TIM REYNISH WEBSITE

JANUARY 2007

A very happy New Year to any browser who happens upon this site.

I was lucky enough to get to the Mid-West International Clinic, and as usual spent a lot of time agonising with colleagues over the future of the wind orchestra medium.

WRONG PERCEPTIONS

We have the problem of being perceived by most musicians as a vehicle for education, ceremonial and entertainment, a perception which ignores the great repertoire of “Art” music which exists as well as that of really good Gebrauchsmusik.

SERIOUS CRITICISM & MIXED MESSAGES

We rarely if ever attract professional critics to comment on our music or our performances, and I suspect that this is because we send out confusing messages. At the Mid-West one of the greatest military bands in the world, under an especially fine conductor who had studied with leading orchestral conductors in USA and Europe, played a concert which ended with the Schoenberg Theme and Variations sandwiched in between the Skaters Waltz and Americans We. The concert itself included 50% transcriptions, a strange programme to give leadership in repertoire and programme planning at the world’s greatest band clinic.

NON-PROMOTION OF GOOD NON-COMMERCIAL WORKS

Re repertoire, time and again I met conductors who had commissioned fine, sometimes excellent works, but had written nothing about them to promote them, had presumably dropped them from the repertoire, had no faith in what they had helped to create.

LEADERSHIP

Do we give clear enough leadership to our students in choosing, programming and performing music? The student in school, college or university, if working with the orchestra, will know the repertoire of Beethoven, Brahms, Berlioz, Bruckner, and maybe even Britten, Berio and Boulez. (S)he will have videos of the orchestras in Boston, Chicago, New York, Vienna, London playing that repertoire conducted by Boult, Bernstein, Boulez or Barenboim, so there are clear yardsticks and role models. I am not proposing a dictatorship in taste. As one WASBE colleague pointed out to me “One man’s meat is another man’s poison”, but a New Year’s resolution to talk about music rather than band, organisation or budgets may be a good start and might lead to more of us exploring new repertoire.

PINK PANTHER MEETS THE WIZARD OF OZ

Finally, I went to Birmingham (UK not Alabama) to a performance of the Britten War Requiem by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, an incredible experience, 85 minutes of closely argued emotive music and text, with the chorus of the London Symphony Orchestra, Tiffin Schools Boys Choir and three great soloists, conducted by Richard Hickox. I could not help reflecting on a distinguished colleague who telephoned me to ask for good film arrangements for his County Wind Band, the county music committee wanted something popular, something user-friendly! It is so sad that the hundred and fifty or so young musicians in Symphony Hall last week should have experienced one of the great masterpieces of contemporary literature, while our leading wind bands are asked to play ephemeral entertainment music much of the time.

Have a great Year!

Yours, 

Grumpy of Leyland

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Point your browser to any headings to fine the appropriate news item

1. NEW YEARS HONOURS IN UNITED KINGDOM 

Guy Woolfenden, OBE 

Dame Evelyn Glennie

2. CD OF THE MONTH for School and Community Bands

3. CD OF THE MONTH for Professional and College Bands

4. PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH - ELEGY FOR MILES DAVIS for Trumpet and Wind Ensemble by Richard Rodney Bennett

5. WEB SITE OF THE MONTH - WHITWELL ESSAYS ON THE ORIGINS OF WESTERN MUSIC

6. COMPOSER OF THE MONTH – PIET SWERTS

7. WORK OF THE MONTH -CYRANO de BERGERAC

8. COMPOSITION COMPETITIONS

Merrill Jones Award

Ostwald Award

GUY WOOLFENDEN OBE

Many congratulations to Guy for the award of the Order of the British Empire for Services to Music. For information on Guy’s career, please go to his Ariel Music website. 

GUY WOOLFENDEN, BORN 12th July 1937

Guy, composer, conductor, broadcaster and formerly a hornplayer with Sadlers Wells Opera, is perhaps the most successful BASBWE commissioned composer, bringing his experience of theatre to the medium; he was for many years director of music at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon, with scores for every Shakespeare play to his credit.

Two early BASBWE commissions, Gallimaufry (1983, Ariel) and Illyrian Dances (1986, Ariel) both draw on the Shakespeare canon; the language is a pastiche of late English renaissance, looking back to both 16th century and the early 20th century, but with twists in the metrical structure and a harmonic piquancy which avoid the obvious.

More direct are Deo Gracias (1985, G&M Brand) and SPQR (1988). For the 1991 International Conference, he wrote a fine set of variations, Mockbeggar Variations (1981). The most recent pieces are Curtain Call (1997), commissioned for performance at the 1997 WASBE Conference, French Impressions (1998, Ariel) written for the Metropolitan Wind Symphony of Boston, and Rondo Variations (1999, Ariel) a movement for Clarinet and Wind Ensemble. Most recent pieces are Birthday Treat (1998), Firedance, (2002), Celebration (2003, Ariel) and the current commission Bohemian Dances, which received its first performance in St Paul, Minnesota on 6th May 2005. He has recorded most of the works on professional disc with the Royal Northern College of Music Wind Orchestra; his wife under the name of Ariel publishes most of his music.

