COncert band Friday, October 11, 2024 • UNCG Auditorium

The Redwoods (1998)

Born in Buffalo, New York, Rossano Galante received his Bachelor of Arts in Trumpet Performance from SUNY Buffalo in 1992 and also studied film scoring at the University of Southern California’s with Jerry Goldsmith. Since moving to California to pursue a career in composition and film orchestration, Galante has worked with composers including Marco Beltrami, Christophe Beck, Brian Tyler, Christopher Lennertz, and Wolfram de Marco.

The Redwoods was commissioned by Norman Alexander for the North Tonawanda High School Band. This bold overture is inspired by the power and majesty of the redwood tree. Known to many as the tallest tree on earth, the redwood can stand strong amid great flooding and strong winds. The redwood does not find its strength alone, however. Each individual tree intertwines its roots with other redwoods within groves to draw on each individual’s stability and fortitude. Likewise, this work highlights work within instrumental sections and across the ensemble to knit together an aural representation of strength and tenacity.

Note by Rossano Galante

Ash (2018)

Jennifer Jolley is a composer, conductor, and professor. Her work is founded on the belief that the pleasures and excesses of music have the unique potential to engage political and provocative subjects. Addressing a range of topics such as climate change, #MeToo, feminist history, and the abuses of the Putin regime, Jolley strives to write pieces that are equally enjoyable and meaningful.

Jolley received degrees from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music. She currently serves as assistant professor of music theory and composition in the Department of Music, Multimedia, Theatre, and Dance at Lehman College in the Bronx and was a Fulbright Scholar to Egypt in 2023. She has been a composition faculty member at Interlochen Arts Camp since 2015.

About Ash, Jolley wrote the following:

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 ashfall 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.

Note by Jennifer Jolley

Celestial Seas (2014)

Originally from Fairhaven, Massachusetts, Julie Giroux started playing piano at three, composing at eight, and has been composing ever since. Her first published work for concert band, published by Southern Music Company, was composed when she was thirteen.

In 1984, Giroux was hired by Oscar-winning composer Bill Conti as an orchestrator. Since then, Giroux has over 100 film, television, and video game credits, and has collaborated with dozens of film composers, producers, and celebrities. Projects she has worked on have been nominated for Oscars, Emmys, Grammys, and Golden Globe awards. In 1992, she won an Emmy for “Outstanding Individual Achievement in Music Direction”—she was the first woman and the youngest person to ever win in that category.

Giroux has also published a large category of classical works with emphasis on original compositions for band, which are published by Musica Propria and distributed internationally.

Celestial Seas was commissioned by the Missouri Bandmasters Association for the 39th anniversary of the Missouri All-State Band. The piece premiered at the 77th Annual Missouri Music Educators Association Conference on January 31, 2015.

Celestial Seas is a musical story covering the next five billion years of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and its eventual collision with the Andromeda Galaxy, which is approximately 2.5 million light years away. By mathematically fast-forwarding time, scientists also agree that none of the planets will collide with each other since they are all spread so far apart. Such distances are hard to imagine. The actual size of planets, measurements in light years and time passing not by thousands of years but by billions is difficult for the mind to grasp. Our sun is 1,287,000 times larger than Earth. It takes more than a million Earths in mass to equal that of the sun. Relative to those proportions of time and size, we as humans become very small and insignificant, like a grain of sand on a beach that is on a grain of sand on a larger beach a million times over—this is still too significant a representation! Five billion years from now, as the collision starts, our sun will have begun transforming into a nova and will have burned the surface of the Earth to a crisp. As a result, there will be no humans on Earth to see the extraordinary light show that will go on for thousands of years. Some scientists think Mars may be far enough away this event. I look at it like this: all we have to do is a little planet hopping over the next four billion years. Luckily, we won’t have to travel too terribly far to find a new home, because an entire galaxy is going to pay us a visit.

Celestial Seas opens up with humans represented by three notes which make up a six-note melody. Those three notes are the building blocks for the entire work which takes us from present day to the collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies and beyond. Extreme dynamic contrasts, crescendos and decrescendos, the constant changing of chords and tempos, and the continuous variations of the original melody are all musical attempts to keep us constantly sailing chronologically and physically on celestial seas.

Note by Julie Giroux

Beyond the SUmmit (2004)

Brian Balmages is a composer and conductor who spans the worlds of orchestral, band, and chamber music. His music has been performed by groups ranging from professional symphony orchestras to elementary schools in venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Sydney Opera House, Toronto Centre for the Arts, and many more. He is a recipient of the A. Austin Harding Award from the American School Band Directors Association and won the 2020 NBA William D. Revelli Composition Contest with his work Love and Light. His music was also performed as part of the 2013 Presidential Inaugural Prayer Service, which was attended by both President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.

Beyond the Summit is a musical celebration that embraces our human nature to constantly strive higher. Everyone must climb a personal “mountain,” and this metaphor reminds us to continue our journey and never stop—even when we think we’ve reached the summit.

Note by Brian Balmages

Sheltering Sky (2017)

John Mackey has written for orchestra, theater, and dance, but the majority of his work for the past several decades has been for wind ensembles. His band catalog receives annual performances numbering in the thousands. Recent commissions include works for the BBC Singers, the Dallas Wind Symphony, military, high school, middle school, and university bands across America and Japan, and concertos for Joseph Alessi, Christopher Martin, and Julian Bliss.

Jake Wallace writes the following about Sheltering Sky:

The wind band medium has, in the twenty-first century, a host of disparate styles that dominate its texture. At the core of its contemporary development exists a group of composers who dazzle with scintillating and frightening virtuosity. As such, at first listening one might experience John Mackey’s Sheltering Sky as a striking departure. Its serene and simple presentation is a throwback of sorts—a nostalgic portrait of time suspended.

The work itself has a folksong-like quality—intended by the composer—and through this an immediate sense of familiarity emerges. Certainly, the repertoire has a long and proud tradition of weaving folksongs into its identity, from the days of Holst and Vaughan Williams to modern treatments by such figures as Donald Grantham and Frank Ticheli. Whereas these composers incorporated extant melodies into their works, however, Mackey takes a play from Percy Grainger. Grainger’s Colonial Song seemingly sets a beautiful folksong melody in an enchanting way. In reality, however, Grainger’s melody was entirely original—his own concoction to express how he felt about his native Australia. Likewise, although the melodies of Sheltering Sky have a recognizable quality (hints of the contours and colors of Danny Boy and Shenandoah are perceptible), the tunes themselves are original to the work, imparting a sense of hazy distance as though they were from a half-remembered dream.

The work unfolds in a sweeping arch structure, with cascading phrases that elide effortlessly. The introduction presents softly articulated harmonies stacking through a surrounding placidity. From there emerge statements of each of the two folksong-like melodies—the call as a sighing descent in solo oboe, and its answer as a hopeful rising line in trumpet. Though the composer’s trademark virtuosity is absent, his harmonic language remains. Mackey avoids traditional triadic sonorities almost exclusively, instead choosing more indistinct chords with diatonic extensions (particularly seventh and ninth chords) that facilitate the hazy sonic world that the piece inhabits. Near cadences, chromatic dissonances fill the narrow spaces in these harmonies, creating an even greater pull toward wistful nostalgia. Each new phrase begins over the resolution of the previous one, creating a sense of motion that never completely stops. The melodies themselves unfold and eventually dissipate until the serene introductory material returns—the opening chords finally coming to rest.