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

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | Divertimento in E-flat, K.166

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

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.

Roberto Sierra (trans. Mark Davis 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