals, allowing the duo to record a full instrumental sound with multi-part vocal harmonies. Paul is credited with perfecting the use of the multi-track tape recorder, a pioneering effort that changed the course of recorded music.

In a December 15, 2003, USATODAY.com interview Paul explained, "I created a little radio show I did every Friday where I could do anything I wanted. As the ideas progressed to do everything in multi-track (I invented the machine, the delay, the echo, all that) ...I took this idea of multi-track recording to Capitol Records and hit with “How High the Moon.”"

After “Mockingbird Hill,” “How High the Moon” would become the second million-selling recording in 1951 for Les Paul and Mary Ford. Within the year Les Paul would also go on to collaborate with Gibson Guitar Corporation to create the extremely popular “Les Paul” model--a solid-body, electric guitar.

Morgan Lewis wrote “How High the Moon” as a slow ballad. Because of its complex and interesting chord progressions, however, the song became a bebop favorite and is now almost always performed up-tempo. In his book Easy to Remember: The Great American Songwriters and Their Songs, William Zinsser refers to the song as belonging to “... the elite company of romantic ballads that generations of jazzmen have embraced for their melodic energy and harmonic interest ...” Countless jazz musicians have employed it as the basis for new compositions, notably Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology” and John Coltrane’s (note the word play) “Satellite.”

For a time, “How High the Moon” contended for the honor of being the most recorded composition by jazz musicians. Today critics glorify the composition with such arguable titles as “the bop national anthem,” “the bop hymn,” or “the national anthem of the modern jazz movement.” Regardless of such nicknames, a title that is indisputable is “Towering Song,” an honor bestowed by the National Academy of Popular Music at the 1957 annual award ceremony.

-Program notes from jazzstandards.com

Nancy Hamilton was born in Sewickley, Pennsylvania on July 27, 1908, daughter of Charles Lee Hamilton and Margaret Miller Marshall. She was educated at Miss Dickinson's School in Sewickley, at the Sorbonne, and received a B.A. from Smith College in 1930.

At Smith, Hamilton was active in the theater and was president of the school's Dramatic Association her senior year. She caused a bit of a scandal at the college with And So On, a topical revue that she wrote and directed. Billy J. Harbin, Kim Marra and Robert A. Schanke, in their book The Gay & Lesbian Theatrical Legacy: A Biographical Dictionary of Major Figures in American Stage History in the Pre-Stonewall Era, wrote "She [Hamilton] had received special permission from the president of this women's college to hire men to play in the show's orchestra. On opening night the audience was scandalized when it was discovered that Hamilton had incorporated many of the men into onstage scenes.

-Program notes from Wikipedia

William Morgan "Buddy" Lewis, Jr. (26 December 1906 – 8 December 1968) was a writer of jazz songs, some of which were also recorded in the pop music genre.

Lewis was born in Rockville, Connecticut and died in New York City. He wrote songs and Broadway theatre scores with lyricist Nancy Hamilton including "How High the Moon" and "The Old Soft Shoe".

-Program notes Wikipedia

A Night in Tunisia by John "Dizzy" Gillespie, arranged by Michael Sweeney

"A Night in Tunisia" is a musical composition written by American trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie in 1942. He wrote it while he was playing with the Benny Carter band. It has become a jazz standard. It is also known as "Interlude", and with lyrics by Raymond Leveen was recorded by Sarah Vaughan in 1944.

-Program notes from Wikipedia

John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie's effect on jazz cannot be overstated: his trumpet playing influenced every player who came after him, his compositions have become part of the jazz canon, and his bands have included some of the most significant names in the business. He was also, along with Charlie Parker, one of the major leaders of the bebop movement.

Gillespie's father was an amateur bandleader who, although dead by the time Gillespie was ten, had given his son some of his earliest grounding in music. Gillespie began playing trumpet at 14 after briefly trying the trombone, and his first formal musical training came at the Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina.

