Southwest Baptist University News Release
Contact: Sharina Smith, Office of Marketing & Communications
BOLIVAR, Mo. – Southwest Baptist University Music Department presents the Wind Symphony in concert on Thursday, April 28, at 7:30 p.m. Works by Grainger, Hanson, and Ticheli are featured by the 56 member ensemble. The Chamber Winds will open the concert with the Petite Symphonie, Op. 90 (1885) by Charles Gounod. The free public performance will be held at First Baptist Church, Bolivar, Mo.
“Gounod was best known for his opera Faust, but devotees of wind chamber music are grateful to him for his contribution to that repertory of his charming Petite Symphonie,” states Dr. Brian Hopwood, conductor and director of instrumental studies at SBU. The classically conceived four-movement work is written for nine players (the Classical wind octet plus flute) and was composed for the Chamber Music Society of Wind Instruments, Paul Taffanel, founder and flautist.
The Wind Symphony will follow with Howard Hanson’s first work for band, Chorale and Alleluia, which was premiered in 1954 by the U.S. Marine Band at the convention of the American Bandmasters Association at West Point. Children’s March: “Over the hills and far away” is composer Percy Grainger’s first composition originally composed and scored for wind band and one of his few compositions that does not exist in any full-length version suitable for performance by symphony orchestra. It is also one of his earliest band scores to call for the piano, not as a solo instrument, but as an ensemble member.
The concert will conclude with Frank Ticheli’s Blue Shades (1996), the result of a consortium commission of thirty high school and university bands. The music grew out of a previous work, Playing with Fire, for traditional jazz band and orchestra. Ticheli states that “after completing it (Playing with Fire) I knew that the traditional jazz influences dominated the work, leaving little room for my own musical voice to come through. I felt a strong need to compose another work, one that would combine my love of early jazz with my own musical style.”
For more information, please call Dr. Brian K. Hopwood, department of music, at 417-328-1647 or email him at bhopwood@sbuniv.edu.
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SBU’s Office of Marketing and Communications is available to news media 24 hours a day at (417) 399-7918.
