Duration: c. 3'
INSTRUMENTATION: 2222 4331 3Perc (no Timp) StringsDETAILS
COMMISSIONED and PREMIERED by the 1983 Spoleto Festival USA Youth Orchestra for its inaugural concerts, Claude White conductor.
AVAILABLE on rental from Theodore Presser Company.
AUDIO EXCERPT: Daniel Dorff conducting the Haddonfield Symphony
PROGRAM NOTES
In April 1983, I
received a phone call from Claude White, conductor of the band and
orchestra at University of Pennsylvania who had recently premiered my
SYMPHONY OF DELUSIONS with the Penn wind ensemble.
Claude had just arrived in
South Carolina to prepare for the Spoleto Festival USA, where he'd be
conducting the Spoleto Festival All-State Youth Orchestra in May, and he
invited me to compose a short fanfare-like overture. A wonderful
opportunity, except he needed the score and set of parts in 3 weeks.
I got right to work,
combining a fanfare motive for the trumpets with a jazzrock groove
accompaniment, developing the interplay between the squarish stop-time
fanfare, and the forward-moving syncopated strings working like a
"rhythm section."
The middle section of this
A-B-A form is a big brass chorale with a driving beat, another interplay
between the fanfare-like brass and the forward-driving other instruments.
Actually this theme was taken from a rock song I'd recently written in
conjunction with several 12-year-old poets as an enrichment project at
Philadelphia's Greenfield School. The Spoleto Festival's youth orchestra
enjoyed playing an orchestral setting of a song whose opening lyrics are
"Lunch at school, it ain't so great, it's something you could really
learn to hate."
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