CANON AND CACCIA for four horns
Program notes by the composer

This work was written in a couple of weeks early in 1977, immediately after the successful premiere of The Eve of St. Agnes on the Northern Illinois University campus. Like Agnes, this work explores an antiphonal relationship among its five performers; I intended that the musicians should be separated as far apart as possible at the imitative beginning of the work, gradually drawing nearer and nearer to each other as the music becomes more chordal. This would be, in other words, a visual and aural representation of the work's two interior forms themselves; the Canon, by definition a "round" of imitative and contrapuntal entrances; the Caccia, "chase" in Italian, a quick movement in 6/8 time traditionally associated with the horn and its fox-hunting ancestry.

Canon and Caccia was intended originally for a concert which the women's music fraternity, Mu Phi Epsilon, was planning on the Northern Illinois University campus during American Music Week, but for various logistic reasons the concert was never presented. The work waited ten years for its premiere, by horn professors John and Laura Fairfield and three of their graduate students, on the NIU campus.

CONCERT VARIATIONS for euphonium and piano
Program notes by the composer

The Concert Variations were commissioned by the Tubists Universal Brotherhood Association, composed during the summer of 1977, and premiered in Los Angeles on June 15, 1978 by Brian Bowman, euphonium, and Steven Harlos, piano, at the Third International Tuba- Euphonium Symposium-Workshop. It was reviewed by the late Don Baird in the Winter, 1979 T.U.B.A. Journal, and has been analyzed in great detail in Kenneth E. Shrum's doctoral dissertation An Analytical Commentary on the Euphonium and Tuba Music of Jan Bach completed at the Arizona State University under the direction of Dan Perantoni. The work is currently available through the T.U.B.A. Press, Annandale VA. With a duration of fifteen minutes, Concert Variations is, as its title implies, a set of variations on an original theme stated at the outset by the euphonium; each variation is based on different performance techniques of the instrument, including quarter-tones, trills, alternate fingerings (and resultant differing timbres), lip smears, valve glissandi, multiphonics produced by singing while playing, etc. Some variations are based on the entire theme, some on characteristic fragments of the theme. The last variation is a fugue whose subject is an ornamented version of the entire theme which opened the work; near the end of the piece this fugal subject is joined by the theme in its original form, creating two simultaneous versions of the theme at two different tempi.

Since its initial performance, this work has attained, by general consensus, the status of a "classic" among works for this combination of instruments, as its many performances around the world -- and its recordings -- will attest.

CONCERTO FOR EUPHONIUM AND ORCHESTRA
Program notes by the composer, May 8 1994

This concerto was composed in the spring and summer of 1990. It has an unusual form, consisting of three movements (moderate - fast- slow) connected by cadenzas for the solo instrument. Its neo-Romantic style is also unusual for the twentieth century, written in this way deliberately in order to give the euphonium an example of "standard" concerto literature. This instrument, one of the most beautiful representatives of the brass family, has until recently lacked the variety of literature so common to other instruments.

The first movement, Legend, is a dramatic/lyric work in traditional sonata form. In typical fashion, some thematic groups are introduced by the solo instrument and developed by the orchestra, others by the orchestra and developed by the solo instrument. At the end of the movement an unmeasured and unaccompanied cadenza for the solo instrument leads directly into . . .

The second movement, Burlesca: this movement is typified by false entrances, false starts, false stops, "wrong note" passages, exuberant bravura passages, and colorful orchestration effects featuring the percussion section. The movement is in a rather loose rondo form, tinged with a Spanish flavor; originally it was planned to call to this movement Saltarello until the comic elements took over; in its present form it appears that the performing forces are often confused as to whether they are in Spain or Mexico. Much of the cadenza linking this movement with the third is played against a long, sustained B-flat pedal in low strings.

Meditation is the third movement, a slow elegy in 7/8 time which winds the work to a quiet close. The strings' harmonic background supporting the clarinet's opening thematic statement is built on the circle of fifths in such a way that, when this passage returns halfway through the movement, this theme can be repeated in canon at eight different tonal levels by the same number of solo woodwinds. A long coda to the work is based on a Bach chorale, chosen not only for its image of praising God through music, but also, at its climax, for its harmonic progression -- a retrograde of the progression on which the earlier portion of the movement is based -- which brings the work to a quiet close. Phrases of the chorale, played by the winds of the orchestra, alternate with "commentaries" on its substance by the solo euphonium and strings -- much in the manner of a minister or rabbi elaborating on the scriptures chosen for a particular service. This movement is dedicated to the memory of Roger Behrend's father Jack, who was a friend of the composer during their military service in the U. S. Army Band, Washington D.C.

