Wind Symphony: Voices, Dreams & Light

PROGRAM NOTES  

DANCE OF THE JESTERS

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, Russia in 1840 and was the son of a well-to-do mining engineer. He studied law and at nineteen started working as a clerk with the Ministry of Justice. He resigned his post after four years to pursue his interest in music at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. In 1866, he went to Moscow, where he was appointed professor of harmony at the new Conservatory. “Dance of the Jesters” was originally composed as incidental music to an 1873 play by Alexander Ostrovsky entitled The Snow Maiden. “Dance of the Jesters’’ is a prime example of Tchaikovsky’s keen sense of musical nationalism. Adapted for a ballet rendition of The Snow Maiden, the dance forever captures the color and zest of Russian folk-dance music. The ballet about the Snow Maiden, the daughter of Father Frost, tells of her forbidden love with a human, Misgir, who is already betrothed to Coupava. The Snow Maiden follows him southward with plans to interrupt his wedding but tragically melts under the rays of the southern sun. This edition comes from an arrangement from the ballet The Snow Maidens that was originally transcribed for a Russian military band.

Note edited by Alexander Scott

WINTER DREAMS

Michael Daugherty is one of the most colorful and widely performed American composers on the concert music scene today. Hailed by critics as “a monster icon maker” whose music reveals a “maverick imagination, with a fearless structural sense and meticulous ear” (the London Times), he first came to international attention in the early 1990s with a series of witty and brilliantly scored compositions inspired by 20th-century pop culture phenomena and personalities. His idiom bears the stamps of classic modernism, with colliding tonalities and blocks of sound. At the same time, his melodies are infectious, and the rhythmic structures are driving and energetic.

Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Daugherty is the son of a dance-band drummer and the oldest of five brothers, all professional musicians. He studied composition at North Texas University, at the Manhattan School of Music, and at IRCAM in Paris with Pierre Boulez. He received his DMA in composition from Yale University in 1986, and he joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1991, where he continues to teach composition in the School of Music, Theater & Dance. Recordings of Michael Daugherty compositions have won multiple Grammy Awards, including three different awards in 2017. Michael Daugherty offers this remark about Winter Dreams for concert band, which originally appeared as the second movement of his 2014 orchestral work American Gothic: Winter Dreams is a contemporary musical reflection on the creative world of Iowa artist Grant Wood (1891-1942). Composed in memory of my father, Willis Daugherty (1929- 2011), the music also reflects on the years when I grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa as the oldest of five sons in the Daugherty family.

I first became aware of Grant Wood, who resided in Cedar Rapids, when I was a ten-year-old boy enrolled in art classes at the Public Library (now the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art). Prominently displayed in the room where we learned to draw and paint was Grant Wood’s original painting of his mother, entitled Woman with Plant (1928). I realized that Grant Wood was everywhere in Cedar Rapids: his paintings and lithographs at the Museum of Art; his farm mural at the old Montrose Hotel; his carved wooden Mourner’s Bench in the principal’s office at McKinley Junior High School; his stained-glass Memorial Window at the Veterans’ Memorial Building. I often rode my bicycle past the artist’s studio at 5 Turner Alley, where Grant Wood created his most famous painting, American Gothic (1930).

My father was a fan of Grant Wood’s regionalist art. Willis was a tour guide at the Grant Wood Studio and displayed reproductions of American Gothic and Stone City (1930) at this home. He was like a character in the background of a Grant Wood painting or lithograph from the 1930s-1940s. As a young boy, Willis milked the cows and fed the horses early every morning on the family farm before walking several miles down a desolate gravel road to a one-room country grade school located near Walker, Iowa. In 2012, I returned to Cedar Rapids to revisit the small towns of Eastern Iowa. I drove along the back roads and farms where my father grew up and where Grant Wood found inspiration for the people and places captured in his art. All the while, I was collecting musical ideas and mental images to create an emotional framework for my composition.

