Norman Dello Joio (b. 1913)
Norman Dello Joio was born in New York City and descended from three generations of organists; he himself was a church organist and choir director at age fourteen. He attended the Julliard School for three years, then transferred to Yale, where he studied with Paul Hindemith. He held positions at Sarah Lawrence College (NY) and at the Mannes College of Music in New York City, where he was Professor of Composition. In 1972, he moved to Boston, and from 1972 to 1979, was Dean of the School of Arts at Boston University. Dello Joio has composed for virtually every medium, including television. In addition to winning an Emmy in 1965 for the original version of "Scenes from the Louvre" and the New York Music Critics Circle Award, he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for "Meditations on Ecclesiastes."
"Scenes from the Louvre" was originally written for orchestra to accompany an NBC television special on the Louvre gallery. Broadcast in November 1964, the version for band was commissioned by Baldwin-Wallace College for its Symphonic Band, conducted by Kenneth Snapp. The transcription was completed and premiered in 1966 with the composer conducting. The composition is a suite of the television music, portraying the museum's development during its construction. Cast in five movements, classical forms are used such as binary, strophic, and theme with variations. The composition does not have a particularly modernistic sound due to its original purpose as descriptive music, but Dello Joio uses a liberal dash of chromaticism, adding spice to his accompaniments. Parallels to "Variants on a Medieval Tune" are apparent, especially in the forth movement. A chorale and cantus firmus treatment of development figure prominently in the third movement.
(Edited by Richard Miles)
Holsinger was born December 26, 1945 in Kansas City, Missouri. He received his Bachelor of Music degree from Central Methodist College in Fayette, Missouri in 1967, and his Master of Music degree from Central Missouri State University in Warrensburg in 1974. He did further post-graduate study at Kansas University from 1979-81 where he also served as staff arranger for the University Bands and was Director of the Swing Choir. Holsinger was twice the recipient of the prestigious Ostwald Award for band composition, sponsored by the American Bandmasters Association. He currently serves as assistant to the Chief Musician at Shady Grove Church in Grand Prairie, Texas. Among his activities, he arranges and produces worship music albums, directs the Academy instrumental music program with his wife, Winona, and teaches theory in the church-affiliated Bible College. Holsinger serves annually as an instructor at several church music conferences and visits several universities yearly, serving as guest composer-conductor. He has held similar temporary posts in Poland and Guatemala. He was commissioned by Kappa Kappa Psi, national honorary band fraternity, to compose a work for their National Intercollegiate Band and conduct its premiere performance at their national convention in 1989.
Hebron was a prominent city of the Old Testament. It was a dwelling place for Abram; the site where Abraham's wife, Sarah, died; a "city of refuge' under the leadership of Joshua; a gift to the descendants of Aaron, the Levite Priest; and the capital city King David chose from which to rule Judah for seven and one-half years. The Gathering of the Ranks of Hebron depicts that time in biblical history when almost 350,000 men came together, armed for battle, determined to make David king over all Israel, eventually making the first ill-fated attempt at bringing the Arc of the Covenant back to Jerusalem.
Frank Ticheli (born January 21, 1958 in Monroe, Louisiana) has composed works for a variety of media, including band, wind ensemble, orchestra, chamber, and theatre-music. His works have been performed by numerous ensembles throughout the United States, Canada, and Japan, including the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, the Pacific Symphony Orchestra, the orchestras of Austin, Colorado, Frankfurt, Memphis, Nashville, and San Antonio, and many university, high school, and middle school ensembles.
His music has been described as "lean and muscular...and above all, active, in motion", "showing an unabashed self-assuredness arising from a great foundation of orchestral technique", and expressing "direct emotion, creating dramatic visceral impact."
He received his Doctor of Musical Arts and Masters Degrees in Composition from the University of Michigan where he studied with William Albright, George B. Wilson, and Pulitzer-prize-winners Leslie Basset and William Bolcom, and his Bachelor of Music in Composition from Southern Methodist University where he studied with Donald Erb.
He is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Southern California, and is now in his fourth year as Composer-in-Residence of the Pacific Symphony Orchestra. He previously was an Assistant Professor of Music at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, where he served on the board of directors of the Texas Composers Forum, and on the advisory committee for the San Antonio Symphony's "Music of the Americas" project.