The style of the work is rather traditional and straightforward, as mentioned above, with the euphonium's lyricism the first consideration. There are no "extended techniques" as such for either orchestra or soloist. The work is roughly 27 minutes long, with the Legend 11 minutes long (including a two-minute cadenza), the Burlesca 6:30, and the Meditation 9:30. The Burlesca, however, has been marked intentionally at a moderate tempo; a virtuoso soloist may prefer a faster tempo which would shorten the work accordingly.

The first performance of this work took place on May 12, 1992 at the T. U. B. A. International Convention in Lexington, Kentucky. Brian Bowman premiered the work, as he had premiered Dr. Bach's Concert Variations for euphonium and piano in Los Angeles back in the late seventies. The concerto has since been played in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Raleigh, North Carolina; Oulu, Finland; Tokyo, Japan; and elsewhere.

DOMPES & JOMPES for string orchestra
Program notes by the composer

Dompes & Jompes was written in January and February of 1986 at the specific request of Scott Stroman, conductor of the English string orchestra Opus Twenty. This group premiered the work on April 17, 1986, at St. John's Church, Smith Square, London.

The work is a suite of four movements for string orchestra, cast in the tempo scheme of slow - fast - slow - fast. The Dompe is an early type of English or Irish song, lamenting and sorrowful in character (cf. My Lady Careys Dompe, 16th- century MS, British Museum); the Jompe an upbeat work for American jazz band (cf. One O'Clock Jompe, Count Basie). Because of the circumstances of its premiere, the work was written in an "English" string orchestra style reminiscent of Elgar, Holst, and Britten (the intentional use of a fragment of "Welcome, Maids of Honor" from Britten's Spring Symphony as the basis for the third movement represents an homage to Sir Peter Pears, who died while this movement was being written).

Dompes & Jompes may be played by any number of excellent string players equalling or exceeding its originally intended instrumentation of thirteen solo performers (4-3-3-2-1). However, the composer prefers a minimum of 12-9-9-4-2 for any string ensemble larger than the original. The parenthetical designations "one only" and "all" which appear in the score and parts are primarily for the benefit of performers in this larger group, and are already implicit in the scoring for the thirteen-part organization.

EISTEDDFOD for flute, harp, and viola

(Program Notes reprinted from the 1979 Aldeburgh Festival Programme Booklet)

Eisteddfod was written in the summer of 1972 at the request of the Orpheus Trio, to whom the work is dedicated. Its title (literally, a 'sitting down together') refers to a legendary Welsh contest in which the heroes fought against each other with games and musical instruments. The only surviving musical relic of these contests is the Penillion, an ancient form of Welsh music practice in which a harpist plays a well-known air while a singer extemporises a somewhat different melody over it.

In this work, the competition takes its form as a set of variations and penillion on Ymadawiad y Brenin (Departure of the King), a tune first appearing in the Welsh Harper of 1839, and first heard by the composer in a recorded performance by Osian Ellis. The opening viola cadenza exposes the textures and motives which will shape each of the twelve variations to follow. Only at the end of the work is the tune heard in its original form, played by the harp and serving as the harmonic basis for the return of previously heard material in the other two instruments.

N. B. The performance by Osian Ellis, Peter-Lukas Graf, and Peter Shidlov at the 1979 Aldeburgh Festival and broadcast by the BBC led to many other performances and recordings throughout the world.

FANFARE AND FUGUE for five trumpets

Program Notes by the Composer, Feb 10 1996

The Fanfare and Fugue was written in 1979, as the climax to a period of creative activity that also included the Canon and Caccia for five French horns, the Concert Variations for euphonium and piano, and the Quintet for Tuba and String Quartet, as well as several works intended for instruments other than brass. It was a commission by the International Trumpet Guild, and was premiered at the 1980 ITG convention.

The work is cast in two connected movements: a ternary (three-part) form based on a fanfare motive in the outer sections, with a more introspective and lyrical muted middle section; and a five-voice fugue whose subject is stated by all five instruments in unison, which break up into individual voices for their various entrances throughout the piece, and are then combined again for a short recurrence of the initial fanfare motive as the conclusion of the piece.

