570130 bk Giannini US 3/15/06 2:30 PM Page 5 University of Houston Wind Ensemble Also available: IND AND LASSICS Founded by the distinguished bandmaster Eddie Green, the University of Houston Wind Ensemble of the Moores W B C School of Music has become recognised as one of the foremost university ensembles in the United States today. The Ensemble is dedicated to exploring the full breadth of the wind-ensemble literature, from the canonic wind repertoire to exciting new and unexplored works. The International Grainger Society selected the Houston Wind Ensemble to record a four-volume series of compact discs featuring works by the Australian-American visionary. One of these recordings was named compact disc of the year by Stereophile. Two of the Wind Ensemble’s other GIANNINI recordings have been nominated for Grammy awards, making them the first college wind ensemble to earn a Grammy nomination. The Moores School of Music’s commitment to academic excellence and the highest performance standards has earned it a place in the forefront of music schools today, enjoying a reputation that Symphony No. 3 attracts students from throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Mexico, South and Central America, and the Far East. Praeludium and Allegro • Variations and Fugue University of Houston Wind Ensemble • Tom Bennett Tom Bennett Tom Bennett is Director of Bands and Associate Professor of Music at the University of Houston’s Moores School of Music. He holds degrees from Texas Tech University and Southern Methodist University. Prior to his appointment in 2000 to the University of Houston, Bennett was Director of Bands at East Texas State University, and had conducted an array of high school bands throughout Texas, several of which won auspicious honours and 8.559131 8.557545 awards during his tenure. Bennett is the recipient of the Leadership and Achievement Award from the Texas Music Educators Association and the Ross Perot Outstanding Teacher Award from the Richardson Independent School District. He was recently presented with the Grainger Medallion by the International Grainger Society, in recognition of his significant contribution to the advancement of the music of Percy Grainger. The award was presented in conjunction with the production of Volume IV of the University of Houston Wind Ensemble’s survey of Grainger’s music. Bennett is a member of the Texas Bandmasters Association, College Band Directors National Association, Texas Music Educators Association, and Phi Beta Mu honorary band fraternity. He is active nationally as a clinician and adjudicator. 8.570074 8.570123 8.570130 5 6 8.570130 570130 bk Giannini US 3/15/06 2:30 PM Page 2 During the 1950s, thanks to Richard Franko throbbing, pulsating accompaniment. Although the the chorale idea, which is elaborated gradually. A lighthearted character. A full recapitulation follows, Vittorio Giannini (1903-1966) Goldman of the Goldman Band in New York, William music is romantic in its emotional expressiveness, its slightly restless section follows, in which a solo cornet bringing the movement, and the symphony, to a Dedication Overture • Fantasia • Praeludium and Allegro • Symphony No. 3 Revelli at the University of Michigan, and Frederick rhythmic regularity and symmetrical phraseology is answered by a solo clarinet, as the chorale idea dazzling conclusion. Variations and Fugue Fennell at the Eastman School of Music, the symphonic suggest a Baroque movement that might be marked becomes increasingly demanding. The plaintive melody Variations and Fugue is one of the late works of band and its smaller, more flexible relative, the wind Grave. Even its contrasting two-part structure harks returns, now building to a heartfelt climax, before a Giannini in which he explored a deeper, more personal Vittorio Giannini was born in Philadelphia to a tenor and the founder of an Italian-American concert ensemble, were coming into their own as serious artistic back to seventeenth-century practice. The Allegro coda of reminiscences ends the movement. mode of expression, and a higher degree of structural distinguished musical family. Not only were both his band that flourished in Philadelphia and Atlantic City media. The need for appropriate repertoire prompted introduces a rapidly scurrying idea in the woodwinds The third movement, Allegretto, has the character complexity, in comparison to his earlier output, parents professional musicians, but his sister, Dusolina, around the turn of the twentieth century. America’s foremost composers to turn their creativity in that unfolds with ingenious-cross rhythms. This idea is of an intermezzo, its main idea a stealthy, whimsical representing a culmination of his elaboration of was one of the world’s leading operatic sopranos during Vittorio began taking music lessons from his this direction, among them Vittorio Giannini, who then developed in counterpoint with fragments of the theme in B flat minor that toys with a hemiola rhythmic traditional compositional technique, taken to its the 1930s and 1940s, and another