Kevin Wilt (B

Kevin Wilt (b. 1984) Fanfare for Winds (2009) Kevin Wilt was the first runner up in the Metropolitan Wind Symphony’s Fortieth Season Fanfare Competition. A native of Detroit, Wilt has been studying music since the age of ten. Kevin holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts in Composition from Michigan State University, where he studied with Ricardo Lorenz. He completed his Masters Degree in Music Composition at MSU, working with Jere Hutcheson and Charles Ruggiero, and his Bachelors Degree in Music Composition and Theory from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where he studied with James Hartway. He is an Assistant Professor of Music and Composer-in-Residence at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. Wilt’s music has been performed across the country, with premieres given at Indiana University and Michigan State University. In addition to concert music, Wilt has composed music for television and films, receiving a Michigan Emmy Award nomination. About the Fanfare, the composer writes: Fanfare for Winds is based on ideas from my Brass Quintet No. 1, which was originally written for my friends in the Wayne State University Brass Quintet. Although the piece worked well, it was clear from the first rehearsal that the musical material would be well suited for a large ensemble. When an opportunity arose to work on another piece for wind symphony, I jumped at the chance to revisit my earlier work. Lasting about two minutes, the fanfare opens with the trumpets, which are quickly imitated by the rest of the brass. The piece’s principal melody is then thrown across many different instrumental colors, gradually being turned backwards along the way. As soon as this transformation is complete, the piece leaps back into the opening trumpet idea, racing to the finish. Robert Russell Bennett (1894-1981) Symphonic Songs for Band (1957) Robert Russell Bennett was an American composer and arranger. Bennett’s father, George Bennett, played violin in the Kansas City Symphony and trumpet at the Grand Opera House, while his mother, May, worked as a pianist and teacher. She taught Bennett piano, while his father taught him violin and trumpet. By the time Bennett was four, he had demonstrated his aptitude for music and his remarkable ear by picking out the finale of Beethoven’s "Moonlight" Sonata on the white keys of the piano. In his autobiography, Bennett recalled finding a ragtime tune on the piano at age ten and being informed by his mother that such music was trash—this lesson taught him to be, as he called it, a “life- long musical snob.” It was to become an irony that conflicted him for his entire career that he became best known for his orchestrations of many well-known Broadway and Hollywood musicals by other composers such as Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers. This included Oklahoma!, Showboat, the 1937 Astaire-Rogers film Shall we Dance and the TV series Victory at Sea. Bennett received two Tony Awards recognizing his orchestrations for Broadway shows. Many of the band arrangements of film and Broadway musicals that the Metropolitan Winds has performed over the years were arranged by Bennett. Symphonic Songs for Band is one of Bennett's most famous compositions for wind band. The work was commissioned for the National Intercollegiate Band by Kappa Kappa Psi and Tau Beta Sigma, national honorary band fraternity and sorority, as part of the two organizations' commissioning program. Symphonic Songs for Band, along with his 1949 Suite of Old American Dances are considered cornerstones of band literature. Symphonic Songs for Band is a suite of three movements: Serenade, Spiritual, and Celebration. Bennett wrote the following program note for the Goldman Band performance in 1958: Symphonic Songs are as much a suite of dances or scenes as songs, deriving their name from the tendency of the principal parts to sing out a fairly diatonic tune against whatever rhythm develops in the middle instruments. The Serenade has the feeling of strumming, from which the title is obtained, otherwise it bears little resemblance to the serenades of Mozart. The Spiritual may possibly strike the listener as being unsophisticated enough to justify its title, but in performance this movement sounds far simpler than it is. The Celebration recalls an old-time county fair with cheering throngs (in the woodwinds), a circus act or two, and the inevitable mule race. Lewis J. Buckley (b. 1947) Fantasy for Two Clarinets (1999) Lewis J. Buckley wrote Fantasy for Two Clarinets for two wonderful US Coast Guard Band clarinet soloists, Thomas Labadorf and Jonathan Towne, for a concert tour the Coast Guard Band was taking through the state of Florida, where both had family. Buckley wrote a showcase piece for these exceptionally talented players, featuring flying arpeggios and the beauty of the clarinet in all ranges. While the mixed meter, irregular rhythms and sometimes unpredictable intervallic leaps give the