FOUR TWO-BIT CONTRAPTIONS for flute and horn
Program notes by the composer Jan 14 1988

These little duets were written during one of the winter months of early 1964, while the composer was defending his country with his trusty French horn in the U. S. Army Band, Washington. D. C. They were intended as a birthday gift for a former horn student of his, then a sophomore co-ed at the University of Michigan, whose roommate played the flute (the hornist was Nancy Booth Stringer, who later collaborated with the composer in writing the poems used in his Three Choral Dances; the flutist was Mary Delano Sholkovitz, an eventual member of the Edinburgh Symphony). The work's title, which generated the work's content, is an obvious satirical jibe at another composing Bach, now decomposing, and his Two-Part Inventions for keyboard. The intention was to write music specifically designed for the duet combination in such a way that the two parts seemed complete by themselves (a later version, for woodwind quintet, was not nearly so successful in performance and has been withdrawn).

Strange to say, the two performers for whom the work was originally written never performed it. The work's first public performance was given by two outstanding high school performers during a young people's concert presented by the St. Petersburg (Florida) Symphony at the Bayfront Auditorium in that city in early 1966. It was scheduled by conductor Thomas Briccetti as an encore to a performance of the Titl Serenade for flute, horn, and string orchestra during that concert. The work's 1970 publication by Media Press is in large part responsible for its world-wide distribution and notoriety; to the composer's eternal embarrassment, it remains his most frequently performed composition. It is particularly popular at the April Fool's Day concerts that are becoming increasingly popular in this country, but it has also been performed in such distant countries as Sweden, England, and Germany with equally successful results. In August, 1987, it was performed in St. Louis for nearly two thousand flautists attending the National Flute Association convention. It has been recorded on CD by members of the Pennsylvania Quintet and, most recently, by members of the Chicago Philharmonic. It was also recorded earlier on the Crystal Records LP "Is This The Way To Carnegie Hall?" The work was released in a new edition by Galaxy Music Corporation in early 1989.

The work’s four movements are Second Lieutenant, Calliope, Gramophone, and Pinwheel. The two performers are encouraged to announce the title of each movement before they play it.

FRENCH SUITE for solo horn
Program notes by the composer

The French Suite was written for Douglas Hill, hornist and teacher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in early 1982 through a series of fortuitous, but eventually rewarding, circumstances. I had been commissioned to write a horn concerto for Jon Boen and the Orchestra of Illinois (members of Chicago's Lyric Opera orchestra) and had heard through the grapevine of a book of extended techniques for the horn which Doug was writing. Hoping to include some of these unusual techniques in my horn concerto, I asked Doug if I could get an advance copy of his book. Doug made a "deal" with me; he would send me a copy of his manuscript along with the tape of the horn examples he had recorded, provided I write a solo horn piece he could play in the approaching International Horn Society convention in Avignon, France. I wrote the piece, Doug played it, and Doug even ended up playing first chair in the horn section of my Horn Concerto, replacing Jon Boen who, of course, was saving himself for the concerto's solo part (horn "section" is a term one should not take too literally, because at the end of the concerto the four sectional horns actually join the soloist at center stage for a real "Jan" session).

The four movements of the suite partake liberally of the special effects Doug had researched for his book, and the venue for the anticipated first performance gave the work its title and form: four short movements in the tempo scheme of slow-fast-slow- fast after the prototypical French suites so beautifully frozen in time by Johann Sebastian Bach. The opening movement, Fantaisie, includes the most advanced performance techniques of the work, and is actually a recitative in which the hornist functions alternately as melodic soloist and harmonic accompaniment. The following Courante features fast mixed rhythms surrounding a slow, lyrical, muted middle section. The third movement, Sarabande, owes much to the dances so often associated with Baroque instrumental suites, its wistful con sordino lines apostrophized by a little "soft shoe" suggested by a hairbrush on the hornist's mute. The concluding Fugue requires the soloist to function as four different polyphonic parts at four different dynamics, registers, and tone colors, eventually ending the work in a blaze of glory.

THE HAPPY PRINCE
for violin soloist, narrator, and chamber orchestra
Program notes by the composer Dec 15 1994

I wrote The Happy Prince in the spring and summer of 1978, in thanksgiving for the birth of our second daughter, Eva. The work is dedicated to Eva and her older sister Dawn, who were 2 and 11 respectively when the work was premiered in Omaha by the Nebraska Sinfonia under the direction of Thomas Briccetti.

