Program

1:30 - Fanfare - DMG

Having been trained in the tradition of military bands, from my formative high school years under James Montgomery, a retired Army musician, to nearly a decade as a Marine Corps musician, I am firmly entrenched that a program should begin with some version of a fanfare. This is a brief attempt at such a fanfare that takes the spirit of hunting/ceremonial aspects of the horn and its romantic, lyrical qualities (both of which are featured individually in the two unaccompanied selections on this evening’s program) and pairs them together to create a short introduction with craggy, minor thematics that drive forward from the outset, complementing, supporting, and competing with each other in turns.

WHEN YOU MEET SOMEONE
DEEP IN GRIEF

Slip off your needs
and set them by the door.

Enter barefoot
this darkened chapel

hollowed by loss
hallowed by sorrow

its gray stone walls
and floor.

You, congregation
of one

are here to listen
not to sing.

Kneel in the back pew.
Make no sound,

let the candles
speak.

Patricia McKernon Runkle

6:00 - Reflections for Horn Alone - Douglas Hill (1994)

Douglas Hill’s program notes for this piece read simply: “Reflections is meant as a rather theatrical soliloquy reflecting upon memories of (a) lost relationship(s).”

I feel I would do this piece an injustice if I elaborated on the music itself more than that, as it is such a personal, individual idea. Instead, I will just briefly elaborate on its inclusion in this particular program, and a small piece of what I hope to convey in its performance.

In the book On Grief and Grieving, authored by David Kessler and the iconic Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the five stages of grief are laid out as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Kessler maintains that the stages have been often misquoted and misunderstood over the decades since they were posited, and that they were never really meant to “tuck messy emotions into neat packages.” Rather, “they are responses to loss that many people have, but there is not a typical response to loss as there is no typical loss.” Kessler uses the stages as a framework of learning to live with loss, and navigating the often treacherous emotional landscape that grieving leaves in its wake. They are “not stops on some linear timeline,” and are not experienced in a particular sequence, or even necessarily at all.

Loss and grief are certainties in life. They are a commonality shared by each and every one of us. As no two people experience any one thing from the same perspective and in the same way, no two people can ever experience the same loss.

As I have explored Dr. Hill’s work, I have found myself reflecting on different passages at different times as different feelings. A section that began as a whisper of hope became a choked cry of despair. A brief musical idea that had started its life with me as a cry of anger at the heavens transformed into a brief moment of exuberant celebration of memory and the privilege of having had something so dear to lose in the first place.

In this performance, I do not presume to speak on behalf of Dr. Hill at all; I am using his work that has become dear to me over the past months as a mouthpiece for my own experience. It is my hope in this that the listener will find in it something that recalls, despite its somber tone, some hint of a laugh that lives only now in their mind, a smile that once brought them joy, and a gentle touch that once brought them comfort.

Douglas Hill was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1946. He is an American composer, author, and horn soloist. He served as professor of horn at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1974 to 2011, and studied with Philip Farkas, Paul Ingraham, and Jack Snider. His extensive list of performances as a horn soloist include the Rochester Philharmonic and the New York City Ballet, and several chamber ensembles. He has written extensively, publishing several books the International Horn Society calls “classics of horn pedagogy;” he has also been extensively published in The Horn Call. More information about Douglas Hill’s impressive career can be located in his IHS biography, to include a list of some of his works.

10:00 - Serenade voor hoorn en fagot - Arie van Hoek (1994; 2000)

The Serenade for horn and bassoon (bass clarinet) was begun in 1994 as a musical gift for van Hoek’s friends Piet Boekhoudt and Marjolein Koldenhof on the occasion of their marriage. The fourth, fifth, and sixth movements were written in 2000 celebrating the birth of their children. The score reads simply “These are just the notes…… that you can make music from.”

The suite consists of several movements indicative of a dancing feel, capitalizing on the conversationality between two voices alone together.

Movement 1, entitled Het begin (the beginning), begins by teasing a brief fanfare, before moving into the two voices sharing an easy stroll through the melodic ideas. The fanfare idea peeks through the journey in several places, before a dramatic growing in speed and volume in the bass clarinet line resolves to a sudden and uneasy silence. A short Largo section then takes the pervasive fanfare idea and turns it into a slow, reflective diversion, almost like humming a tune half remembered, and without any real obligation to the original melody other than as its initial source. The two voices fade away together into nothing, and then are back on the path they started on at the beginning of the movement, that happy stroll down sunlit paths.

Movement 2, Het waarom (the why), takes the themes from the first movement and turns them from a brisk walk down sunlit paths into a sweet serenade in the moonlight, with the two voices singing to each other in the lilting tone here reserved for lovers.

Movement 3, Het verkeren (Being around) takes the form of a Tango, and features the two voices dancing together in a spirited contrast to their previous serenade. The crisp, metric line of the bass clarinet provides the framework and style of the music, while the horn’s varied melody slides playfully atop it.

Aerie van Hoek is a physicist from the Netherlands whose career has centered on the technical aspects of electro-optic equipment. From 1970-1976, his work at the Optische Industrie “De Oude Delft” included research and development of advanced medical and military equipment. Following this, his focus was on research and education of time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy at Wageningen University until 2013. Van Hoek is a talented amateur hornist and composer, and a large number of his works can be found online for free use here.

6:00 - Monoceros (op. 51) - Wolfgang Plagge (1990)

The program notes for Monoceros read, “This is a piece for solo Horn about the legendary Unicorn, an animal everybody has heard about but nobody has ever seen. In the work it shows itself with fervour where you wouldn’t expect to find it, and as soon as you think you know where it is, it gallops out of sight.”

