SKU: CL.012-3701-01
Rob Grice's Portrait of an Old Country Town is a programmatic work depicting images of an early American community. The beauty of the countryside, the work involved in taming the great outdoors, and a small town festival celebration are all pictorial elements of the piece. Accessible to bands of modest experience, sounds much harder than it is. An exceptionally nice work!
About Gems of the Concert Band
A series of transcriptions and other works in varying styles, representative of the programming of the Great American Classic Concert Band era of a century ago, as exemplified by John Phillip Sousa, Edwin Franko Goldman, Karl L. King, and Leonard B. Smith
SKU: GI.G-8657
ISBN 9781622770649.
Edited and Photographed by Michael Stillwater Waldron Island Reflections offers images and words from Shining Night, the award-winning documentary film about the life and music of Morten Lauridsen. Morten Lauridsen, among the leading American composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, draws his inspiration from the serenity of nature. In his summer residence on remote Waldron Island in the San Juan Archipelago many of his greatest works are composed. For anyone who appreciates nature as inspiration for creativity, Waldron Island Reflections provides a glimpse into a unique Pacific Northwest haven where timeless words are given a musical voice through Lauridsen’s sublime artistry. About the music of Morten Lauridsen: In 2007 Morten Lauridsen received the National Medal of Arts, the highest artistic award in the United States, from the President in a White House ceremony “for his composition of radiant choral works combining musical beauty, power, and spiritual depth.” He is Distinguished Professor of Composition at the USC Thornton School of Music, Los Angeles. www.mortenlauridsen.net/ “For those of us who need great music to live and feel more fully, these works speak clearly to the soul and illuminate our greater hope.”– St. Louis Post-Dispatch “This is celestial and spine-tingling stuff. Contemporary choral music really doesn’t come any better than this.” – Daily Express Michael Stillwater is a filmmaker and music educator whose award-winning documentary, Shining Night: A Portrait of Composer Morten Lauridsen, was deemed “a heartening rarity” by Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal. www.shiningnightfilm.net.
SKU: CF.FAS92
ISBN 9781491142967. UPC: 680160900466. 9x12 inches. Key: G major.
This lovely original ballad for strings sounds like it was based on a traditional folk song. Carl Strommen has a way of writing memorable melodies and lush harmonies. Lonestar sounds like an American cowboy song, and will stretch the musicianship of your young students.The plaintive opening in Violin 1 (optional solo) then joined with Violin 2 (optional solo) at m. 9 suggests an early morning sunrise on the vast Western prairie. With each new section, the sun slowly emerges and rises in full glory at m. 41. The performance of Lonestar will be most effective when played broadly, with expression, observing all dynamics and tempo changes. To present this musical portrait more clearly, the conductor is encouraged to take advantage of the interpretive opportunities that Lonestar provides. For more information, please visit carlstrommen.com.
SKU: AP.49731
UPC: 038081568188. English.
One of George Gershwin's most recognizable works, transcribed and arranged for a cappella singer! This iconic American masterpiece creates a musical portrait of early twentieth-century New York City and fully encapsulates the spirit of the Jazz Age. Alan's well-conceived adaptation features some of the most recognizable themes performed entirely on singable syllables. Sure to thrill singers and bring audiences to their feet!
About Alfred Pop Choral Series
The Alfred Pop Series features outstanding arrangements of songs from the popular music genre. These publications provide exciting, contemporary, and educationally-sound arrangements for singers of all ages, from elementary through high school, to college and adult choirs.
SKU: GI.G-10563
ISBN 9781622775996.
Conductor, chorus director, airplane pilot, educator, activist, mentor, and advocate Margaret Hillis blazed a trail upon which many continue to tread. The first woman to regularly conduct a major symphony orchestra, she was the founder of the Chicago Symphony Chorus and served for thirty-seven years as its first director, winning nine Grammy Awards. She was also a flight instructor for the U.S. Navy during World War II, an influential member of the National Endowment for the Arts, and built a reputation for her meticulous score preparation and innovative methods of refining choruses into superb ensembles. She earned the respect of the world’s major conductors along with the admiration and affection of many musicians, colleagues, and music lovers. But as compelling as what Margaret Hillis achieved is how she deftly circumvented the constant barriers in fields where women were not welcome. Further complicating her career aspirations, Margaret Hillis was a lesbian woman in an era when such an identity would have certainly ended her career. In Margaret Hillis: Unsung Pioneer, author Cheryl Frazes Hill—a longtime colleague and associate—examines how Hillis was able to overcome the many challenges she faced, navigating a career in ways relatable not only to musicians but also to women in all professions. Margaret Hillis’s story is one of resilience, determination, and passion for music. Her journey is an inspiration, a portrait of what it takes to succeed at the highest level in any field. Dr. Cheryl Frazes Hill is the Conductor of the Milwaukee Symphony Chorus and the Associate Conductor of the Chicago Symphony Chorus (CSC). Beginning as a member of the CSC in 1976, Margaret Hillis appointed Frazes Hill to the CSC conducting staff in 1987. Frazes Hill has served as professor of music at Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts since 2002. A frequent guest conductor, Frazes Hill is a published writer for national education and choral journals on topics of her research in music education and choral conducting. She is married to Dr. Gary Hill, and they have two children, Carlyn and Mitchell. We are living in an age when strong women are accomplishing amazing things—and this is the story of a woman who succeeded in the male world of orchestral conducting and established the award-winning Chicago Symphony Chorus. Her life consisted of challenges continually met and conquered, and her relentless drive for excellence in her profession. Cheryl Frazes Hill gives us a carefully researched, balanced, and well-written account of her eventful life and achievements. —Alice Parker Renowned conductor, composer, and longtime friend of Margaret Hillis Cheryl Frazes Hill was in a unique position to observe the career of Margaret Hillis because she was close to her on a personal and professional level. What is particularly gratifying about this biography is that it is clearly the work of someone who admires Margaret Hillis’s accomplishments, but at the same time Frazes Hill has retained a balanced objectivity about her subject. I came away from reading this with a greatly increased knowledge about Margaret Hillis, along with a deep appreciation for what she accomplished as a true pioneer. —Henry Fogel Former President, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, League of American Orchestras Dean Emeritus, Chicago College of Performing Arts, Roosevelt University.