Oscar Wilde's story made a powerful impression on me when, at the age of eleven, I heard my sixth grade teacher's reading of the tale near Christmastime, but thirty years were to pass before I felt confident enough of my technique to write music that would dramatize the words without distracting from them. I was drawn to the story because of its lyric imagery - - a natural for musical accompaniment -- as well as its appealing and universal symbols of charity, redemption, and resurrection.

The Happy Prince, at its creation, was the latest in a series of works I had written to explore the symbiotic relationships between words and music. This exploration had begun during a decade in which I wrote several art songs based on English poetry (1961-71); then followed with a one-act opera, The System, based on a tale of Edgar Allan Poe (1973); an a cappella choral cycle, My Wilderness, based on poems of Carl Sandburg and others (1975); and The Eve of St. Agnes, an "opera of instrumentalists" (1976) which used small wind ensemble groups placed antiphonally in the concert hall to act out the Keats poem on which the work was based.

It was my intention to create a closer bond between program music and its narrative than Prokofiev was able to do with Peter and the Wolf, whose start-music, stop-music, start- narration, stop-narration jerkiness was unavoidable in an age before sophisticated miking techniques would enable the narrator to speak her words over continuous orchestral sound. I therefore designed The Happy Prince with intentional "windows" in the music where the narrator's words would be required to fit; much of the music was also written in the lower to middle range of the orchestra to complement the female narrator's voice I had in mind, that of my wife Dalia. While the narrator is necessarily the focal point of the work, it resembles, on another level, a violin concerto, in which the constant arabesques and cadenzas of the solo violin represent the swallow of the story. Several musical leit-motifs, used in the manner of Wagner, appear in the music to portray other events and characters of the Wilde tale.

The Happy Prince was chosen from over fifty new chamber music scores as winner of the Omaha Symphony Guild's 1979 New Music Competition, and was performed ten times in the Omaha Nebraska area by Thomas Briccetti and the Nebraska Sinfonia, Dalia Bach narrating and Stephen Shipps as the violin soloist. It has since been performed by several other orchestras -- most recently, the Kibbutz Chamber Orchestra of Israel, The Illinois Chamber Orchestra, and Chicago's Metropolis Symphony Orchestra -- and has been commercially recorded and published.

HELIX for alto saxophone and wind/percussion octet
Program notes by the composer

Helix was commissioned by the National Association of College Wind and Percussion Instructors in 1982, written in the fall of 1983, and first performed at the National MENC convention in Chicago on March 24, 1984. Stephen Duke, alto saxophonist, appeared as soloist at the premiere, accompanied by a faculty group from Northern Illinois University. Donald Funes, then chair of the NIU School of Music, was the conductor.

This was one of those rare -- and welcome -- commissions where no specific stipulations regarding instrumentation, style, or length were imposed by the commissioning agency; NACWPI directed only that the work should be written for some combination of wind and percussion instruments. Left completely free to choose my own project, I determined to write a work featuring our school's outstanding alto saxophonist, Stephen Duke. I had long been fascinated with the plight of the saxophone in its search for identity: an instrument never entirely at home with the woodwinds or the brass, neither strictly legitimate as the orchestral winds were nor, for that matter, strictly a jazz instrument either. I decided that this work would explore those struggles of the sax by planting it squarely between two opposing wind trios -- one of brass, one of woodwinds, each with its accompanying percussionist -- and also between two opposing styles: hard-edge jazz and 20th -century French-influenced legitimate music. The work also employs a good deal of heterophony, as the opening sax solo throws flute-, clarinet-, and bassoon-colored "shadows" of itself against the wall of background silence. The title was suggested by the spiral figure which apostrophizes the three initial statements of the sax's melodic material.

Craig B. Parker, writing in the Journal of the International Trumpet Guild, said this of the work:

Bach explores a myriad of timbres in HELIX, from subdued woodwinds and muted brasses to explosive tuttis. HELIX, like many of the recent works of Albright, Bolcom, Del Tredici, Rochberg, and others, adroitly juxtaposes diverse stylistic elements, in this case ranging from Hovhaness-like improvisation to jazz licks, into an eclectic, unified whole.

