Wind Ensemble: Mosaic

PROGRAM NOTES

Kaleidoscope Eyes

Kaleidoscope eyes, more commonly known as kaleidoscope vision, is an optical side effect of migraine headaches, stroke, or brain injury. It produces distorted vision that resembles the view through a kaleidoscope, often including broken and multicoloured images. In this work, composer Katahj Copley views this phenomenon through rose-coloured glasses, so to speak, leaning into the Greek roots of the word, kalos (“beauty”), eidos (“form”), and skopeo (“to observe”). Copley’s bubbly textures, cheerful melodies, and brilliant orchestration provide an almost overwhelming palette of colours and sounds, a kind of soft-filtered version of the titular sensation.

A Symphonic Prelude on “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair”

A traditional folk song with likely Scottish origin, “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” was among the songs collected by Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles in their travels around the Appalachians in the early twentieth century. The melody best known today was composed by John Jacob Niles in 1941 and has been recorded by many singers since then, perhaps most notably the beautifully haunting 1965 rendition by the great Nina Simone. Alfred Reed’s setting for symphonic band exploits the diverse colours of the woodwind and brass instrument families, with an emphasis on the darker timbres that befits the tragic tone of the original folk song.

Green Bushes

By the time Percy Grainger had moved with his mother to America in 1914, his training in Frankfurt and early career in London had already cultivated in him some radical ideas about race and its relationship to musical worth. But these ideas were escalated after encountering the writings of the American Nordicists, including Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. Grainger’s version of Nordicism held that the purest of race were to be found in Scandinavia (especially Sweden, where his wife Ella, née Ström, was from) as well as the more “unadulterated” parts of northern Europe and Britain, where blond hair and blue eyes were the norm. These views extended to music as well, though they shifted over time, particularly as Grainger struggled to reconcile them with his fascination with the music of non-Nordics, including that of Jewish composers as well as the “Mongolians” (his umbrella term for cultures of East and Southeast Asia). That he held these views, and continued to hold them through the 1930s and 1940s, despite their strong alignment with the violent ideologies of Nazi Germany, complicates his legacy as one of the foremost composers of wind band music, and makes the decision to perform his music much less straightforward.

Grainger’s beliefs are reflected in his musical work as well, in his marked preference for using “blue-eyed English” expressive terminology in his music as opposed to Italian, as well as in his extensive work collecting and setting folk songs. In these settings Grainger often attempted in various ways to capture the metric flexibility and free ornamentation of the folk singers he heard and admired. “Green Bushes” was a very well-known song in England in the early twentieth century, often sung to accompany dancing. In this setting, originally for full orchestra, Grainger attempts to capture the “unbroken keeping-on-ness of the dance-urge” by presenting the melody, largely unchanged and uninterrupted, over thirty times, moving it across the different instruments of the ensemble and surrounding it with various countermelodies, textures, and characters.

Lichtweg

The inspiration for this piece was a public art installation by Keith Sonnier along a moving walkway at the Munich Airport. Constructed in 1993, the installation, titled Lightway in English, consists of a series of brightly-coloured neon lights, and is intended to help reduce stress levels in air travel passengers. “Just as the panes of glass, mirrors, and aluminum sheets refract and scatter the colourful neon light,” writes composer Jennifer Jolley, “[the work’s] ostinato is diffused amongst the different colours in the ensemble.” 

Symphony No. 3, “Quebec Mosaic”

Robert Buckley’s third symphony was commissioned and premiered by La Musique du Royal 22e Régiment in Quebec City, to celebrate their 100^th anniversary. The band was established in July 1922, and its founding music director, Charles O’Neill—one of the pillars of Canadian wind band history—was also a founding director and later president of the American Bandmasters Association. Buckley’s symphony is a rich tapestry of Quebecois folk tunes, woven together using his distinct rhythmic and harmonic vocabulary. The four movements portray the seasons as one might experience them in “La Belle Province”. (Buckley himself lived many years in Montreal before ultimately returning to Vancouver, where he spent his youth.) After a flashy opening movement depicting Quebec’s vibrant fall colours, the second movement settles into a wintry stillness under a thick blanket of snow. The third movement begins with a thaw before the music bursts forth with the teeming of new life in the springtime. Finally, in the symphony’s fourth movement, Buckley simulates the experience of going from stage to stage at a summer festival.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Pratik Gandhi (he/him) is an award-winning freelance conductor and researcher based in Toronto. He is a sessional lecturer at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music, where he directs wind bands and teaches conducting. He is also music director of the Rouge River Winds and the Milton Philharmonic Orchestra, and was the founding music director of Soup Can Theatre. In addition to regularly guest conducting and adjudicating bands and orchestras, Pratik is active in several organizations that support music educators, most notably the Ontario Band Association. Since 2017, he has also served as Vice-Chair of the Concert Band Division of MusicFest Canada. Pratik is currently a doctoral student at York University, where his research, supported in part by an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, investigates issues of equity and representation among wind band composers in Canada. Pratik received a B.Mus. in music education and an M.Mus. in conducting from the University of Western Ontario, where he studied conducting with Colleen Richardson, Jerome Summers, and James McKay, and percussion with Jill Ball.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CONCERT OFFICE
Eric Chow, supervisor; Cory Bertrand, front of house coordinator; Tam Nguyen, marketing & communications officer

PERFORMANCE COLLECTION
Karen Wiseman, librarian; Nicole Magirias, student library assistant

PERFORMANCE OFFICE
Michelle Kitsis, administrator; Amanda Eyer Haberman, performance assistant; Ilinca Stafie, performance staff

YORK UNIVERSITY PERFORMANCE FACILITIES
Ian Albright, manager; Kimberly Guidolin, events administrator; Victor Wolters, coordinator, technical services; Angela Kegel, technical services assistant

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