“Fiat ars – pereat mundus,” says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

–Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

I first became acquainted with the writings of Walter Benjamin when I was a graduate student in New Mexico. His observations were carefully sharp, and his predictions seemingly prescient and nigh prophetic. This particular passage from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” fills me with chills every time I read it, and as I have gotten older and experienced the placing of supercomputing into our palms and pockets, the radical splintering of American politics (and thus family and friendships), and the advent of artificial intelligence from science fiction into reality, Benjamin’s observations seem to become only more and more salient.

The wind symphony’s program this evening, half of which was programmed by our students independently of my curation and guidance, reflects the dizzying, horrifying cycles of violence our species perpetuates. It appears we are all feeling it as the stock market spirals, friends and family are laid off en-masse, and wars continue to destroy precious lives across the globe, and much of this for seemingly no reason—at least, no logical one.

As students come into class tired, anxious, sometimes frightened, I have found myself saying, “We will get through this. It’s not the first time we’ve seen it.” I remember the first time I said this, I caught myself. Why? I thought. Why is part of my comfort taken in the fact that I’m used to this?  Not being surprised by something is a coping mechanism, not a mechanism for effecting change.

Benjamin, again with the sharp observations, pointed out an incredible set of language by Italian Filippo Marinetti in the Manifesto of Futurism and its relationship to the fascist momentum building through the years leading up to WWII:

“For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic. . . . Accordingly we state: . . .War is beautiful.”

As an artist, how horrifying! What a stage for Benito Mussolini to enter upon. What kind of language are we using today to set tomorrow’s stage?

We hope that tonight you will experience beautiful things, but those beautiful moments have sometimes sharp edges because of the irony in which they are couched. The juxtaposition of North Korean and South Korean nationalism, the mocking dialogue between massed winds and a single saxophone, the shell-shocked hurt of gunfire in a house of God, all happening around the quiet sanctification of the Hebrew Kedushah, the sound of the human voice in song, the tambourine of a Sunday morning Gospel service.

Sometimes history feels like a never-ending cycle, and it is exhausting, alarming, and even terrifying. “Fiat ars – pereat mundus” Benjamin said of the fascists. “Let art be created – though the world perish.” Music is a tool. It can be used for propaganda or for transcendence. And when we’re making music, perhaps we can break out of a cycle and into a march—exhilarating, powerful, unstoppable. I myself have witnessed musicking as a mechanism for healing. How will we use it?

In Omar’s words at the bottom of the score in “Of Our New Day Begun:”

“Let us march on ‘til victory is won.”

–C.R.

The Suite for Variety Orchestra, No. 1 (1956) is a work by Dmitri Shostakovich in eight movements that draw from the composer's earlier themes. The first of these movements is the delightful March originally found in Korzinkina's Adventures, Op. 59 from 1940. James Curnow has skillfully adapted this work for band, sure to become a welcome addition to the repertoire for winds.

–Program Note by the Publisher

I wanted my setting of "Amazing Grace" to reflect the powerful simplicity of the words and melody -- to be sincere, to be direct, to be honest -- and not through the use of novel harmonies and clever tricks, but by traveling traditional paths in search of truth and authenticity. 
 
I believe that music has the power to take us to a place that words alone cannot. And so my own feelings about "Amazing Grace" reside in this setting itself. The harmony, texture, orchestration, and form are inseparable, intertwined so as to be perceived as a single expressive entity. 
 
The spiritual, "Amazing Grace", was written by John Newton (1725-1807), a slave ship captain who, after years of transporting slaves across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World, suddenly saw through divine grace the evilness of his acts. First published in 1835 by William Walker in The Southern Harmony, "Amazing Grace" has since grown to become one of the most beloved of all American spirituals. 
 
"Amazing Grace" was commissioned by John Whitwell in loving memory of his father, John Harvey Whitwell. It was first performed on February 10, 1994, by the Michigan State University Wind Symphony, John Whitwell conductor.
 
