Laurier Wind Orchestra: Program Notes

Nov. 18, 2025

Smetana Fanfare

Pulitzer Prize and Grawemeyer Award winner Karel Husa’s early training from the Prague Conservatory catapulted him to study in Paris with renowned teachers Arthur Honegger and Nadia Boulanger. Emigrating to the United States in 1954, he taught composition and conducting at Cornell University for 38 years until his retirement.

Karel Husa’s native land was never far from his thoughts, particularly while composing. In 1984, he wrote this Smetana Fanfare based on two excerpts from Czech composer Bedřich Smetana to honor the centennial of his death. Smetana’s Wallenstein Camp is quoted directly in the trumpet opening section, and another quote is featured in the low brass. Reflecting both Smetana’s exile from Prague and Husa’s own flight from Communist Czechoslovakia, woodwinds represent the voice of the people, often crying out in distress, sometimes shouting together in protest, over the nationalistic fragments of music and an ominous military presence in the percussion.

Our opening work tonight is conducted by student guest conductor, Michael Kallinis.

Home Away From Home

Catherine Likhuta is a Ukrainian-Australian composer, pianist and recording artist. Her music exhibits high emotional charge, programmatic nature, rhythmic complexity and Ukrainian folk elements. Catherine’s pieces have been played extensively around the world, and performed by prominent symphony orchestras, chamber ensembles soloists. Likhuta holds a bachelor's degree in jazz piano from Kyiv Glière Music College, a five-year post-graduate degree in composition from the National Music Academy of Ukraine (Kyiv Conservatory) and a PhD in composition from the University of Queensland. She is a recipient of the Vice-Chancellor's Alumni Excellence Award from the University of Queensland.

Home Away From Home is Likhuta’s musical reminiscences of some special places in her life, as she shares in her program notes:

I was born and raised in Kyiv, Ukraine, and then lived in the United States for eight years before moving permanently to Australia in 2012. As a result, all three countries became home to me, and I always miss them and my friends in each of them when I am away. I feel equally at home in all three. It so happened that the commission for Home Away from Home came just before my family and I went on sabbatical to Ithaca, NY (our home in 2005–2009) from Australia for six month, also stopping by Ukraine on our way there. It was a very special time, filled with somewhat forgotten youthful thrill, wonderful reunions and nostalgic experiences. It made me realize that, in a way, each of these three places is my home away from home. I reflected on that thought and also started thinking about the university freshmen students for whom I was writing the piece, who just left their parents’ nest and were finding their home away from home and their new life and community on campus. It is an exciting yet emotional time for them, and I wanted to reflect that in the piece.

The opening section of the work represents the initial excitement associated with the new beginning, somewhat similar to a plane take-off: you are strapped in and have no control over what’s going to happen next, yet somehow you know you are in for an exciting experience. You hear the engine starting, which makes your heartrate go up (mine, anyway!).

The melancholic section that follows is a moment of reflection, inspired by the experience of visiting a house where your loved ones used to live, for the first time after they are gone. The experience cannot be put into words—it can only be lived through. I have lived through it and felt like sharing it by means of music. After the initial sadness and sorrow, which are inevitable parts of this experience, your mind brings forward wonderful memories associated with these loved ones, making you sad and happy at the same time.

The next section is desperate and determined, building the tension and bringing the listener to the gutsy climax inspired by Ukrainian folk music, before returning to the original youthful, optimistic and funky opening material. The piece ends on a positive note, with a little quirky waltz surprise thrown in just before the end.

Peace Dancer

Jodie Blackshaw is an Australian composer and educator. She completed her PhD in 2020 under the guidance of indigenous composer Dr. Christopher Sainsbury at Australian National University. Through music Blackshaw has found a way to become an advocate for women and the environment. In 2014 she launched a ‘Female Band Composer’ database which helps spread female-composed band music to a global community of conductors and has used sales of her compositions to spread awareness about environmental threats.

Peace Dancer, a piece commissioned by the University of British Columbia Conducting Symposium Consortium, is inspired by a First Nations text of the same name written by Roy Henry Vickers of the Squamish Nation. He tells the story of a song and dance that is thousands of years old, the songs having been composed for Chiefs on the Pacific northwest coast. The Chief chosen to perform the sacred dance is recognized as a healer and reminds members of the community how they lost their way and love for creation. The piece is divided into different moments: meditation, awakening, realization, and humility, taking the audience on a journey of self-discovery, possibly guiding them to recognize their own wrongdoings. The goal is to teach the lesson of Peace Dancer, to move on with humility and grace.”

