April 13 Event Features Concert and Symphonic Bands
Contact: George Manlove at (207) 581-3756
ORONO — The University of Maine Symphonic Band and the University of Maine Concert Band will share the Hutchins Hall stage at the Maine Center for the Arts on April 13 to each present a short concert.
The Concert Band will start the performances at 7:30 p.m.; the larger 50-60-member Symphonic Band follows after a brief intermission.
Sports bands director Christopher White has selected a varied program of band music for the Concert Band, including “Night Dances” by Bruce Yurko and “Haven Dance” by David Holsinger.
“I know the composer of ‘Night Dances’ and really enjoy the music of Bruce Yurko,” White says. “It has good scoring and quite a bit of percussion in it.”
The piece opens softly and slowly, with chimes and vibraphones prevalent, he says. “It sets a mood of night in the beginning, kind of slow, dark and mysterious, then moves into the dance part, which is very explosive and features a lot of percussion and brass.”
“Haven Dance” was composed to capture the spontaneous dancing of the composer’s two-year-old daughter “doing what two-year-olds do,” according to White. “You can hear a child dancing, complete with the odd stops and spins that kids might do when dancing.”
Not all music is thematic, according to White, but when it is and the audience knows the theme, it helps in appreciating the score.
The Concert Band also will perform “Moravian Folk Song Rhapsody” by composer Robert Sheldon, which the band played for the first time in Maine on March 30, when Sheldon visited the university and several area schools.
Curvin Farnham, director of bands at UMaine, has planned an uplifting selection of music for the Symphonic Band that includes Tchaikovsky, Aron Copland, some entertaining work by John Philip Sousa that was written after Sousa’s military marching band days, and three movements of “Concerto for Tuba” by Edward Gregson.
The Symphonic Band program includes music to be played during its 2004 Maine schools tour, which begins the day after the concert.
Farnham says he chose music for the April 13 concert that represents what students have studied or played, and in the case of “American Overture For Band” by Joseph Wilcox Jenkins, it is music many of the students have heard performed. The piece was commissioned for and recently performed at a concert in the Bangor area by the U.S. Army Field Band, Farnham says.
The program also includes “The Promise of Living,” from the opera “The Tender Land” by Aron Copland, and the first three movements of “Concerto for Tuba,” by Gregson, with Scott Vaillancourt of Lewiston, an applied lower brass teacher at UMaine, as tuba soloist.
“He’s a wonderful soloist,” Farnham says. “The students had a chance to perform the first movement of this piece with him last fall.”
Vaillancourt earned a B.A. in music from Bowdoin College, and a masters in music in composition and a masters in tuba performance from the University of Michigan. The music director at Saints Peter and Paul in Lewiston, he also is a free-lance composer, arranger, performer and teacher in Maine. He routinely performs in many of Maine’s premiere instrumental ensembles.
Another piece on the program, “Rendezvous with the Other Side,” composed last fall by Richard Saucedo, a high school band director from Indiana, depicts “what happens when we pass away and go to a new realm,” says Farnham.
The Sousa march, “Nobles of the Mystic Shrine March,” offers a different side of the 19th Century composer and band leader. Sousa’s style became less militaristic and “more entertaining” later in his life, according to Farnham.
Dean Paquette, music supervisor at the Hancock Elementary School, is assistant conductor of the Symphonic Band.
Admission for the April 13 concert is $6.