LAUDES for brass quintet
Program notes by the composer

Laudes (loud-ays), as its name may imply, is a Twentieth-Century tribute to the great brass tower music of the Italian Renaissance. Its title has several different associations: I(louds) was the sunrise service of the Roman Catholic Church. Laude (loud-ee) were Italian hymns of praise and devotion which flourished from the 13th through the 19th centuries. And the title is also a musical pun: somewhere in each movement is a loud concert A! The work was written in late 1971 at the request of the Chicago Brass Quintet, which premiered the piece at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art on January 21, 1972.

The work is cast in four contrasting movements. Reveille moves from dark to bright colors, alternating sections of relative inactivity with sections of extreme brilliance and energy. Its title was chosen after the fact, because of the music's suggestion of a sunrise. Scherzo is cast in three-part form, its quick outer sections consisting principally of a single melodic line produced by rapid entrances and exits of the five instruments playing their "open" (valveless) tones con sordino, the middle section consisting of chromatic scale segments in both principal and supporting material. Cantilena gives each instrument an opportunity to dominate one of several solo sections which alternate with weightier sections of all five instruments, each section cadencing in the same d minor/c minor ploychord. Volta, a lewd dance (the couples actually embraced each other!) of Provencal origin, is in this instance a quick movement of violent dynamic and textural contrasts. After an exhausted breakdown of the instrumental forces near the end of this movement, the suite concludes with a coda based on a slow section of the first movement; out of this coda emerges a gradually rising and quickening line which brings the work to a brilliant close.

In 1974 this work received international attention when it was chosen as the best new brass quintet submitted to the First International Brass Institute in Montreux, Switzerland. Since that time, Laudes has been performed countless times throughout the world, largely through the efforts of the New York Brass Quintet, which performed it on two European and several American tours, recorded it on Crystal records, and published it through their Mentor Music house. Laudes opened the Kennedy Library in Boston, and was danced to by the Hubbard Street Dancers on the streets of New York. It is one of a very few works by living contemporary composers existing simultaneously in four different recordings, three of which on CD and recorded since 1990. In 1983 a poll of International Trumpet Guild members selected it (along with works by Dahl, Schuller, and Etler) as one of the four most significant brass quintets ever written.

MY VERY FIRST SOLO
for alto saxophone and electric piano
Program Notes by the Composer

My Very First Solo was written in 1974 at the request of Miller Sigmon, then alto saxophone soloist with the Marine Band, Washington D. C. It was premiered in July, 1974 by Mr. Sigmon and myself at the International Saxophone Congress in Bordeaux, France.

The title is misleading; the work is actually one of the most difficult ever written for the instrument. At the time of its first performance, it was a veritable glossary of contemporary performance techniques -- multiphonics, fluttertonguing, various new articulations, humming while playing, timbral changes, quarter-tones, etc. -- just beginning to be utilized by serious composers. But it WAS the first -- not to say only -- solo I had ever written for the saxophone up to that time, and thus the name.

The work, like many saxophone works of the French school, is in two major sections: a slow, rhapsodic interplay between the two instruments followed by a quick, mixed-meter dance. Basic serial techniques were utilized in generating much of the work's melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic material, and many other fragments were suggested by effects peculiar to the Moog synthesizer which I was also exploring at the time of the work's composition. These electronic effects of the composition are intended to be enhanced by the presence of the electric, rather than acoustic, piano as the accompanying instrument.

The electronic piano part originally was written for the 140B Wurlitzer, a piano with volume and vibrato control knobs designed primarily for university classroom piano courses and actually manufactured in DeKalb, Illinois where I have taught since 1966. Artists playing the Fender-Rhodes, Korg, Roland or other electronic keyboards of more recent manufacture should choose a keyboard preset that evokes the older Wurlitzer: a "plummy" sound somewhat similar to the timbre of the vibraphone but slightly fatter and sweeter. In addition, the instrument chosen must have a full five-and-a-third octave range (from A1 to C7) immediately available with no registration displacement necessary.

The saxophone part has been printed on heavy card stock to facilitate their "shuffling" during performance; the infrequent rests in the saxophone part made the routine page turns of an ordinarily bound parts format impossible to achieve.