Blackshaw’s evocative re-telling is conducted this evening by student guest conductor, Adrianna McQuillin.

Diamond Tide

Vietnamese-American Viet Cuong has studied with Grammy and Pulitzer Prize winning composers during his studies at Curtis, Peabody, and Princeton University. He was raised in Marietta, GA, and credits his percussion and clarinet experiences in high school band as the beginning of his timbral explorations. Cuong serves as Assistant Professor of Music Composition and Theory the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he teaches composition, orchestration, and music theory. He has also served on the faculties of the Eighth Blackbird Creative Lab, Juilliard Summer Composition, and Newfound Chamber Winds Tidewater Composition Workshop.

About his work, Diamond Tide, Cuong shares his inspiration in the score notes:

“A 2010 article published in Nature Physics details an experiment in which scientists were able to successfully melt a diamond and, for the first time, measure the temperature and pressure necessary to do so. When diamonds are heated to very high temperatures, they don’t melt; they simply turn into graphite, which then melts (and the thought of liquid graphite isn’t nearly as appealing or beautiful as liquid diamond.) Therefore, the addition of extremely high pressure—40 million times the pressure we feel on Earth at sea level—is crucial to melt a diamond.

The extreme temperature and pressure used in this experiment are found [on] Neptune and Uranus, and scientists therefore believe that seas of liquid diamond are possible on these two planets. Oceans of diamond may also account for these planets’ peculiar magnetic and geographic poles, which do not line up like they do here on Earth. Lastly, as the scientists were melting the diamonds, they saw floating shards of solid diamond forming in the pools—just like icebergs in our oceans. Imagine: distant planets with oceans of liquid diamond filled with bergs of sparkling solid diamonds drifting in the tide…

These theories are obviously all conjecture, but this alluring imagery provided heaps of inspiration for Diamond Tide, which utilizes the “melting” sounds of metallic water percussion and trombone glissandi throughout.”

Viet Cuong will be visiting Laurier next week, as Composer-In-Residence with the Wellington Wind Symphony, where they will be performing more of his music on Friday, Nov. 28 at 7:30 p.m. at Knox Presbyterian Church in Waterloo.

Angels in the Architecture

Frank Ticheli is an American composer and conductor and is a key figure in the modern wind band repertory. Ticheli has won several awards including the NBA Revelli Composition Contest in 2006, as well as the Charles Ives Scholarship and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship, both from the Academy of Arts and Letters. His academic training includes both a PhD and Masters from the University of Michigan. In addition to being a world class conductor and composer, from 1991 to 2023 he was on teaching faculty and now Professor Emeritus of the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, as Professor of Composition.

Angels in the Architecture received its premiere performance at the Sydney Opera House on July 6, 2008 by a massed band of young musicians from Australia and the United States, conducted by Matthew George. The work unfolds as a dramatic conflict between the two extremes of human existence–one divine, the other evil. The work’s title is inspired by the Sydney Opera House itself, with its halo-shaped acoustical ornaments hanging directly above the performance stage.

Angels begins with a single voice singing a 19th-century Shaker song:

I am an angel of Light
I have soared from above
I am cloth’d with Mother’s love.
I have come, I have come,
To protect my chosen band
And lead them to the promised land.

This “angel”–represented by the singer–frames the work, surrounding it with a protective wall of light and establishing the divine. Other representations of light– played by instruments rather than sung–include a traditional Hebrew song of peace (“Hevenu Shalom Aleicham”) and the well-known 16th-century Genevan Psalter, “Old Hundredth.” These three borrowed songs, despite their varied religious origins, are meant to transcend any one religion, representing the more universal human ideals of peace, hope, and love. An original chorale, appearing twice in the work, represents my own personal expression of these aspirations. In opposition, turbulent, fast-paced music appears as a symbol of darkness, death, and spiritual doubt. Twice during the musical drama, these shadows sneak in
almost unnoticeably, slowly obscuring, and eventually obliterating the light altogether. The darkness prevails for long stretches of time, but the light always returns, inextinguishable, more powerful than before. The alternation of these opposing forces creates, in effect, a kind of five-part rondo form (light–darkness–light–darkness–light).

Angels in the Architecture poses the unanswered question of existence. It ends as it began: the angel reappears singing the same comforting words. But deep below, a final shadow reappears – distantly, ominously.

- Note by Frank Ticheli