–Program Note by the Composer

Mark Wolfram's Sonoran Fiesta Overture was commissioned by the Green Valley Concert Band of Green Valley, Arizona. Conductor Dr. John Snavely asked Mr. Wolfram to write a composition to honor the band's late timpanist Peg Bowden and her husband Lester Weil. 
 
The piece has a strong overture-type opening and moves into an energetic march-type feel. After a step-out solo from the timpani and percussion the work is peppered with Mexican musical influences. The overall takeaway is that of an exciting fiesta - complete with a big ending to bring it home!
 
–Program Note by the Publisher

Apart from transcriptions of the march from the Love for Three Oranges (1919), this Op. 99 effort is the most popular among the half-dozen or so marches for military band that Prokofiev wrote. It is festive and short, lasting two to three minutes, and its merriment never becomes bombastic, its prismatic colors never blindingly brilliant.
 
The main theme here is utterly memorable in its bouncing vigor and celebratory cheer. Prokofiev obviously felt it a worthwhile creation since he reused it in his opera The Story of a Real Man, Op. 117 (1947-1948). If the outer sections of this B-flat march are fleet and festive, the middle section can be characterized as relatively subdued in contrast, but without breaking the joyous mood. Prokofiev's robust scoring and deft instrumental balancing throughout enhance the march's effectiveness: this is not band music of blaring brass and pounding drums, but a composition both unashamedly merry and masterfully subtle. One of a group of patriotic compositions Prokofiev wrote in support of the Russian war effort, the work was premiered via a Moscow radio broadcast on April 30, 1944.
 
–Program note from Allmusic.com

When I received a commission from the American Bandmasters Association, I knew that I wanted to write a march. How do you not write one for an organization that John Philip Sousa belonged to? Besides, who doesn’t love a good march? Their rhythmic drive and infectious melodies are irresistible. Even the word itself –“march” – is sharp and percussive. It’s like they were engineered to give us sonic sugar highs. Yet there is another side to the sonic pleasures of the march -- since antiquity, marches have been recognized and principally employed to incite combatants gearing up for battle.
 
At first it seemed strange to make this association. The migration of the march from martial processions that celebrated rulers and nations to an art-music genre performed in the auditoriums of educational institutions is usually dated to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The ardor it inspires has long been divorced from the promotion of grim acts of violence. At best, the march motivates decidedly non-lethal athletic competition. I realized, however, during my research and writing of this piece that this is only a partial description and that the march’s original functions have persisted.
 
This is because the story of the march’s conversion to political neutrality isn’t one narrative but two. While it is true that the march retreated to the aesthetic realm in Europe and the United States, it was simultaneously advancing in the accompaniment of political and economic dominion abroad. Though often uncredited, it’s actually the march that introduces Western music to the non-Western world. It wasn’t orchestras performing the canon in concert halls, but military bands playing amongst cannons in colonial ports. For much of humanity, the reception of the march is impossible to uncouple from the imperial project it provided a soundtrack to. Moreover, we see this legacy of the march continue today only on a global scale. New marches are being written for elected officials, sovereigns, and the increasing number of despots and proto-autocrats to legitimize their stations, to provoke expansionist and nationalist fantasies, and to inflame their followers.
 
With March! I wanted to follow my connections to both legacies. The work is a combination of my devotion to a type of musical composition and my uncertain feelings towards its historical past and present. Fortunately, I had a precedent in the form of Dmitri Shostakovich’s March of the Soviet Militia (1970) to offer assistance in my efforts (listeners may detect a loose homage to his work in my opening). Like Shostakovich’s late work, my march is a dark parody. But where Shostakovich used the march form in excess to turn pomp into pomposity in “honor” of a brutal armed force, I sought to deconstruct my march. I wanted my crisp, uncomplicated anthems and quotations of unsettling North Korean patriotic melodies to be interrupted and broken apart by irreverent percussion, sputtering tempos and audio taken from the Korean demilitarized zone. My intention was to blunt the march’s aural seductions. I still wanted the bravado, but I wanted to make it insubstantial and alienating.
 
