Old Home Days

Charles Ives, born in 1874 to a father who was a band leader during the US Civil War, was raised in a prominent Danbury CT family—and went on to become perhaps the first American composer of international renown, and a pioneer in experimental musical techniques, including polytonality, tone clusters, so called ‘chance’ music, and quarter tones.

All delivered in a package of Ives’s favorite musical influences, which included hymns, traditional folk music, town band melodies at holiday parades, fiddlers at Saturday night dances, patriotic songs, parlor ballads and the melodies of Stephen Foster.

To complete the fascinatingly contradictory portrait, Ives’s musical career was a kind of side hustle. He had a parallel and equally successful career running his own… insurance agency! where he pioneered insurance plans for wealthy clients that prefigured many aspects of modern-day estate planning.

Incidentally, there was another great American artist who also worked in the insurance biz: the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Wallace Stevens, born five years after Ives, and who also spent his entire 9-to-5 career at an insurance company in Hartford. CT.

Ives’s music went largely ignored during his lifetime, but in the years since his death in 1954, his reputation has soared, championed by luminaries like Elliot Carter, Aaron Copland, Bernard Herrmann, Gustav Mahler, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, John Cage, Frank Zappa and Phil Lesh, bassist for the Grateful Dead, who described Ives as one of his musical heroes. How’s that for irony: an insurance guy praised by one of the Dead.

We will be performing tonight Ives’s charming suite entitled Old Home Days, arranged for Band by Jonathan Elkus, which is both full of Ivesian nostalgia and also has little traces of those characteristic Ives touches: unexpected dissonances, out of kilter rhythms where you least expect them, snatches of familiar tunes heard fleetingly, as though from across a town green: listen especially for “Little Annie Rooney,” “Auld Lang Syne,” “The Girl I left Behind Me,” “London Bridge is Fallen Down!,” even a quotation from Handel’s oratorio “Saul” in the Slow March. And in the Opera House movement, notice how just as the listener gets ready to watch the show as the curtain goes up, Ives diverts the listeners attention to what’s happening OUTSIDE the theater: a village band marching by, and the ringing of church and schoolhouse bells.

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Program notes by John Rabinowitz

North Bridge Portrait

After graduating in 1976 from the Berklee College of Music with a degree in composition, Stephen Bulla went on to become the chief arranger for the President’s Own Marine Corps Band in Washington, DC, while also composing music for the celebrated group. When he left in 2010, composer John Williams described Bulla as “one of the most accomplished musicians of his generation.”

In addition to his tenure with the Marine Band, Bulla has composed for, and conducted, the National Capital Band of the Salvation Army, and has served as music director of the New England Brass Band and the Brass of the Potomac.

In 1999, the Concord Band commissioned Bulla to create a piece honoring the colonial heritage of New England. And Bulla responded with his evocative “North Bridge Portrait”, based on authentic musical themes of the American Revolutionary Period.

In his own words, “A slow and ominously quiet introductory section leads to a brisk sea-chantey-like tune, depicting the busy lifestyle of the Colonists. The music then slows, and an expressive setting of Willam Billings’ song ‘America’ is developed and incorporated in the musical tapestry as a tribute to the new England composer’s work. The music concludes with a dramatic recreation of the famous first shot that led the country to war (this time fired by the percussion section), along with a rousing setting of ‘Washington’s March,’ a popular song of that day.”

Contrasting colors and stylistic shifts tracing the historic events surrounding "the shot heard 'round the world," North Bridge Portrait is a memorable experience to play… and we trust, to hear.

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Program notes by John Rabinowitz

Three New England Caricatures

Another of our most treasured commission composers is James Curnow, born and raised in Michigan, now living in Kentucky, where he is composer-in-residence (emeritus) on the faculty of Asbury University in Wilmore.

Those of you who have attended our Holiday Pops concerts each year in December are undoubtedly familiar with one of those commissions, Overture to a Winter Festival, which we play joyfully every year without fail, a lyrical Curnow piece written as a retirement gift in 1994 for the Concord Band’s first music director, William Toland. 

And there have been other commissions as well, including 1987’s Five Concord Diversions and 1988’s beautiful Welsh Variants.

Tonight, in the spirit of our New England theme, we’re delighted to be performing Curnow’s evocative Three New England Caricatures, written in 2011 and dedicated to the New England Youth Wind Ensemble.

Written in three movements, “Jolly Old Roger,” “Polly Van,” and “Captain Kidd,” after the infamous 17th century pirate, the piece features many of Curnow’s characteristic flourishes—beautiful melodies, jaunty rhythms, challenging passage work, and, throughout, a myriad of percussion sounds coming from cake pans, frying pans and water bottles.

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Program notes by John Rabinowitz