sister, Euphemia, was mother when he was five; after four years he was produced five such works between the years 1958 and Praeludium theme. An episode in which this theme is juxtaposition. An expansive, wide-arching melody that ultimate reaches. Revealing elements of both a a member of the vocal faculty of the Curtis Institute of awarded a scholarship to study at the Verdi 1965. heard against highly dissonant chords leads to a appears twice provides contrast. chaconne and a passacaglia, the work presents a series Music for many years. Today Vittorio is perhaps best Conservatory in Milan, where he concentrated on both Giannini composed the Dedication Overture in recapitulation of the Allegro material, building to a Returning to the key of B flat major, the fourth of fifteen variations on a chord progression clearly in C known as a teacher, having spent decades on the violin and composition. Returning to the United States, 1965, for the ceremonies marking the conclusion of the climax at which point the Praeludium melody returns in movement, Allegro con brio, is, like the first movement, minor, on a chromatically descending bass-line, and on composition faculties of the Juilliard School, Curtis he continued his education at the Juilliard School in North Carolina School of the Arts’ first year. It is a abbreviated form, now as an outcry of despair. a sonata-allegro design, but with the character of a a chromatically ascending melodic line. The variations Institute, and Manhattan School of Music, and ending New York, where he studied composition with Rubin festive piece, thoroughly conventional in style and Shortly after finishing Praeludium and Allegro, march. Its main idea, a brilliant, rapidly descending are followed by a double fugue whose first subject is a his educational career as the founding president of the Goldmark. During the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s, character, yet imbued with an innocent sincerity that Giannini turned his attention to composing an entire scale pattern, pivots on a tritone harmonic movement twelve-tone combination of both the bass line and the North Carolina School of the Arts. Among his students Giannini’s compositional output centered chiefly can charm even a sophisticated listener, an example of symphony (his No. 3) for band, commissioned by the (again anticipating the Dedication Overture). The melodic line, in the shape of a wedge, and whose second are John Corigliano, David Amram, Adolphus around operas and songs, all in a highly romantic, even his thorough mastery of traditional formal and Duke University Band and its conductor Paul Bryan. rushing scales are followed by a fanfare-like motif subject is derived from the same material. Despite its Hailstork, Alfred Reed, Nicolas Flagello, and Thomas sentimental, vein. One of his earliest songs became his developmental technique. The overture is constructed of Completed in 1958, Symphony No. 3 is unquestionably suggesting the Lydian mode in the cornets and firm grounding in tonality, the work achieves Pasatieri. most famous: “Tell Me, Oh Blue, Blue Sky,” written in two, largely diatonic, thematic ideas: The first, Giannini’s most frequently performed and recorded trumpets, and then by a more sustained melodic idea. considerable dissonance through an elaborately woven Giannini, however, was a prolific composer as well, 1927, and later championed by such singers as Leonard marchlike in character, comprises a number of motifs work, and has become a much-beloved staple of the The second theme grows from this melodic idea, and is texture of non-harmonic tones and polychords. It is also one of the many Italian-Americans who flourished Warren, Mario Lanza, and, more recently, Thomas that become the building blocks of the entire piece; the band repertoire. Establishing the work’s overall tonality more subdued, though still martial in character, calling another example of the way Giannini combined during the twentieth century, helping to create a Hampson. He had two major operatic successes in second, in marked contrast, is warmly and sweetly of B flat major, the first movement, Allegro energico, to mind similar passages in the ceremonial works of romantic expressive content with Baroque formal distinguished repertoire shaped along traditional tonal, Europe during the 1930s, Lucedia and The Scarlet nostalgic. These ideas are worked out alternately in a opens with a resolute theme suggestive of the Walton. The mood again becomes exuberant as a procedures, right up to the Tierce de Picardie that ends formal, and developmental lines. His output includes Letter, the latter with his sister Dusolina and Hans way that is easy to follow. A subtle additional element Mixolydian mode, built upon a series of ascending cheerful “closing” idea appears in the woodwinds, the work. Considered one of his finest compositions, more than a dozen operas, seven symphonies, scores of Hotter in the leading rôles. In spite of critical acclaim it is the tritone, which underlies the first thematic idea, fourths and including a triplet figure.