Cleveland Winds and Friends, March 7

Our second concert will be on Monday, March 7, 2011 at 7 PM in Waetjen Auditorium on the campus of Cleveland State University. We are very pleased to announce that Professor Howard Meeker, Director of Instrumental Music at Cleveland State University, will be our guest conductor. Professor Meeker will be conducting Ingolf Dahl‘s Sinfonietta. We are also pleased to announce that two of the area’s finest wind bands will be sharing the concert stage with us that evening. Our two guest ensembles will be the North Royalton Community Band, led by Cleveland Winds percussionist Mark Wozniak, and the Cleveland Heights High School Wind Ensemble, under the direction of Brett Baker.

The repertoire for the rest of the Cleveland Winds’ portion of the concert will feature Aaron Copland’s Emblems, led by Music Director Birch Browning.

Program Notes

Sinfonietta – Ingolf Dahl

The form of this Sinfonietta is akin to an arh or to the span of a large bridge: the sections of the first movement correspond, in reverse order and even in some details, to the sections of the last. For example, the opening fanfares of the back-stage trumpets are balanced by those at the close of the work; the thematic material that ends the first movement opens the last, although in altered form. The middle movement is itself shaped like an arch: it begins with an unaccompanied line in the clarinets and ens with a corresponding solo in the alto clarinet. The center of the middle movement which is the center of the whole work–a gavotte-like section, and the lightest music of the entire Sinfonietta–is the “key-stone” of the arch.

The tonal idiom of the work grows out of the acoustical properties of the symphonic band: a wealth of overtones. Thus I feel that bands call for music with more open and consonant intervals than would be a string ensemble or a piano. The Sinfonietta is tonal, and centered aournd A-flat major. At the same time, however, its corner movements are based on a series of six tones (A-flat, E-flat, C, G, D, A) which, through various manipulations, provide most of the work’s harmonic and melodic ingredients and patterns. The six tones were chosen to permit all kinds of triadic formations. Furthermore, their inversion at the interval of the major sixth yields a second six-tone set which comprises the remaining six tones of a complete twelve-tone row.

The six-tone set is introduced tone by tone by the opening back-stage trumpets, and as it reappears in its original form and in transpositions, it constitutes the entire tonal content of this fanfare.

Throughout the two corner movements, the set appears in various guises, from the blunt unison statement which opens the last movement to the almost unrecognizable metamorphoses elsewhere. It also provides melodic as well as harmonic frameworks. Thus in the first movement, it serves as focal point in the march tune which opens the principal rondo section; it also motivates the succession of tonalities in the cadenza-like modulatory episode for the clarinet section, which goes from A-flat via E-flat and C major, and so forth, to A major, i.e., to the key farthest removed from the initial A-flat. (When the cadenza reaches the A, the rondo section returns.)

The First Movement, “Introduction and Rondo,” proceeds by simple alternation between march-like refrains and rhythmically looser episodes. A culmination is reached at the point at which the entire clarinet section, punctuated by the brass and percussion, breaks into the brilliant cadenza mentioned above. The movement closes in full tutti and with a drum pattern which traditionally would stand at the beginning of a march, but which here ends it.

The Second Movement, “Notturno Pastorale,” consists of alternations and superimpositions of several musical forms in a single movement. These forms are: a fugue, a waltz, and a gavotte. The fugue subject first hides in a lyrical saxophone solo. It derives from the tetrachord E-flat, F, G-flat, A-flat, but through octave displacements and rhythmic shifts, etc., each of its appearances is slightly different from all others, as if it were refracted by different lenses at each entry.

Superimposed upon the fugue is the waltz which alternately recedes into the distance and returns to the foreground. By contrast, the middle section–Gavotte–is of a much simpler fabric: a lightly accompanied oboe tune.

It will be noted that the second movement, unlike the first, avoids most of the “conventional” band sounds. There is no tutti, and the texture is often densely polyphonic or, as in the Gavotte, uncommonly thin and airy.

The tonality of D-flat–the classical sub-dominant key-relative to the first movement. Throughout, there is a gravitational temptation toward further sub-dominants: to G-flat, then to C-flat, and so on.

The Third Movement, “Dance Variations,” begins with the most straightforward presentation of the six-tone set. Thereupon the set, serving as the basso ostinato of this passacaglia-like movement, undergoes countless set-derived transformations. (The term “variations” here refers to the ostinato.) Appearing above these bass variations we hear a multitude of different little tunes in shifting colors. And all this proceees along a key-scheme that goes through most of the circle of fifths, beginning several time over on the key level of A-flat. A lyrical middle section provides contrast. Toward the end, after a rhythmic tutti, the instrument, in commedia dell’arte fashion, bow out one by one.

- Ingolf Dahl

Emblems – Aaron Copland

In May, 1963, I received aletter from Keith Wilson, President of the COLLEGE BAND DIRECTORS NATIONAL ASSOCIATION, asking me to accept a commission from that organization to compose a work for band. He wrote: “The purpose of this commission is to enrich the band repertory with music that is representative of the composer’s best work, and not one written with all sorts of technical or practical limitations.” That was the origin of “EMBLEMS”.

I began work on the piece in the summer of 1964 an completed it in November of that year. It was first played at the CBDNA National Convention in Tempe, Arizona, on December 18, 1964, by the Trojan Band of the univeristy of Southern California, conducted by William Schaefer.

Keeping Mr. Wilson’s injunction in mind, I wanted to write a work that was challenging to young players without overstraining their technical abilities. the work is tripartite in form: slow-fast-slow, with the return of the first part varied. Embedded in the quiet, slow music the listener may hear a brief quotation of a well known hymn tune, “Amazing Grace”, published by William Walker in The Southern Harmony in 1835. Curiously enough, the accompanying harmonies had been conceived first, without reference to any tune. It was only a chance perusal of a recent anthology of old `Music in America’ that made me realize a connection existed between my harmonies and the old hymn tune.

An emblem stands for something — it is a symbol. I called the work EMBLEMS because it seemed to me to suggest musical states of being: noble or aspirational feelings, playful or spirited feelings. The exact nature of these emblematic sound must be determined for himself by each listener.

- Aaron Copland