NEC Wind Ensemble + Mary K. Schneider: Mozart, Stucky, Etezady, Sierra

NEC: Jordan Hall | Directions

290 Huntington Ave.
Boston, MA
United States

NEC alumna Mary K. Schneider is tonight's guest conductor of the NEC Wind Ensemble in a program of Mozart, Roshanne Etezady, Steven Stucky, and Roberto Sierra. NEC faculty and BSO member Mickey Katz will be the cello soloist in this program. 

About Mary K. Schneider

Mary K. Schneider is Professor of Music and Director of Bands at Eastern Michigan University, where she conducts the Wind Symphony, teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in conducting and music education, directs the Music Now Contemporary Music Festival, and oversees and guides all aspects of EMU’s comprehensive band program.  Prior to this appointment, Schneider served on the faculty at the University of Minnesota for three years.  She holds a doctor of musical arts degree in conducting from the University of Texas at Austin, and also earned degrees in horn performance and music education from the New England Conservatory of Music and the University of Connecticut.
     Schneider maintains an active schedule as a guest conductor. Past engagements include performances with the Dallas Winds, U.S. Air Force Band, Sydney Conservatorium Wind Symphony, Concordia Santa Fe, and the Festival Band at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, as well as honor and all-state bands throughout the country. Recently, she has served as an adjudicator for the National Concert Band Festival, Thailand International Wind Ensemble Competition, the Victorian School Music Festival in Melbourne, and has been in residence as the featured instructor of the Australian Band and Orchestra Directors Conducting Symposium in Sydney, and at the Almeria Academy of Music in Spain.
     An elected member of the American Bandmasters Association,  Schneider has served on the executive board of the College Band Directors National Association, and as the first female president of the North-Central division. A strong advocate for new wind music, she has participated in commissioning and/or premiering over three dozen works for wind band, and has collaborated with a diverse group of composers including Carlos Simon, William Bolcom, Gilda Lyons, John Corigliano, Michael Daugherty, Roshanne Etezady, and Steven Stucky.

 

This is an in-person event with a private stream available to the NEC community here: https://necmusic.edu/live

  1. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | Divertimento No. 3 in E-flat Major, K.166

    Allegro
    Menuetto – Trio – Coda
    Andante grazioso
    Adagio – Allegro

  2. Steven Stucky | Voyages, for solo cello and wind orchestra (1983)

    (One movement with four sections)
    Ben moderato
    Allegro brioso
    Adagio
    Allegro

    Program note

    Although the music of Voyages for cello and wind orchestra is continuous, it falls into four distinct sections, or movements: slow/fast/slow/fast. The first movement is a kind of catalog of musical materials: a few chords, fragments of melody, gestures, and musical textures. Each of the three succeeding movements uses these same materials in new ways; each is patterned on the first movement, but each more loosely than the last. In this way, the whole composition creates a series of concentric circles orbiting around the central nucleus of musical ideas voyages outward from the work's opening.
         But each movement has a character of its own, too. The second, a scherzo in near-perpetual motion, is dominated by ostinato figures. The slow third movement offers solos and duets for English horn, bass clarinet and bassoon, tuba and solo cello. The finale combines many elements, but most prominent is a series of brass fanfares alternating with a set of variations for the soloist accompanied by small groups of instruments.
         Having long wanted both to write something for solo cello and to try my hand at writing for wind ensemble, I decided that to combine these two projects might provide very interesting compositional challenges and opportunities. Voyages was commissioned by the Yale Band; the solo part was written for cellist Lynden Cranham. The work was composed between mid-1983 and mid-1984. Ms. Cranham and the Yale Band gave the first performance in New Haven on 7 December 1984, with Thomas C. Duffy conducting.
    - Steven Stucky