Fantasy a contemporary flavor, other parts of the music sound harmonically quite traditional. He says he has always liked the piece, but the Met Winds gave it special meaning; for Buckley’s MWS audition concert in the fall of 2006, Peter Norman and Jason Bielik played the Fantasy, and, as Buckley puts it, “Not only did they play it beautifully, but I got the job!” Frank Ticheli (b.1958) Angels in the Architecture (2008) Angels in the Architecture was commissioned by Kingsway International and received its premiere at the Sydney Opera House by a massed band of young musicians from Australia and the US, conducted by Matthew George. The title was inspired by the Sydney Opera House, with its halo-shaped acoustical ornaments hanging directly above the performance stage. The composer writes: The work unfolds as a dramatic conflict between the two extremes of human existence – one divine, the other evil. This “angel”, who is represented by the singer, frames the work, surrounding it with a protective wall of light and establishing the divine. Other representations of light, performed by the instrumentalists, including the Hebrew song of peace Hevenu Shalom Aleichem and the well known 16th-century Genevan Psalter Old Hundreth. Despite their varied religious origins, these songs represent the universal human ideals of peace, hope, and love. In opposition, turbulence, fast-paced music appears as a symbol of darkness, death, and spiritual doubt. Twice during the musical drama, these shadows sneak in almost unnoticeably, slowly obscuring, and eventually obliterating the light altogether. The darkness prevails for long stretches of time, but the light always returns, inextinguishable, more powerful than before. The alternation of these opposing forces creates, in effect, a kind of five-part rondo form (light – darkness – light – darkness – light). Just as Charles Ives did more than a century ago, Angels in the Architecture poses the unanswered question of existence. It ends as it began: the angel reappears singing the same comforting words. But deep below, a final shadow reappears, distantly, ominously. Frank Ticheli is Professor of Composition at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music. He has written for orchestra, chamber ensemble, and choir, but he is perhaps best known for his more than twenty pieces for concert band. The Metropolitan Wind Symphony is excited to be leading a three-ensemble consortium in commissioning a new work from Mr. Ticheli. The Metropolitan Wind Symphony will premiere the resulting composition in May 2017. Samuel Barber (1910-1981) Commando March (1943) Samuel Osmond Barber was an American composer of orchestral, opera, choral, and piano music. He is one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century: music critic Donal Henahan stated that "Probably no other American composer has ever enjoyed such early, such persistent and such long- lasting acclaim."[1] His Adagio for Strings (1936) has earned a permanent place in the concert repertory of orchestras. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music twice: for his opera Vanessa (1956–57) and for the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1962). Also widely performed is his Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1947), a setting for soprano and orchestra of a prose text by James Agee. At the time of his death, nearly all of his compositions had been recorded. Barber wrote his Commando March shortly after being enlisted in the United States Army during the Second World War. The work was completed in February 1943 and was premiered on May 23 of that year by the Army Air Force Tactical Training Command Band in Convention Hall, Atlantic City, New Jersey, most likely with the composer conducting. The critic Fredric V. Grunfeld writing in High Fidelity magazine described the march as "an old-fashioned quickstep sporting a crew cut," and the work received many performances in the final years of the war. Barber made a transcription of the march for full orchestra, which was premiered by Serge Koussevitzky leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Symphony Hall in Boston on October 29, 1943. (note by Russ Girsberger). Jason Huffman (1978) Alleles (2016) Alleles began as a few sketches originally intended as an undergraduate thesis. These sketches were tabled in favor of a work for brass ensemble, the eventual thesis. Over the years, these sketches were expanded and reworked, first with the thought of making a symphony out of them, then as an essay similar in structure to Samuel Barber’s works. This opening was orchestrated and read by Boston Conservatory’s Orchestra in a reading session, and then set aside again. When Lew approached me to write something for the Metropolitan Wind Symphony, a group whose abilities I know well, I knew these sketches had found a home. Given this extended gestation, the title came only after well into the final compositional stages.

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