San Francisco Wind Ensemble
In addition to its annual concert series at SF State, the ensemble strives to offer a variety of community engagement activities, arts education services and collaborations, at little to no cost to student musicians. Further goals include collaborations with composers to support their ambitious, innovative musical visions.
Program
- Sierra (1953–): Fandangos (2000) (transcribed by Mark Davis Scatterday)
- Lukáš (1928–): Sinfonia Brevis for Symphonic Wind Orchestra and Percussion (1995)
- Grainger (1882–1961): Lincolnshire Posy (1937)
Program notes
Program notes
Roberto Sierra (1953–): Fandangos (2000) (translated by Mark Davis Scatterday)
Roberto Sierra, one of the leading figures in American music today, was born in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, in 1953. His style seeks to incorporate “elements of folklore and of popular music (urban folklore) in order to create a music that in essence is Puerto Rican, and portrays the marvelous and contradictory world of that tropical island.” These nationalistic elements are reduced to their very essential components to be merged with forms and styles of traditional concert music.
The National Symphony Orchestra and its conductor, Leonard Slatkin, commissioned Fandangos. It is a flamenco form, which originated in Spain during the early 18th century. It is a folk dance for couples, featuring rotations typical for courtship dances. The word “fandango” encompasses the Portuguese fado (traditional dance and singing, and the Latin fatus (fate). Sierra’s composition is inspired by a keyboard fandango credited to Spanish composer Antonio Soler (1729–1783). Sierra writes:
“The keyboard Fandango of Antonio Soler has always fascinated me for its strange and whimsical twists and turns. My Fandangos is a fantasy, or a ‘super-fandango’ that takes as its point of departure Soler’s work and incorporates elements of Boccherini’s Fandango (1798) and my own Baroque musings. Some of the oddities in the harmonic structure of the Soler piece provided a bridge for the incorporation of contemporary sonorities, opening windows to apparently alien sound worlds. In these parenthetical commentaries, the same materials heard before are transformed, as one would look at the same objects through different types of lenses or prisms. The continuous variation form over an ostinato bass gave me the chance to use complex orchestration techniques as another element for variation.”
The predominant element in the music is its Spanish flavor, interspersed with more contemporary textures. Throughout the piece, images are portrayed through the music. Brass fanfares call to mind a proud matador—agitated chromatic passages a wild bull, and melodic variations a hot Spanish arena.
Zdenék Lukáš (1928–): Sinfonia Brevis for Symphonic Wind Orchestra and Percussion, Op. 265 (1995)
Zdenék Lukáš is a Czech composer. He graduated from the Theatre Institute in Prague and was an elementary school teacher for five years. He proceeded to work at the Czechoslovak Radio Studio in Plzeň, where he served as an editor and literary manager. He then founded and directed the mixed choir Česká Píseň (Czech Song).
Lukáš began composing during high school while studying music theory with Antonín Mádr from 1943 to 1946 and composition with Jaroslav Řídký. Lukáš’ early compositions have a definite late romantic flavor and are influenced by Czech folk songs. But he began to compose in a more modern style when he met the composer Miloslav Kabeláč in 1962. Lukáš worked with Kabeláč for eight years and has often cited Kabeláč as an important and invaluable influence.
Since 1964, Lukáš has been a full-time composer with two exceptions: He took a teaching position at Prague Conservatory of Music on a temporary basis and was later director of a women’s chamber choir for the Czechoslovak State Ensemble of Songs and Dances. After the Soviet invasion of 1968, a watershed moment for most artists in Czechoslovakia, Lukáš became a little more introverted and directed his energies toward creating a personal style in regard to melody and rhythm. He often employs a scale with regular alternation of major and minor seconds so that the resultant octave has one extra tone (for example, A-B-C-D-Eb-F-Gb-Ab-A).
A prolific composer with more than 270 works to his credit (including six symphonies, several operas, chamber music and a plethora of choral and other vocal compositions) Lukáš continues to compose today and works with choirs both in the Czech Republic and abroad.
The Central Band of the Czech Army commissioned Sinfonia Brevis for Symphonic Wind Orchestra and Percussion, Op. 265, in 1995. The band, conducted by Karel Bělohoubek, aimed to produce a CD featuring exclusively contemporary Czech composers’ works for wind ensemble. Its album Symphonic Works was released in late 1995.
Lukáš had already written several smaller works for this fine wind ensemble and consequently used his experience to produce a challenging large-scale work for this powerful medium. The result of this endeavor is a major symphonic composition in two movements, boasting a musical language of its own. The slow first movement begins dark and mysteriously, building in a fashion reminiscent of Anton Brucker. A calm, peaceful secondary theme section, mostly featured in the woodwinds, almost evokes Mahler-style elements of contrasting emotions. In the second movement, Lukáš plays with several folk-song inspirations, as well as contemporary harmonies, ultimately leading into a grad finale.
With Sinfonia Brevis, Lukáš joins the ranks of those most important composers who paved the way for the promising development of symphonic wind music in the 20th century.
Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882–1961): Lincolnshire Posy (1937)
Percy Aldridge Grainger was an internationally renowned Australian-American composer and pianist. His music carrier started early, with his first tour at age 12. Soon after, he moved from Australia to England, where he befriended Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, whose love of national music prompted Grainger to look closely at English folk music, inspiring many of his compositions, including Lincolnshire Posy.
Lincolnshire Posy employs many of the English folk songs gathered in the English county of Lincolnshire by Lucy E. Broadwood and Grainger. Dedicated to “the folk singers who sang so sweetly to me,” the composer makes careful acknowledgement of the people who sang for him, not only in the forward to the score, but in the way he reflected the nuances and mannerisms of the singers in the music.
This bunch of “musical wildflowers” commences with Lisbon Bay (Lisbon, Dublin Bay), a brisk sailor’s song with parallel harmonies that sound somewhat archaic in character. Besides Grainger’s use of theme and variation form, the counter melody introduced midway through by horns and trumpet is based on the first phrase of another folk song, The Duke of Marlborough.
Horkstow Grange is another set of variations on a theme, though with a darker mood, as if to echo the disturbing events surrounding the subject of a miser and his man.
Rufford Park Poachers narrates the poaching of game from a private hunting reserve. Folk singer Joseph Taylor’s free rhythms led Grainger to score this song in a series of changing meters.
The sprightly sounding Brisk Young Sailor is about a young man returning to wed his true love while the fifth movement, Lord Melbourne, is a 17th-century war song set by Grainger in a somewhat violent fashion with brass and percussion instruments predominating. The melody is a variant of The Duke of Marlborough, which was used as the counter melody in Lisbon Bay.
In the final movement, The Lost Lady Found, Grainger again uses the form of theme and variations. In the final variation he calls for the addition of “tuneful percussion”: glockenspiel, xylophone and tubular chimes, bringing this unique work to a joyful conclusion.