Importantly, I depart from Shostakovich in my proximity to the brutal regime referenced. He lived in the midst of the Stalinist nightmare. I exist in a wounded but still functioning liberal democracy far from the nightmare of the Kim dynasty. And while there is personal connection -- my mother was orphaned during the Korean War -- the selection of North Korean marches should ultimately be understood as representative of our contemporary moment: one where dictatorships and backsliding democracies embrace repression, ethno-nationalism, and brutality to thunderous cheers and fanfare.
 
–Program Note by the Composer

“His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

— Walter Benjamin from Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

This evocative passage by Walter Benjamin depicting the angel of history has been swirling around in my mind for the past few years. Events and mindsets of the distant past, some stretching back centuries, seem to be circling back and repeating themselves in the present. And the failure, at times, for all of us to recognize this circular nature of some historical events has been deeply disheartening. My concerto, The Angel of History, reflects on this passage of time and the way the past tumbles violently into the present. The concerto is cast in four movements. 
 
The first movement, a Prologue, emerges gradually out of the sound of tolling bells. The saxophone soloist meditates quietly on a pair of notes, rocking back and forth, before opening up into a more fleshed out melodic idea. A series of chorales from the ensemble begin to pile up until they break forth into the second movement, A Storm Blowing from Paradise. The soloist, now much more agitated than in the opening, breathlessly barks out a broken and fragmented message to an indifferent and at times mocking and snarling ensemble.
 
The third movement, Wreckage Upon Wreckage, the longest movement in the piece, toggles between steady, almost chant-like lines from the ensemble and long, lyrical responses from the soloist. These statements for the ensemble get heavier and more threatening with each iteration until they eventually overwhelm the soloist and roar out a grand wall of sound. Left hovering in space with shards of bell sounds, the soloist opens up into a reserved but emotional statement.



The final movement, Epilogue—Kedushah, leaves the piece back where it started, with the sounds of distant bells chiming in regular intervals pushing forward towards the future. 

The Angel of History is dedicated to the soloist Derek Granger who, as the sole commissioner of my entire saxophone output, performs my music with the care and attention to detail any composer would dream of.
 
–Program Note by the Composer

Of Our New Day Begun was written to honor nine beautiful souls who lost their lives to a callous act of hatred and domestic terrorism on the evening of June 17, 2015, while worshipping in their beloved sanctuary, the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (affectionately referred to as “Mother Emanuel”) in Charleston, South Carolina. My greatest challenge in creating this work was walking the line between reverence for the victims and their families, and honoring my strong, bitter feelings towards both the perpetrator and the segments of our society that continue to create people like him. I realized that the most powerful musical expression I could offer incorporated elements from both sides of that line - embracing my pain and anger while being moved by the displays of grace and forgiveness demonstrated by the victims’ families.
 
Historically, black Americans have, in great number, turned to the church to find refuge and grounding in the most trying of times. Thus, the musical themes and ideas for Of Our New Day Begun are rooted in the Black American church tradition. The piece is anchored by James and John Johnson’s time-honored song, Lift Every Voice and Sing (known endearingly as the “Negro National Anthem”), and peppered with blues harmonies and melodies. Singing, stomping, and clapping are also prominent features of this work, as they have always been a mainstay of black music traditions, and the inclusion of the tambourine in these sections is a direct nod to black worship services.
 
This work received its premiere on February 20, 2016, at the College Band Directors National Association (CBDNA) Conference, held at The Gaillard Center in Charleston, South Carolina. Members of the Mother Emanuel AME congregation were in attendance.
 
This work was commissioned by a consortium led by Dr. Gary Schallert and Dr. Jeff Bright of Western Kentucky University to honor the nine victims and families of the June 17, 2015, terrorist attack on Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, SC.
 
–Program Note by composer

Dr. Christopher Ramos

Conductor

Ms. Jamie Kim

Conductor