QUINTET FOR TUBA AND STRINGS
Program notes by the composer

My Quintet for Tuba and Strings was written in the summer of 1978 at the request of Harvey Phillips, who premiered it with a quartet of Indiana University graduate students during two marathon concerts at New York's Carnegie Recital Hall in January of 1980. The work has no programmatic associations, but seeks to extend the performance techniques of tuba and strings alike within a somewhat conservative, direct and easily understood musical language. I was asked by Mr. Phillips to stay within traditional tuba performance techniques -- no multiphonics, flutter-tonguing, bent pitches, etc. (which have turned out to be curiously gimmicky to today's ears) -- but had no range, register, tempo or rhythmic restrictions, which I took full advantage of. The strings, on the other hand, use ponticello, col legno battuto, tremolo harmonics, snap pizzicati, double and triple stops, etc., in addition to their normal means of sound production.

In the first movement, Introit, the strings' canonic and tightly woven introductions lead to a series of tuba cadenzas whose textures and motives will form the basis of the remaining three movements. The Scherzo in Moto Perpetuo which follows is cast in ternary form, the tuba cavorting against a string background of rapid interlocking 32nds in the outer sections, and attempting to keep up with the first violin's thematic material in the quieter, more sustained middle section. Movement Three, Chaconne, is a slow but very intense set of variations on a slow ground, growing even more intense as it leads to the last movement, Ripresa e Fandango. This movement begins with the same introduction heard at the outset of the first movement, but with the tuba taking part in the canonic dialogue; this leads to a very fast, dance-like give-and-take movement which ends the work.

The Quintet for Tuba and Strings is available for purchase from the Tuba-Euphonium Press.

PIANO CONCERTO with orchestra
Program notes by the composer

My Concerto for Piano and Orchestra was sponsored by a National Endowment for the Arts grant and was written, during the summer and fall of 1975, for faculty colleague Donald Walker, at the School of Music of Northern Illinois University. A series of unexpected events kept the work from being performed until July, 1981, when it was premiered at the Grant Park outdoor concert series with Sheldon Shkolnik as pianist and Christopher Keene conducting the Grant Park Symphony. The work was written for large orchestra and is in three movements, with the second and third connected; its duration is a little over thirty minutes.

The first movement, Allegro con brio, is cast in the customary sonata-allegro form, with its two primary themes -- one serious and lyrical, the other comical and angular -- developed in various ways and leading to a virtuosic cadenza. Despite its fairly serious tone, this movement includes such unusual -- for a piano concerto -- instruments as temple blocks and cowbells.

The second movement, Variazioni, is a series of variations based on William Byrd's madrigal My Sweet Little Darling and introduced by Alfred Deller in the voice-and-viols arrangement of his old Vanguard recording. Byrd's bittersweet lullaby, invoking the Gods to "bless and keep thee from cruel annoy" finds expression in the increasing violence of each new variation, a musical argument about the difficulties inherent in raising children in any violent environment (including that of the present day). Eventually, a chorus of crying and moaning unborn -- or yet-to-be-born -- children is heard in the distance immediately before the pianist's cadenza; immediately after the cadenza the movement comes to a close with a ghost-like revisitation of the theme in cello harmonics. This leads directly to the third movement, Rondo in Moto Perpetuo.

Rondo in Moto Perpetuo is announced by a Bartokian brass fanfare which actually furnishes some of the thematic material found later in this concluding movement of the concerto. The primary feature of the rondo theme, however, is that of a rhythmic ostinato in the lower register of the piano; its 7/4 meter is projected throughout the remainder of the movement and the various contrasting themes which furnish relief from this ostinato. A bit of musical theater appears near the end of the concerto, in the form of a dialogue between piano and orchestra; this idea came directly out of the composer's university orchestration classes and his fondness for comparing a performance of the piano version of a work with the recording of the work's orchestral version. In this particular instance, each gesture of the pianist is mimicked by the orchestra, which always takes the phrase one extra measure beyond what the pianist had done, in a kind of "can you top this" interplay until the pianist, in desperation, begins playing arpeggios. This is, of course the most difficult pianistic texture for an orchestra to realize, causing the ensemble to break down. In retaliation, individual members of the wind sections stand and play their own idiomatic cliches against the accompaniment provided by the pianist's arpeggios until everyone in the orchestra is standing except the cellos, of course, and the soloist -- whose opportunity to stand comes when the concerto ends and he is allowed to stand to acknowledge the applause!