The works of Guy Woolfenden's are perhaps typical of this new wave of music for wind band, which has charm and wit, is in a popular idiom but avoids clichés. I believe that it is ignorance of the medium which leads to this repertoire being largely ignored. In a rare “serious newspaper review” of wind music, Robert Maycock wrote of Woolfenden's Gallimaufry in The Independent:

In so far as music criticism deals seriously with radio at all, it tends to concentrate on Radio 3, such are the cultural blinkers most critics wear. At the least, this means that good things on the other networks get missed - such as the Royal Northern College of Music Wind Orchestra playing Guy Woolfenden last Friday, again on Radio 2. If you're in the new-music business and smirking, ask yourself if typecasting someone as a theatre composer isn't another case of cultural blinkers ...... A piece like Gallimaufry, with its witty ingenuities, expert layout, and a tune that stays with you as long as Carousel's, has helped thousands of players to cut their musical teeth and stirred thousands more with the adventure of living music. Yet how many "contemporary" specialists have heard a note of it?

* Recorded on CD DOY 042: - GALLIMAUFRY RNCM Wind Orchestra conducted by Guy Woolfenden

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EVELYN GLENNIE, born in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1965, is the world's foremost, and first full-time, solo percussionist. At the age of 12 and began to study timpani at that time, working extensively with her teacher to learn to sense percussion vibrations. Glennie made her professional debut in 1985, and it did not take long for her musical adventurousness to show itself. In addition to performing with classical ensembles, she commissioned new works (over 80 to date), single-handedly expanding the repertoire of works for solo percussion. An energetic concertizer, she is typically on the road for over 100 evenings a year, and has made 13 solo recordings.

Glennie crosses musical boundaries with unusual ease. In addition to performances with most of the major European and American classical orchestras, she has worked with the Kodo Japanese drummers, the experimental Icelandic pop vocalist Björk, Javanese gamelan ensembles, Brazilian samba bands, and other musicians on five continents. Her album Shadow Behind the Iron Sun, released in 2000, fulfilled Glennie's long-held desire to join forces with a pop producer, in this case the veteran American studio wizard Michael Brauer.

The Royal Northern College of Music commissioned two works to feature Evelyn Glennie as soloist with wind orchestra, Thea Musgrave’s Journey through a Japanese Landscape (1994) and Adam Gorb’s Elements. Both are available on CD

Journey Through a Japanese Landscape - Concerto for Marimba and Wind Orchestra

Singapore Symphony Orchestra 

Lan Shui, conductor

Evelyn Glennie, percussion

BIS CD1222

ELEMENTS
Wind music of Gorb, Marsh and Bingham
RNCM Wind Orchestra with Simone Rebello, Percussion
1. Elements (Suite for Percussion and Wind Ensemble) - Adam Gorb
2. Three American Icons - Judith Bingham
3. Heathcote's Inferno - Roger Marsh
DOYEN CD 127
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INTERNATIONAL REPERTOIRE RECORDINGS

Many of the students at Ithaca College are following a Music Education course, and so my two concerts there last Spring Semester included a number of works which I hoped they would find useful later in their careers. In Volume 4, while L’Homme Armé and Dances from Crete are tough, they can be tackled by a good school band. However Improvisations – Rhythms by Andreas Makris was written on commission for a school band, and it introduces some aleatoric writing, some serial techniques and above all some mixed metres.

Volume 3 is perhaps more user friendly; the Ranki is a wonderful piece which always reminds me of Petrouchka and the rest of the programme is to my mind well worth investigating by any conductor looking for new repertoire which will challenge the players a little. Bill Connor’s Tails aus dem Vood Viennoise is in my opinion a masterpiece, a Grade3/4 work which gives students the emotional buzz they would get from a Mahler Symphony.

Volumes 1 and 2 include two concerts of music more suitable for University and Professional groups. Despite some duplication of repertoire, I feel that the four discs might introduce an international perspective to possible future programming,

VOL 4 ITHACA COLLEGE WIND ENSEMBLE 6804-MCD
Improvisations-Rhythms (1975) Andreas Makris (Greece/USA) Ballerbach
Reflections (2000) Richard Rodney Bennett (England) MusicSales
L’Homme Armé (2003) Christopher Marshall (New Zealand) Maecenas
Resonance (2006) Christopher Marshall (New Zealand) Maecenas
Dances from Crete (2003) Adam Gorb (England) Maecenas
Marsch (1981) Marcel Wengler (Luxembourg) Maecenas

VOL 3 ITHACA COLLEGE SYMPHONIC BAND 6733-MCD
King Pomade Suite no 2 (1953) Ranki Gyorgy (Hungary) Stormworks
Elegy for Miles Davis (1993) Richard Rodney Bennett (England) MusicSales
Symphony of Winds (1981) Derek Bourgeois (England) HaFaBra
Blackwater (2006) Fergal Carroll (Ireland) Maecenas
Tails aus dem Voods Viennoise (1992) Bill Connor (Wales) Maecenas

