Wind Ensemble
Transformation
Oct 17, 7:00 pm, Ford Hall
Under director of bands and conductor Daniel Cook, the Wind Ensemble maps transformation of sound, character, and story across four sharply contrasting works. Cook frames the idea as music that represents emotions, characters, or themes, and asks what we learn about those characters when they’re played by instruments.
The evening lifts off with Reena Esmail’s “Tuttarana,” a three-minute, high-velocity opener that fuses the ensemble’s full tutti —Italian for “all together,” meaning the entire group plays as one—with the virtuosic tarana tradition from Hindustani vocal concerts. From there, “Mothership”by composer Mason Bates, who used to be a club DJ, launches with an onstage DJ playing samples while the instruments “dock” and depart like spacecraft. “You get this techno groovy stuff,” Cook says, “and slow-jazz kind of stuff,” including a quirky oboe solo from assistant professor Luis Gallo Quintero.
Lindsey Bronnenkant’s Tarot turns character study into sound painting, akin to Holst’s The Planets , but with archetypes from the Tarot—so listeners hear three cards evolve in color, texture, and mood. The program culminates in Percy Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy , born of the composer’s 1906–08 wax-cylinder field recordings of English folk singers. Though entirely instrumental, the piece preserves both songs’ and singers’ personalities: a conversational quartet of soprano sax, oboe, bassoon, and baritone sax sketches a reunion between long-separated lovers; later, a brass-driven movement channels a warlord “several beers in,” reminiscing with bluster.
For the players, Cook says, the challenge is theatrical as much as technical: “It’s not good enough just to play the piece with technical proficiency … You have to play this one like an 80-year-old man reminiscing about the past.”
Concert Band
Around the World in 60 Minutes
Oct 24, 7:00 pm, Ford Hall
Associate professor Benjamin Rochford ups the ante on Jules Verne with a musical circumnavigation completed in just one hour—stopping in Peru, Havana (Cuba), San Antonio (Texas), Stillwater (Oklahoma), and Russia to show how places and cultures shape sound.