Winter Dreams is inspired by the bleak winter scenes of rural Iowa depicted in Grant Wood’s paintings and black and white lithographs of the 1930s-1940s, such as January and February. A haunting melody evokes a cold winter wind whistling “down in the valley.” The title of this movement also hearkens back to Jay Sigmund (1885-1937), an Iowa poet and close friend of Grant Wood. It was Sigmund, who was instrumental in persuading Wood to turn his attention from Europe back to Iowa for artistic inspiration. In a poem entitled “Grant Wood,” Sigmund describes how “time found a new son/Dreaming on the plain.”

Note Compiled by Nicholas Balla

PEACE DANCER

Peace Dancer is inspired by the First Nations text of the same name by Roy Henry Vickers (Squamish Nation). In the words of the author:

The story Peace Dancer is about a song and dance that is thousands of years old and originating from the time of the flood. Songs have been composed for different Chiefs up and down the Pacific Northwest coast. The Chief who is chosen to do this sacred dance is recognized as a healer in each community, and the songs and dances are a reminder of the great flood and how the people lost their way and their love for all things in creation. During the dance, there is a time when the dancer shakes the eagle down from their headdress to remind the people of the flood.

While this text affords many music-making opportunities, the composer chose to focus on one moment.

“We have really lost our way; we have not taught our children love and respect.”

This is achieved by dividing this short piece into "moments" of meditation, awakening, realization, and humility. It takes you, the audience, on an emotional journey, similar to realizing you have been in the wrong; maybe you have been unkind or acted in a way that does not become you. Once you realize the consequences of your actions, remorse and understanding that there is a need to move forward with grace and humility follows. Thus is the lesson of Peace Dancer.

Note from University of British Columbia Symphonic Wind Ensemble, 2017

ANGELS IN THE ARCHITECTURE 

Frank Ticheli is currently Professor of Composition at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music. He is the winner of the 2006 National Band Association’s William D. Revelli Memorial Band Composition Contest and has been awarded the Walter Beeler Memorial Prize, the Charles Ives Award, and the Goddard Lieberson Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ticheli received both his doctoral and master’s degrees in composition from the University of Michigan. The composer offers the following remarks about his composition: Angels in the Architecture unfolds as a dramatic conflict between the two extremes of human existence—one divine, the other evil. The Sydney Opera House inspired the work’s title, with its halo-shaped acoustical ornaments hanging directly above the performance stage. Angels in the Architecture 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 Aleichem”) 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).

Just as Charles Ives did more than a century ago, 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 Stephen Meyer

BIOGRAPHY  

Jeff has recently retired from thirty years of teaching elementary and high school music in York Region. He was the Head of the Music Department at Unionville High School (UHS) in Markham, Ontario for twenty years where he worked with students of all levels and disciplines. His work with the Arts Unionville program at UHS explored performance excellence and collaborative ventures with other arts disciplines and beyond while his award-winning ensembles consistently received the highest ratings at provincial and national festivals and competitions. Jeff has been awarded multiple Conducting Excellence Awards at the Ontario Band Association's (OBA) Provincial Band Festival and is the founding Director of the OBA's Ontario Provincial Honour Band. He is currently working with the Ontario Educational Leadership Centre (OELC), is a sessional lecturer with the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto and is a guest conductor, clinician and adjudicator across Ontario. 

Jeff received his Honours Bachelor of Music Education from Western University and his Bachelor of Education from Nipissing University. He also recently received the 2025 Arts Ambassador Award from the City of Markham.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Eric Chow, Concert Office - Supervisor 

Karen Wiseman, Performance Collection – Librarian 

Sara Ainsley Ko, Performance Collection – Student Librarian 

Eddy Aitken, Performance Office – Administrator 

Amanda Eyer Haberman, Performance Office – Assistant 

Ilinca Stafie – Performance Office - Staff 

Ticket Prices: $30 Adult, $20 Senior, $10 Student. 
University of Toronto students with a valid T-Card are admitted free at the door (space permitting, some exceptions apply). No ticket reservation necessary.