ROUNDS AND DANCES for brass quintet
Program notes by the composer

Rounds and Dances was a joint commission by the four principal American brass organizations and was composed during the summer of 1980. It received its premieres in 1981 at both the National Trombone Workshop in Nashville, Tennessee (by the Eastman Brass Quintet) and the International Trumpet Guild convention in Boulder, Colorado (by the University of Wisconsin Brass Quintet). It is a suite of five short movements conceived primarily in terms of the ensemble rather than the individual parts.

The first and fourth movements are canonic in nature: in the Fanfare the instruments enter in score order, moving down from the movement's Trumpet I beginning; in Idyl the instruments enter in ascending order from the tuba's opening solo. These two movements contrast in spirit as well as form; the Fanfare is rhythmically exciting, assertive, and comes dangerously close to being trapped in its repetitions, while the Idyl is quiet and introspective, with a "long line" that builds steadily to a climactic outcome.

The remaining movements, homophonic in texture, are generic dance forms of Europe and South America. In the second movement, Sarabande, each instrument has the opportunity to display its soloistic technique against the unvarying, slow dance background of the remaining instruments. Carioca, the third movement, is a lively dance featuring an unusual opening texture with its own, built-in echo effect. The concluding "fast and fleet" Galop is the quickest movement of the set, poking gentle fun at Rossini among other composers of Allegro movements. This movement follows the Idyl without pause.

STEELPAN CONCERTO with orchestra
Program Notes by the composer

The solo part of the Steelpan Concerto was actually written for soprano pan, a steel instrument which usually plays the primary part in the Caribbean steel bands. The work was composed in the late summer of 1994 for Liam Teague, a young musician from Trinidad whose musicianship inspired the work, and with the financial assistance of the Woodstock Chimes Foundation, Garry and Diane Kvistad, presidents. It is also an homage to Al O'Connor and the NIU Steel Band -- one of the oldest such university groups in existence -- and to the artistry of steel drum builder Cliff Alexis, whose instruments’ incredible intonation and tone make them worthy partners in any serious musical endeavor. The work was actually conceived in terms of three distinctly different accompaniments to back up the solo pan player: piano, steel band, and full orchestra. It was also written in such a way that additional parts from the steel band could be added to augment the soloist and his accompanying forces in orchestral performances. Its idiom is a popular one, similar to some extent to the music indigenous to the Caribbean islands, from which it borrows its percussion section.

The work is in two main sections connected by an extended solo cadenza. The first movement's title, Reflections, is not only a description of its musical content, style, and tempo, but carries an additional meaning: in Europe reflection is a synonym for pealing, the action of striking a bell. In this context, the movement's title refers to the bell-like sound of the Alexis instruments; the climax of the movement is intended to be reminiscent of the "change-ringing" of bells popular as a seasonal sport in English church steeples. The second movement, Toccata (touch piece), also carries a double meaning. It is not only an opportunity for the soloist to display his machine- rhythm speed, accuracy, and virtuosity as well as his phenomenal dynamic control; it is also a connection with that Baroque past with which the name of this composer -- despite all efforts to the contrary -- is forever associated.

THREE BAGATELLES for solo piano
Program notes by the composer

My Three Bagatelles was written in 1963 and revised in 1971. Its three movements are based programmatically on legendary lovers appearing in Boccaccio's Decameron and compositionally on some twelve-tone techniques I was studying at that time. It was my original intention to complete twelve bagatelles, with ten based on the ten characters of the Boccaccio novel and the remaining two musical portraits of the married friends of mine, piano students at Juilliard at the time, who had asked me to write the work. For whatever reason (economic hardship?) my friends split up and divorced soon after I had completed the third movement. This event forced me to rethink the work in terms of a three- movement structure. Each of the three movements treats my original twelve-tone row in a different way.

The Decameron is a collection of one hundred stories told by a group of ten young Italian aristocrats -- seven ladies, three men -- who were forced to flee Florence during the 1348 plague and seek refuge in a country house for ten days, where they whiled away the time telling stories (ten days X ten persons = one hundred stories). At the end of each day, one of the ten characters sang a song detailing his or her attitudes toward life and love. It was my intention that the songs they sang would furnish not only the over-all character of each of my bagatelles, but serve as a guide to its form or structure as well.

Thus it was that the first movement, Emilia, describing a young woman twittering about her egocentric love for herself, might easily twitter as well, and could be cast in the so-called bar form A-A-B which, by definition, includes -- heaven forbid -- a long repeated section (rarely found in any twelve-tone after Webern), the better to describe her self- centered infatuation.