SKU: PR.11441690S
UPC: 680160626021. 9 x 12 inches.
Ran's third string quartet was written for the Pacifica Quartet, who are featuring it in numerous performances from May 2014 through February 2016, across the country and abroad. Their blog page dedicated to the work also features the composer's notes, for more indepth insight. ...impassioned solos emerge from ominous quiet, and high arpeggios in the violins quiver alongside the earthy cello. Ms. Ran skillfully deploys these extremes of color, volume and pitch, yet the overall somewhat chilly impression is one of poise. -- Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times.My third string quartet was composed at the invitation of the Pacifica Quartet, whose music-making I have come to know closely and admire hugely as resident artists at the University of Chicago. Already in our early conversations Pacifica proposed that this quartet might, in some manner, refer to the visual arts as a point of germination. Probing further, I found out that the quartet members had special interest in art created during the earlier part of the 20th century, perhaps between the two world wars. It was my good fortune to have met, a short while later, while in residence at the American Academy in Rome in the fall of 2011, art conservationist Albert Albano who steered me to the work of Felix Nussbaum (1904-1944), a German-Jewish painter who, like so many others, perished in the Holocaust at a young age, and who left some powerful, deeply moving art that spoke to the life that was unraveling around him. The title of my string quartet takes its inspiration from a major exhibit devoted to art by German artists of the period of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) titled “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s”, first shown at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2006-07. Nussbaum would have been a bit too young to be included in this exhibit. His most noteworthy art was created in the last very few years of his short life. The exhibit’s evocative title, however, suggested to me the idea of “Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory” as a way of framing a possible musical composition that would be an homage to his life and art, and to that of so many others like him during that era. Knowing that their days were numbered, yet intent on leaving a mark, a legacy, a memory, their art is triumph of the human spirit over annihilation. Parallel to my wish to compose a string quartet that, typically for this genre, would exist as “pure music”, independent of a narrative, was my desire to effect an awareness in my listener of matters which are, to me, of great human concern. To my mind there is no contradiction between the two goals. As in several other works composed since 1969, this is my way of saying ‘do not forget’, something that, I believe, can be done through music with special power and poignancy. The individual titles of the quartet’s four movements give an indication of some of the emotional strands this work explores. 1) “That which happened” (das was geschah) – is how the poet Paul Celan referred to the Shoah – the Holocaust. These simple words served for me, in the first movement, as a metaphor for the way in which an “ordinary” life, with its daily flow and its sense of sweet normalcy, was shockingly, inhumanely, inexplicably shattered. 2) “Menace” is a shorter movement, mimicking a Scherzo. It is also machine-like, incessant, with an occasional, recurring, waltz-like little tune – perhaps the chilling grimace we recognize from the executioner’s guillotine mask. Like the death machine it alludes to, it gathers momentum as it goes, and is unstoppable. 3) ”If I must perish - do not let my paintings die”; these words are by Felix Nussbaum who, knowing what was ahead, nonetheless continued painting till his death in Auschwitz in 1944. If the heart of the first movement is the shuddering interruption of life as we know it, the third movement tries to capture something of what I can only imagine to be the conflicting states of mind that would have made it possible, and essential, to continue to live and practice one’s art – bearing witness to the events. Creating must have been, for Nussbaum and for so many others, a way of maintaining sanity, both a struggle and a catharsis – an act of defiance and salvation all at the same time. 4) “Shards, Memory” is a direct reference to my quartet’s title. Only shards are left. And memory. The memory is of things large and small, of unspeakable tragedy, but also of the song and the dance, the smile, the hopes. All things human. As we remember, in the face of death’s silence, we restore dignity to those who are gone.—Shulamit Ran .