The origins of the unicorn can be traced back to the ancient Greek monokerōs (μονόκερως). This compound word is comprised of mono-, meaning “one,” and keras, or “horn.” This beast was described first in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder as having a horse’s body, a stag’s head (without the antlers), an elephant’s feet, and a wild boar’s tail. A single, black, meter-long horn was centered on the creature’s forehead, and it was impossible to capture alive.

Over time, this image was romanticized and merged with other cultural animals and myths to become the standard single-horned steed we know today. In the early 17th Century, Dutch cartographer Petrus Plancius included the constellation Monoceros on one of his globes; it was not among the 48 constellations notated by Claudius Ptolemy in the Almagest, in the formative ideas of the concept of a geocentric universe.

The unicorn in its modern form also plays an integral role in Celtic mythology, so much so that it is an immortalized symbol of the Scottish royal line, and the country’s national animal. The elusive, pure white beast in Celtic lore is said to have unsurpassed healing properties, be fiercely independent, and represents a virginal purity and persistence in the face of adversity.

This work (for one horn) captures a wild and elusive image of the one-horned* creature that is impossible to pin down. It leaps from a wild hunt to horn calls in the distance, is subsumed an instant by a mad pursuit through the brush before being stymied again, a mysterious and anticipatory “stalking” gives way to another, more frantic dash, and then the quarry slips softly away again, perhaps to be pursued another day, perhaps into legend and myth itself.

*I cannot overstate my delight with the single horn theme.

Wolfgang Antoine Marie Plagge is a Norwegian composer and pianist born in 1960. He has performed since he was 8 years of age, and has been awarded the Hungarian Order The International Order of Knights by St. Stefan, Hungary’s highest civilian award. Plagge’s works have begun to take their place in the litany of “standard” repertoire, and many of his works have grown out of his research of the early Norwegian Middle Ages and his love of the music of ancient Northern Europe.

Samuel Hazo's
SILENCE SPOKEN HERE

What absence only can create

    needs absence to create it.

Split by deaths or distances,

    we all survive like exiles

    from the time at hand, living

    where love leads us for love's

    reasons.

                    We tell ourselves

    that life, if anywhere, is there.

Why isn't it?

                            What keeps us

    hostages to elsewhere?

                                                The dead

    possess us when they choose.

The far stay nearer than we know

    they are.

                    We taste the way

    they talk, remember everything

    they've yet to tell us, dream

    them home and young again

    from countries they will never leave.

With friends it's worse and better.

Together, we regret the times

    we were apart.

                                Apart, we're

    more together than we are

    together.

                        We say that losing

    those we love to living

    is the price of loving.

                                            We say

    such honest lies because

    we must- because we have

    no choices.

                            Face to face

    we say them, but our eyes

    have different voices.

2:30 - Untitled - DMG (2022)

What has come to be known as “The Global War on Terror” has dominated most of my life, as it has dominated the first two decades of the 21st Century. War is hell on every aspect of life, whether it’s acknowledged or not. The human cost of the last twenty years in Afghanistan has always been, to me, unfathomable. It is my fervent prayer that a cost like that becomes universally unfathomable and a long-past bygone of antiquity. But we’ve not yet arrived at that day.

This selection, still untitled, is based on a piece for wind ensemble that I began writing after the Hamid Kharzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, was attacked by a suicide bomber on 26 August 2021 as coalition forces worked to evacuate civilians during the United States’ withdrawel. 

Politics and policy aside, the service members struck in that attack were there serving a singular purpose - to help people. The oldest Marine killed in the attack was 31; five of the Marines were only 20. Thirteen American service members and at least 170 Afghan civilians were killed in the attack, bringing current US military involvement to a close at the cost of even more human life.

In the face of brute force, chaos, destruction, and death, there will always be those who give of themselves for the greater good and in the service of others. The Marines, Corpsman, and Soldier that paid the ultimate price that day were serving something so much greater than the United States - they were serving human beings in the uncertainty and chaos of war.

This trio does an even poorer job of paying homage to them than the original wind band work, but its inclusion on my first program seemed a necessity. As long as there is love in the hearts of strong men and women, there is hope in the world; we can build on that hope. A better world is within our grasp.

Staff Sgt. Darin T. Hoover, 31

Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo, 25

Sgt. Nicole Gee, 23

Cpl. Hunter Lopez, 22

Cpl. Daegan W. Page, 23

Cpl. Humberto A. Sanchez, 22

Lance Cpl. David L. Espinoza, 20

Lance Cpl. Jared M. Schmitz, 20

Lance Cpl. Rylee J. McCollum, 20

Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola, 20

Lance Cpl. Kareem M. Nikoui, 20

Navy Corpsman Maxton W. Soviak, 22

Army Staff Sgt. Ryan C. Knauss, 23

To all who pay the price of service to others with everything that they are. Fair winds, and following seas. Until Valhalla.

Immeasurable thanks to my family, for supporting this crazy dream and enabling me to pursue this world of fancies that is music; to my brother, for igniting in me the fire to want to build a better world with more love and kindness; mentors like Jim Montgomery for teaching me how to build a space in which you can let others find their voice, and to always be a safe space for your students to discover the world; Dr. Abagail Pack for being a fount of affirmation and enthusiasm, along with the technical and pedagogical proficiency of a deity; Christian for letting me drag him into anything, even against his better judgements; and Ye for so readily jumping in to support me trying to figure out how to say something without being encumbered by words. An eternal debt to all those who dedicate their life to the service of others. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and I am a product of every person that has passed through my life.

My sincerest gratitude to all of you who shared this moment with us, and doubly so to anyone who made it reading through this texted-narrative of what I hope is an equally-narrative musical performance. Even in the face of the worst, life is worthwhile when we share in it together.

Fair winds and following seas; Semper Fidelis.