Midway March

In the classic World War II motion picture Midway (1976), John Williams created one of the most riveting and powerful marches ever heard on the silver screen. This authentic edition brings all the energy and excitement of this composition to the wind band format.

 

Divertimento for Band, Op. 42

The Divertimento is one of Persichetti’s lightest and most entertaining works. It was written in a log cabin schoolhouse in Kansas in 1949 and premiered in New York City with the composer conducting in 1950. In a June 1980 letter to Frederick Fennell, founder of the famed Eastman Wind Ensemble, Persichetti explained that family friends had given him the cabin one summer to write a new work for full orchestra. He explained that as he wrote the brasses tossing the woodwinds about while the timpani was commenting here and there, something strange was happening. He began to realize that the strings were NEVER going to come in. So thus was created the composer's first work for band!

The six short movements demonstrate rhythmic and contrapuntal savoir-faire blended neatly with tongue-in-cheek humor and lyrical nostalgia. The work is still one of Persichetti’s most popular compositions.

- Program Note from Lee University Wind Ensemble concert program, 11 October 2016

 

Themes from "Green Bushes"

Among country-side folksongs in England, Green Bushes  was one of the best known of folksongs -- and well it deserved to be, with its raciness, its fresh grace, its manly clear-cut lines. Green Bushes strikes me as being a typical dance, a type of song come down to us from the time when sung melodies, rather than instrumental music, held countryside dancers together. It seems to breathe that lovely passion for the dance that swept like a fire over Europe in the Middle Ages -- seems brimful of all the youthful joy and tender romance that so naturally seek an outlet in dancing.

- Percy Grainger

 

On A Hymnsong Of Philip Bliss

On A Hymnsong Of Philip Bliss is a radical departure of style of this composer. The frantic tempos, the ebullient rhythms we associate with Holsinger are replaced with a restful, gentle, and reflective composition based on the 1876 Philip Bliss-Horatio Spafford hymn, It Is Well with My Soul. Written to honor the retiring principal of Shady Grove Christian Academy, On A Hymnsong Of Philip Blis' was presented as a gift from the SGCA Concert Band to Rev. Steve Edel in May of 1989.

 

Symphony No. 1 The Lord of the Rings, "Gandalf (The Wizard)"

The first movement is a musical portrait of the wizard Gandalf, one of the principal characters of the trilogy. His wise and noble personality is expressed by a stately motif which is used in a different form in movements IV and V. The sudden opening of the Allegro vivace is indicative of the unpredictability of the grey wizard, followed by a wild ride on his beautiful horse, Shadowfax.

- Program Note by composer

 

Magnolia Star

Magnolia Star was a train that ran from New Orleans to Chicago with the famous Panama Limited in the mid-20th century. This work evokes train travel with driving rhythms and train-like sonorities, and also uses the blues scale.

- Program Note from publisher