VOL. 2 UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY WIND ENSEMBLE 5347-MCD
Dances from Crete (2003) Adam Gorb England
Gran Duo (2000) Magnus Lindberg Finland
Awake, You Sleepers (2002) Laurence Bitensky USA
Per la Flor del Lliri Blau (1934) Joaquin Rodrigo Spain

VOL. 1 UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY WIND ENSEMBLE 4949-MCD
Samurai (1995) Nigel Clarke England
Diaghilev Dances (2003) Kenneth Hesketh England
Danse Funambulesque (1930) Jules Strens Belgium
L’Homme Armé (2003) Christopher Marshall New Zealand
Concerto for Wind Orchestra (2003) Christian Lindberg Sweden

MARK CUSTOM RECORDS

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ELEGY FOR MILES DAVIS

The Trumpet Concerto by Richard Rodney Bennett has long been one of my favorite commissions. He wrote it for the RNCM and the soloist Martin Winter and it was premiered in 1993 at a BASBWE Conference. Now Novellos/MusicSales have published the slow movement as a separate piece; it is a ballad based on The Maid of Cadiz, and is one of the most moving pieces of wind music I know, gorgeous tune, wonderfully scored. The fact that it is serial is completely incidental.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED FOR ANY GROUP

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WHITWELL ESSAYS ON THE ORIGINS OF WESTERN MUSIC

“The principal purpose in writing these essays is to make available to the reader a much broader understanding of the practice of music in earlier societies than that which is provided in traditional music history texts.” ~ David Whitwell

181 ESSAYS ON HISTORY AND AESTHETICS OF EARLY MUSIC

This is an extraordinary labour of love, with a huge range of topics covered with skill and energy, essential for any musician interested in earlier music and music practice.

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PIET SWERTS

CYRANO de BERGERAC

A visit to the theatre in early January to see Rostand’s great play Cyrano de Bergerac reminded me of a piece from the 2003 WASBE Conference called Cyrano by Piet Swerts which at the time impressed me enormously. Repeated hearings have reinforced that first impression that here is a full-blooded romantic tone-poem well worth playing with a good community band such as L’Orchestre d’Harmonie de l’Éctricité de Strasbourg (OHES) or an honours band looking for something different. The work is on sale from De Haske.

Piet Swerts was born in Tongeren in 1960. He studied from 1974 to 1989 at the Lemmens Institute in Leuven, where he earned ten first prizes and studied piano with Robert Groslot and Alan Weiss. He was the first recipient from the Lemmens Institute of the Lemmens Tinel prize for composition and piano magna cum laude. Piet Swerts now teaches piano, analysis and composition at the same institute, positions he has held since 1982. In 1985 he became the conductor of the Ensemble for New Music at the school. As a composer, Swerts has won numerous prizes, including the Camille Huysmans Composition Prize in 1986 for his work, Droombeelden (Dream images) and, in that same year the Composition Prize of the Province of Limburg for his Capriccio for Guitar and Chamber Orchestra. He received the Baron Flor Peeters Prize for his Apocalyps I for organ in 1983 and in 1985 he was awarded the prize for Belgian artistic promotion for his song Ardennes for soprano and piano. He won the SABAM Prize for his Rotations for piano and orchestra, the work that was chosen as the compulsory concerto for the final round of the International Queen Elisabeth Competition in 1987. The newspaper, De Gazet van Antwerpen awarded him its prize for his Symphony No. 1 in 1989. In 1993 a choral work earned him the Composition Prize of the Province of Brabant, while in 1993 his violin concerto Zodiac was selected as the compulsory work for the finals of the International Queen Elisabeth Competition. With this work he won First Prize in the International Queen Elisabeth Competition for Composition (with a jury that included Górecki). An important moment in his career was the premiere of his large-scale opera Les liaisons dangereuses in 1996 at the Flemish opera.

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Merrill Jones Composition Contest
DEADLINE 1st November 2007 2007 Ninth Biennial NBA/Merrill James Memorial Young Composers Band Composition Contest Composers must be under the age of 40. For full details on the NBA website point your browser to the heading for this paragraph or contact the Chair, Frank Wickes, wickes@lsu.edu
Merrill Jones Composition Contest Application
Past Winners of the Merrill Jones Composition Contest

Frank B. Wickes, Chairman
Director of Bands, 292 Band Hall
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA 70803

Ostwald Award
Deadline 9TH November 2007 for the ABA Ostwald Award for a work for concert band with a prize of $10,000. For full details on the ABA website point your browser to the heading for this paragraph or contact
Stephen Steele, Chairman
ABA/Ostwald Committee
Illinois State University/Bands
Campus Box 5660
Normal, IL 61790-5660
Phone (309) 438-8833 fax (309) 438-2477
ssteele@ilstu.edu 

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