Lauretta, the second of the three movements, describes a young woman bemoaning the mistake she made in trading her single blessedness for the married state. This movement is strophic in design (verse-refrain-verse-refrain, etc.) with each verse (based on linear interpolations of the row) expressing Lauretta's more and more hysterical recitatives, the unchanging refrain (a harmonic treatment of the same material, decorated with Landini-type figurations) describing the six-voice "there, there" comfortings of the remaining ladies.

The third movement, Pamfilo, is a portrait of a young man so consumed by love's fire that it threatens to annihilate him. Here the twelve-tone row appears as the roots of a chordal progression serving as background to a rather diabolical chorale prelude in which the "chorale tune" is actually provided by a medieval drinking song from the Glogauer Liederbuch, "In Feurs Hitz," its accompaniment a gypsy-like cembalom texture out of whose turgid swirling densities surfacing from time to time such melodic fragments as "In a Persian Market," "Old Joe Clark," and the ever-popular "There's a Place in France . . . ," each partitioned by repetitions of a familiar melodic fragment occuring in works as diverse as Enesco's Rumanian Rhapsodies and Heifetz' Hora Staccato.

TRIPTYCH for brass quintet
Program notes by the composer

The Triptych for brass quintet was a joint commission by the American Brass Quintet and Chamber Music America, with funds from the Pew Memorial Trust. It was written during the summer of 1989.

As its name might imply, the Triptych is a set of three movements for brass, based on formal prototypes of the Renaissance period but updated to take advantage of the assumed improvements in brass instrument design and playing techniques over the past four centuries. These include such things as increased chromaticism, wider dynamic range, use of trombone "smears" and rapid changes of mutes and instruments, in addition to a traditional legacy of antiphonal entrances, points of imitation, and widely varying polyphonic instrumental textures.

The Canzona is typified by frequent appearances of a long-short-short repeated-pitch pattern, alternated with sections suggesting heterophonic pyramids; hemiola (metric substitution) is also very much in evidence.

The Threnody is a dirge, primarily muted, in which each instrument has the opportunity to intersperse its solo lament between appearances of a tutti ritornello of concerted grief.

The Fuga pits the working-out of a four-square fugue subject against a perpetual-motion counterpoint of running triplets. The subject begins in trombones and works its way up through the other instruments. As the subject's appearances occur in higher and higher keys, the two trumpet players (in self- defense?) are forced to change accordingly to other, more suitable instruments.

WOODWORK for percussion quartet
Program notes by the composer March 4 2004

Woodwork was written and premiered in the spring of 1970, at the request of Thomas Siwe, then director of Percussion Studies at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, for the last in a Krannert Hall series of concerts celebrating landmark percussion works and newly-written works of the 20th Century. I named the piece "Woodwork" because it used only wooden instruments of the percussion family, including slit drums, marimbas, a xylophone, bamboo wind chimes, and other instruments made of wood. I dedicated the work not only to Tom, but also to my father, who was not only owner of a lumberyard and later the chief carpenter for the Beer Nuts corporation, but because he himself created the notched sticks called for in the score by turning them on his own lathe.

The deep stage of the Krannert’s Great Hall, where the work was scheduled to be played, inspired me to try a configuration of the percussion quartet that could rarely be tried elsewhere: that of having the four players and their mallet instruments positioned behind each other, so that first percussionist Michael Udow would appear to have a flurry of eight arms, resembling the Indian God Shiva when all four players were actively performing. The canonic opening of the work was an intentional means of "choreographing" the players' motions so that Mike's initial gestures would then spread to the second player, the third player, and the fourth. The result was a work as interesting for the physical movement of its players as for the unusual onstage instruments.

In overall texture, the work proceeds from strictly notated pitches of the mallet instruments to eventual noise (by way of the slit drums) produced by the players beating on the fiberboard sides of their instruments (rarely achieved today since the redesigning of the Musser instruments ). Each percussionist has a wide array of sticks and mallets in addition to the instruments under the control of each.

The work was rescheduled a month after its intended premiere, which had been intended for the weekend of the disastrous Kent State massacre in the spring of 1969. It was only after the work had been written and performed that I learned Tom Siwe's last name meant "Shiva" in Polish. A very strange coincidence.