Laurier Wind Orchestra: Program Notes

Oct. 22, 2025

Prologue and Parade

Ulysses Kay was born in 1917 in Tuscon, Arizona, and studied at the University of Arizona, Eastman School of Music, Yale and Columbia universities, working with cutting edge composition teachers of the time known for their harmonic inventiveness, including Bernard Rogers, Howard Hanson, and Paul Hindemith. He is one of the most prolific African American composers, with over forty orchestral works, five operas, forty choral compositions, and seven original works for wind band. Kay earned several prestigious awards for his compositions in genres outside of wind band, including two Prix de Rome selections, a Guggenheim fellowship, and six honorary doctorates. After his death, several of his works were withdrawn from publishers by his estate for unknown reasons, and his music has been slowly reemerging into performances as conductors seek to include historically underrepresented voices.
Prologue and Parade is a stand-alone version of the first two movements of a larger wind band work, Concert Sketches, originally written in 1967. Revised ten years later for school band programs, the music shows the influences of his composition teachers, particularly Paul Hindemith, with whom he studied in 1940. The opening builds chords in fourths rather than traditional thirds, creating a wildly dissonant and dense harmony opening. The Parade relies on familiar marching cadences and motives but combines the melodic material in a variety of unconventional ways – two tonalities at the same time, and juxtaposing bugle calls and decorative flourishes over long melodic phrases, finally briefly recalling the opening lush chromatics.

Shoonthree

Henry Cowell was born in California to parents who had fully embraced a bohemian lifestyle well before the concept was fashionable. Raised on a commune, Cowell’s social and educational experiences set him on a completely individualistic path, encouraging unconventional and experimental musical creation even as a composer in his teenage years without any formal musical training. His father’s Irish family provided the familiarity with traditional music that he uses in his more conventional works, but his best-known pieces are usually taught in the modern musicology classes, like “The Banshee” that requires a pianist to play on the inner strings of the piano to create the effect of distant screams, and tone clusters of setting one’s arm on the keyboard. Cowell was arrested and spent four years in San Quentin State Prison in 1936 on a “morals” charge, as it was illegal at that time to live an openly homosexual lifestyle. Fellow composer Percy Grainger was a frequent visitor and supporter, smuggling Cowell’s music out of the prison and getting it published for him, as is the case for this work.

Shoonthree is the Gaelic term that describes a dream so vivid it awakes a sleeper. Described by the composer as a “blarney-ing lilt for band,” the premiere of this piece was given by the ensemble created and conducted by Cowell, the San Quentin Prison Band during his time as an inmate.

Symphonic Metamorphosis

German composer Paul Hindemith immigrated to the United States in 1940 to protect his Jewish wife from the increasing threat of the Nazis, and they became citizens in 1946. He taught at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut and was a major influence on many important composers of the latter half of the twentieth century. The year 1943 was both a turbulent time in America and a period of artistic and cultural growth. While World War II raged in Europe, Americans turned to music and art as a diversion from the omnipresent hardships of the war.

In early 1940, Hindemith began discussing the possibility of producing a ballet based on the music of composer Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826) with the Russian ballet producer Leonide Massine. The idea intrigued Hindemith, but he and Massine clearly had different concepts of the project. Massine had envisioned simple arrangements of Weber’s melodies rather than Hindemith’s sharper and more colorful interpretations of the music. The ballet was dropped, but Hindemith did not let the music go to waste. He reworked his ideas into what became the Symphonic Metamorphosis. The first, third, and fourth movements are based on melodies from relatively obscure piano duets of Weber that Hindemith and his wife would often play together.

Symphonic Metamorphosis received its world premiere by the New York Philharmonic on January 20, 1944, with Artur Rodzinski conducting. Although it was written for orchestra, Hindemith immediately felt that it should also be available for band and requested that his Yale colleague Keith Wilson create the transcription. Since that time, the heroic “March” that serves as the fourth movement of the suite is often performed on its own.

Vision Chant

Award-winning composer Andrew Balfour, of Cree descent living in Winnipeg, has written a body of choral, instrumental, and orchestral works based on the stories and cultural of his birth. He has been commissioned by many prominent Canadian choral ensembles, and his works have been performed and broadcast internationally. Andrew is the Artistic Director of Winnipeg’s Camerata Nova, a professional choir known for their inter-genre and interdisciplinary collaborations. He is passionate about music education and outreach, particularly for schools in low-income areas and the isolated northern communities in Canada.

Vision Chant was written originally for Balfour’s choir in 2015, and he describes it in the score:

"This work conjures images of a vision, which is very important to native peoples in their ceremony and their medicine. You could look at it as a dream, or even a nightmare. It evokes the imagery of an other-worldly vision. It evokes the imagery of windago, which is a very scary spirit in indigenous culture. It also calls out to grandmother and grandfather for protection, to lead them through this vision. At the end it dissolves into an awakening or a sunrise, with a sense of security and peace."

Vision Chant has been arranged for wind ensemble by the composer and Dr. Mark Hopkins, of Acadia University. 100% of the proceeds from the sale of the band version of Vision Chant are being donated to the Nova Scotia Native Women’s Association.

Prelude and Fugue in D minor

Johann Sebastian Bach, the keyboard composer of the late 1600’s/early 1700s, isn’t often a featured part of wind ensemble concerts, except as an arrangement. With numerous church music and court music positions that required new weekly compositions, Bach’s inventiveness and sheer mass of music has allowed for us to create sets of rules for harmony, form, and counterpoint that have driven the majority of western art music compositions. His development and standardization of the “fugue” form takes the idea of a “round” song or “canon” and adds levels of complexity in a systematic approach. The authorship of this Prelude and Fugue in D minor is under some debate by scholars who now believe that this set of organ works were actually written by students of Bach in his style, but still demonstrate the relentless chordal development and fugue style created by the Baroque master.

Symphony No. 6 for Band

Vincent Persichetti was a piano and organ prodigy who was supporting himself with his musical talents by age 11. At the age of 20 the longtime Philadelphia resident was simultaneously the head of the music department at Combs College, a conducting major with Fritz Reiner at the Curtis Institute, and a piano and composition student at the Philadelphia Conservatory. His distinctly original compositions began to be recognized internationally before he was 30. His skyrocketing reputation led to his appointment at the Juilliard School, where he later became the chair of the composition department at age 47. He died in 1987, leaving behind a unique body of work in almost every musical medium, including several masterpieces for the wind band. Persichetti’s writing explores the endless combinations of wind, brass, and percussion instruments, using both choirs of like instruments and timbral crossovers. His musical ideas are from conventional sources - his symphony uses the conventions and forms that are textbook Mozart, but his use of harmony is where he is truly groundbreaking.

While much of the music for Symphony No. 6 for Band is rooted in commonly used triads, they are often combined in poly-tonal ways. The most glaring example is his final chord, using all twelve possible pitches through six different triad groupings. The entire symphony is based on a hymn that Persichetti wrote for his book, Hymns and Responses for the Church Year, “Round Me Falls the Night.” While we hear the chorale in its entirety as the second movement, the fragments of the hymn make up the melody in the opening slow introduction and Allegro. The third movement functions as both the Minuet dance movement that Mozart would have used and a nod to a Beethoven-like scherzo (joke) - the two dances are incredibly different, changing meters and styles dramatically. The final movement illustrates the vitality of his writing, including sections he describes as having “grit and grazioso (grace),” “a crazed march,” and bugle calls before culminating in the immense 12-tone chord.