Cajuns are descendants of the Acadians, a group of early French colonists who began settling in Acadia (now Nova Scotia) around 1604. In 1755 they were driven out by the British, eventually resettling in South Louisiana and parts of Texas, preserving many of the customs, traditions, stories, and songs of their ancestors.
Although a rich Cajun folksong tradition exists, the music has become increasingly commercialized and Americanized throughout the twentieth century, obscuring its original simplicity and directness. In response to this trend, Alan and John Lomax traveled to South Louisiana in 1934 to collect and record numerous Cajun folksongs in the field for the Archive of Folk Music in the Library of Congress. By doing so, they helped to preserve Cajun music in its original form as a pure and powerful expression of Louisiana French Society.
"La Belle et la Capitaine" tells the story of a young girl who feigns death to avoid being seduced by a captain. Its Dorian melody is remarkably free, shifting back and forth between duple and triple meters. In this arrangement the melody is stated three times. The third time an original countermelody is added in flutes, oboe, clarinet, and trumpet.
Howard Hanson is one of the most important figures in the American music world. He has exerted widespread influence as a composer, conductor, and educator. Born in Wahoo, Nebraska, in 1896, Hanson studied music at Luther College, at the Institute of Musical Art (Juilliard School of Music) in New York, and at Northwestern University. At the age of twenty, he accepted an appointment as dean of the Conservatory of Fine Arts, College of the Pacific in San Jose. In 1921 he was the first composer to enter the American Academy in Rome, having won its Prix de Rome. Upon his return to the United States in 1924, he became the director of the Eastman School of Music, a position held until 1964. In 1936 he was elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters in New York, and in 1938 to fellowship in the Royal Academy of Music in Sweden. In 1944 he received the Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No. 4. In 1945 he won the Ditzen Award, followed in 1946 by the George Foster Peabody Award, and in 1951 by the Award of Merit of the Alumni Association of Northwestern University. He holds thirty-six honorary doctorates from American colleges and universities, in addition to many other honors and distinctions received both in this country and abroad.
Hanson's major works include his opera Merry Mount, six symphonies, many choral and chamber works. Among his principle works for band are March Carillon, Dies Natalis, Young Person's Guide to the Six-Tone Scale, and Laude. Hanson's style is romantic, tonal (although enhanced by euphonious dissonances), with asymmetric rhythms at times, and a preference for the low instrument registers.
The Merry Mount is an opera based on Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, The Maypole of Merry Mount. Hawthorne's has an historical basis in conflict between the Puritans and Cavaliers, which in recently-settled New England resulted in the conflict between settlers of Plymouth and the Cavalier group led by Thomas Morton, who had established Merry Mount at what is now Quincey, Massachusetts. The plot of the opera is anything but merry: set in a Puritan town in old New England, it concerns a pastor's romantic obsession with a visiting Lady, and the unleashing of his repressed hedonism. The story was a natural for Hanson, combining his love for "warm-blooded music," poetic description, and Puritan history. The opera had its stage premiere on February 10, 1934 at the Metropolitan Opera; four years later, Hanson prepared an orchestral suite from the work. The dazzling Merry Mount, with its lush orchestration, elicited 50 curtain calls in its operatic premiere at the Met.
The austere Overture, which describes the Puritans, makes extensive use of the modal writing Hanson considered "very much in keeping with the Puritan character...I have always been passionately devoted to the great modal melodies which have come down to us from the past. As a boy, I heard countless Swedish folk-songs and folk-dances, most of which were in the Aeolian or Dorian modes...In church I was impressed with the chorale melodies which form so important a part of the Lutheran service, many of which are so strongly influenced by the Gregorian chant."
The playfulness of the second movement Children's Dance is deceptive; it reflects the disruptive presence in town of the hedonistic Cavaliers. The third movement, Love Duet, would not be out of place in Hanson's Romantic Symphony, with its passionate account of Pastor Bradford's desire for Lady Marigold Sandys; while the exhilaration Maypole Dances use original themes written in "the old modes" to depict the erection of the maypole, an object that scandalizes the Puritans-and reflects the human sensuality that leads Pastor Bradford to murder.