Gillespie's earliest professional jobs were with the Frankie Fairfax band, where he reportedly picked up the nickname Dizzy because of his outlandish antics. His earliest influence was Roy Eldridge, whom he later replaced in Teddy Hill's band. From 1939-41, Gillespie was one of the principal soloists in Cab Calloway's band, until he was dismissed for a notorious bandstand prank. While with Calloway he met the Cuban trumpeter Mario Bauza, from whom he gained a great interest in Afro-Cuban rhythms. At this time he also befriended Charlie Parker, with whom he would begin to develop some of the ideas behind bebop while sitting in at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem.

From 1941-43, Gillespie freelanced with a number of big bands, including that of Earl "Fatha" Hines. Hines' band contained several musicians Gillespie would interact with in the development of bebop, such as singer Billy Eckstine, who formed his own band featuring Gillespie on trumpet in 1944.

The year 1945 was crucial for both bebop and Gillespie. He recorded with Parker many of his small ensemble hits, such as "Salt Peanuts," and formed his own bebop big band. Despite economic woes, he was able to keep this band together for four years. His trumpet playing was at a peak, with rapid-fire attacks of notes and an amazing harmonic range. A number of future greats performed with Gillespie's big band, including saxophonists Gene Ammons, Yusef Lateef, Paul Gonsalves, Jimmy Heath, James Moody, and John Coltrane. The rhythm section of John Lewis, Milt Jackson, Kenny Clarke, and Ray Brown became the original Modern Jazz Quartet.

He took various bands on State Department tours around the world starting in 1956, the first time the U.S. government provided economic aid and recognition to jazz. Those excursions not only kept Gillespie working, they also stimulated his musical interests as he began incorporating different ethnic elements into his music, such as the Afro-Cuban rhythms he weaved into his big band arrangements. Never losing his thirst for collaboration, Gillespie worked with a variety of jazz stars as well as leading his own small groups on into the 1980s.

-Program notes from the National Endowment for the Arts

Folk Song from Somerset by Ralph Vaughn Williams, arranged by Ed Huckeby

Ralph Vaughn Williams was born in England and studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in London at the Royal College of Music under two major figures of the late 19th-century renaissance of English music, Sir Charles Stanford and Sir Hubert Parry. In 1897-98 he studied in Berlin under the noted composer Max Bruch and in 1909 in Paris under Maurice Ravel. About 1903 he began to collect folk songs, and in 1904-06 he was musical editor of The English Hymnal, for which he wrote his celebrated “Sine Nomine” (“For All the Saints”).

After artillery service in World War I, he became professor of composition at the Royal College of Music. His studies of English folk song and his interest in English music of the Tudor period fertilized his talent, enabling him to incorporate modal elements (i.e., based on folk song and medieval scales) and rhythmic freedom into a musical style at once highly personal and deeply English.

The first movement is set as an English march, and is made up of three folk songs, I’m Seventeen Come Sunday, Pretty Caroline, and Dives and Lazarus. The first two folk songs deal with similar subject matter of military men falling in love with, and marrying, beautiful women. The styles of the two songs offset each other, the first is bouncy and jovial, the second legato and cantabile. The third folk song included in movement one is Dives and Lazarus. Lazarus repeatedly begs Dives, a rich man, for food but is denied. To portray the antagonism of the event, Vaughan Williams has set a firm duple meter melody in the low brass against a rigorous triple meter accompaniment in upper winds.

Both folk songs used in the Intermezzo deal with love betrayed, and Vaughan Williams’s keen sense of orchestration is on full display throughout this movement. My Bonny Boy begins the movement in a lonely F Dorian with sparse accompaniment. The mood shifts slightly to the folk song Green Bushes set as a somewhat playful scherzando. The pace of this folk song belies the fact that the tonal center has remained F Dorian, and thus never really feels happy or jovial.