     
    Artists

  3. INTERMISSION

  4. Roshanne Etezady | Anahita (2005)

    The Flight of Night
    Night Mares
    Sleep and Repose; The Coming of Light

    Program note

    In the Assembly Chamber of the State Capitol Building in Albany, New York, there are two murals that were completed in 1878 by the New England painter William Morris Hunt. These works are enormous -- each approaching 18 feet in length -- and are considered the culminating works of the artist’s career.   
         One of these murals, The Flight of Night, depicts the Zoroastrian Goddess of the Night, Anahita, driving her chariot westward, fleeing from the rising sun. However, if you travel to Albany today, you won’t see The Flight of Night. Two years after Hunt completed the giant murals (and only one year after his death), the ceiling in the Assembly Chamber began to leak. By 1882, The Flight of Night had already been damaged, and by 1888, the vaulted ceiling in the Assembly Chamber had to be condemned. A “false” ceiling was erected, completely obscuring Hunt’s murals, and today, most of The Flight of Night has been destroyed by the elements. Only the lowest inches of the original painting are still visible.
         Anahita draws inspiration from photographs of Hunt’s masterpiece before its decay as well as from the Persian poem that inspired Hunt originally. The first movement, The Flight of Night, is characterized by dramatic, aggressive gestures that are meant to evoke the terrifying beauty of the goddess herself. Movement two, Night Mares, is a scherzo-like movement that refers to the three monstrous horses that pull the chariot across the sky. In the final movement, Sleep and Repose/The Coming of Light, we hear the gentler side of the night, with a tender lullaby that ends with trumpets heralding the dawn.
         What follows is the translated Persian poem that Colonel Leavitt Hunt sent to his brother, William Morris Hunt.

    -Roshanne Etezady

    Anahita

    Enthroned upon her car of light, the moon
    Is circling down the lofty heights of Heaven;
    Her well-trained courses wedge the blindest depths
    With fearful plunge, yet heed the steady hand
    That guides their lonely way. So swift her course,
    So bright her smile, she seems on silver wings.
    O’er-reaching space, to glide the airy main;
    Behind, far-flowing, spreads her deep blue veil,
    Inwrought with stars that shimmer in its wave.
    Before the car, an owl, gloom sighted, flaps
    His weary way; with melancholy hoot
    Dispelling spectral shades that flee
    With bat-like rush, affrighted, back
    Within the blackest nooks of caverned Night.
    Still Hours of darkness wend around the car,
    By raven tresses half concealed; but one,
    With fairer locks, seems lingering back for Day.
    Yet all with even measured footsteps mark
    Her onward course. And floating in her train
    Repose lies nestled on the breast of Sleep,
    While soft Desires enclasp the waist of Dreams,
    And light-winged Fancies flit around in troops.

  5. Roberto Sierra (trans. Mark Scatterday) | Fandangos (2000)

    Program note

    Antonio Soler’s Fandango for keyboard has always fascinated me, for its strange and whimsical twists and turns. My Fandangos is a fantasy, or a “super-fandango,” that takes as point of departure Soler’s work and incorporates elements of the Boccherini’s Fandango 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 if 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.
    -Roberto Sierra

  6. NEC Wind Ensemble

    Flute
    Anne Chao
    Jeong Won Choe
    Shengyu Cui
    Isabel Evernham
    Jay Kim
    Jungyoon Kim
    Elizabeth McCormack
    Subin Oh
    Anna Ridenour

    Oboe
    Yuhsi Chang
    Sojeong Kim
    Alexander Lenser
    Daniel Meza
    Kelley Osterberg
    Christian Paniagua

    Clarinet
    Dillon Acey
    Sarah Cho
    Xianyi Ji
    Phoebe Kuan
    Aleksis Martin
    Max Reed
    Chasity Thompson
    Cole Turkel

    Bassoon
    Zoe Beck
    Adam Chen
    Garrett Comrie
    Seth Goldman
    Matthew Heldt
    Abigail Heyrich
    Carson Meritt
    Erik Paul
    Andrew Salaru
    Jialu Wang

    Saxophone
    Vladyslav Dovhan
    Xinyi Liao
    Guanlong Shen
    Juchen Wang

    French horn
    Mattias Bengtsson
    Grace Clarke
    Jihao Li
    Mauricio Martinez
    Willow Otten
    Noah Silverman
    Quanbin Zhu

    Trumpet
    Ko Te Chen
    Matthew Dao
    Maxwell DeForest
    Eddy Lanois
    Reynolds Martin
    Nelson Martinez
    Alexandra Richmond
    Cody York

    Trombone
    Eli Canales
    Jaehan Kim
    Quinn McGillis
    Noah Nichilo
    Alex Russell
    Kevin Smith

    Bass Trombone
    Roger Dahlin
    Shin Tanaka

    Euphonium
    Scott Odou
    David Paligora

    Tuba
    James Curto
    Masaru Lin

    Percussion
    Gustavo Barreda
    Jordan Fajardo-Bird
    Eli Geruschat
    Ross Jarrell
    Danial Kukuk
    Nagaieng Lai
    Mark Larrivee
    Eli Reisz
    Jakob Schoenfeld
    Halle Hayoung Song
    Connor Willits
    Rohan Zakharia

    Harp
    Yoonsu Cha
    Shaylen Joos

    Piano
    Seulah Noh

    Bass
    Brian Choy


    Wind Ensemble Graduate Assistants
    Weizhe Bai
    Rachel Brake

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CollegeWind Ensembles