The third movement (the selection on tonight's concert), Folk Songs From Somerset, uses four different folk songs dealing loosely with unattainable love. Blow Away the Morning Dew, describes a country boy attempting to seduce a girl who quickly outwits him. The second folk song, High Germany, is about a young English woman’s lover and her three brothers being called off to war in Germany. Thirdly, Vaughan Williams modified a version of “The Trees They Do Grow High” which deals with a young woman who has been wed by her father to a much younger boy. The final folk song is John Barleycorn which is an allegory representing the harvesting of barley, and the imbibing of its final form (beer and whisky).

-Program notes from University of Missouri Wind Ensemble concert program on April 28, 2021

Simple Gifts - A traditional Shaker hymn, arranged by Scott Stanton

"Simple Gifts" is a Shaker song written and composed in 1848, generally attributed to Elder Joseph Brackett from Alfred Shaker Village. It became widely known when Aaron Copland used its melody for the score of Martha Graham's ballet Appalachian Spring, which premiered in 1944.

-Program notes from Wikipedia

Mt. Wrightson March by Jason Taurins, arranged by Josh Tentadue

Mt. Wrightson March began as a sketch of the mountain taken in Green Valley, Ariz. The opening Mannheim rocket follows the contour of the mountain as it pierces the skyline. The tallest peak in its range, Mt. Wrightson is home to an observatory which is famous for helping discover liquid water on Mars.

-Program Note by composer

Jason Taurins (b. 3 September 1991, Grand Rapids, Mich.) is an American music educator, composer/arranger, trumpeter and clinician.

Mr. Taurins holds a Bachelor of Music in Education degree from Western Michigan University, where he studied composition with Lisa Coons and Richard Adams. He also has a Master of Music degree from the University of Florida. His musical interests include writing for wind bands, arranging for marching band, and writing marching band drill, as well as writing chamber music. His influences are diverse, including the great classical composers, the twentieth century avant garde, jazz, classic rock, and metal. He is an active advocate of music by living composers, and diversity in musical programming.

He has been commissioned and performed by performers and ensembles from around the United States, Europe, and Asia. He was a winner of the 2017 Fifteen Minutes of Fame competition. He has been invited to perform with the World Youth Wind Orchestra Project in Schladming, Austria.

As an avid musical miniaturist, he also created the Minute of Music Project to support new music for trumpet, and to promote composers. He has also written for the project.

Since 2019, Mr. Taurins has been employed as the 6-12 music teacher at St. David Unified School District #21 in St. David, Ariz., where his responsibilities include teaching middle and high school band, high school small ensembles, and high school choir.

-Program notes from the Wind Repertory Project

Yorkshire Ballad by James Barnes, adopted into a flex band arrangement by Clarence Barber

Composed in the summer of 1984, James Barnes’ Yorkshire Ballad was premiered at the Kansas Bandmasters Association Convention in Hutchinson, Kansas, by the late Claude T Smith, who was serving as the guest conductor for the Kansan Intercollegiate Band. Since being published in 1985, it has become one of the composer’s most popular works. It has been arranged for full orchestra and string orchestra by the composer, for marimba and piano by Linda Maxey, for flute choir by Arthur Ephross, and for trombone or tuba/euphonium ensemble by John Bohls.

The composer writes that:

“over the years, many conductors and teachers have called me to ask about the work, and whether the tune itself is in fact a folksong. Yorkshire Ballad is not a folksong, but it is written in that style. I composed this little piece so that younger player would have an opportunity to play a piece that is more or less in the style of Percy Aldridge Grainger’s Irish Tune from County Derry. Even Grainger’s easier works are too difficult for most younger players to do them musical justice, so I thought I would write a little piece that might emote some of the feelings and colors of Grainger’s wonderful music, but, at the same time, was technically much more accessible to the younger player.” “People always ask me what I was trying to portray when I wrote Yorkshire Ballad. All I can say is that I was thinking of the beautiful, green Yorkshire dales of Northern England; the rolling hills and endless stretch of beautiful pasturelands that my wife and loved so much when, a year before, we had driven through this most marvelous spot in the world.“

- Program Note from the Wind Repertory Project

James Charles Barnes (b. 9 September 1949, Hobart, Okla.) is an American composer, conductor and educator.

Barnes studied composition and music theory at the University of Kansas, earning a Bachelor of Music degree in 1974, and Master of Music degree in 1975. He studied conducting privately with Zuohuang Chen.

Professor Barnes is member of both the history and theory-composition faculties at the University of Kansas, where he teaches orchestration, arranging and composition courses, and wind band history and repertoire courses. At KU, he served as an assistant, and later, as associate director of bands for 27 years.

His numerous publications for concert band and orchestra are extensively performed at Tanglewood, Boston Symphony Hall, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.

Barnes has twice received the coveted American Bandmasters Association Ostwald Award for outstanding contemporary wind band music. He has been the recipient of numerous ASCAP Awards for composers of serious music, the Kappa Kappa Psi Distinguished Service to Music Medal, the Bohumil Makovsky Award for Outstanding College Band Conductors, along with numerous other honors and grants. He has recorded three commercial compact discs of his music with the world famous Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra. More recently, he completed a CD of his works with the Koninklijke Militaire Kapel (The Queen’s Royal Military Band) in Holland. He has also been commissioned to compose works for all five of the major military bands in Washington, DC.

Mr. Barnes has traveled extensively as a guest composer, conductor, and lecturer throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, Japan and Taiwan. He is a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), the American Bandmasters Association and numerous other professional organizations and societies.

-Program notes from the Wind Repertory Project

Mock Morris by Percy Aldridge Grainger. Transcribed by Joseph Kreines, and adapted into a a flex band arrangement by Aric Branchfield

Grainger produced several versions of Mock Morris for different media. This transcription is based on the string orchestra version, composed in 1910, but takes several scoring ideas from the 1950 version which Grainger made for Leopold Stokowski. The composition is best described by Grainger in the preface to the string orchestra score: "No folk-music tune stuffs at all are used herein. The rhythmic cast of the piece is Morris-like, but neither the build of the tunes nor the general lay-out of the the form keeps to the Morris dance shape."

-Program note by Joe Kreines

While many of Grainger’s works incorporate and feature these collected folk songs, Mock Morris is an original work. Though the composition utilizes original thematic material, the listener might find it difficult to believe that it is indeed original. Grainger repeatedly asserted the originality of the piece to skeptical listeners, while admitting that one theme was “(unwittingly) cribbed from an early Magnificat of Cryil Scott.”

Mock Morris is a buoyant, jaunty romp, inspired by the traditional English Morris folk dance. There have been several settings of the work, but the original was written for a small, six-piece string ensemble in 1910. The American composer and educator Joseph Kreines transcribed the work for band and wind ensemble in 1991.

-Program Note by Gregory C. Depp for the University of Texas Symphony Band concert program, 7 December 2018

George Percy Grainger (8 July 1882, Brighton, Victoria, Australia – 20 February 1961, White Plains, N.Y.) was an Australian-born composer, pianist and champion of the saxophone and the concert band, who worked under the stage name of Percy Aldridge Grainger.

Grainger was an innovative musician who anticipated many forms of twentieth century music well before they became established by other composers. As early as 1899 he was working with "beatless music", using metric successions (including such sequences as 2/4, 2½/4, 3/4, 2½/4).

In December 1929, Grainger developed a style of orchestration that he called "Elastic Scoring". He outlined this concept in an essay that he called, "To Conductors, and those forming, or in charge of, Amateur Orchestras, High School, College and Music School Orchestras and Chamber-Music Bodies".

In 1932, he became Dean of Music at New York University, and underscored his reputation as an experimenter by putting jazz on the syllabus and inviting Duke Ellington as a guest lecturer. Twice he was offered honorary doctorates of music, but turned them down, explaining, "I feel that my music must be regarded as a product of non-education."

-Program notes from the Wind Repertory Project