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A Contented Winter's Day
Zion Lutheran Church
January 13, 2008 - 3:00 p.m.

Quintet for Winds, Opus 43                                                                 Carl Nielsen
Crystal Duffee, flute     Nicole Kottman, oboe
Emily Bressler, clarinet     Cheryl Neumann, bassoon
Kevin O'Keefe, French horn
Allegro ben Moderato
Menuett
      
String Quartet No. 8 in F major, K 168                         Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Sarah Cullen, violin     Jerry Henry, violin
Julie Marston, viola     Michael Wahlmann, cello
Allegro
Andante
Menuetto
Fuga

Compatriots                                                                                   Murray Houllif
Joshua Duffee, snare drum      Jack Martinez, tympani

Tres Fl'Amigos                                                                                    Clint Miller
Joshua Duffee, Jack Martinez, and Gregory Marston,
Snare Drum Trio

PROGRAM  NOTES

David Holsinger

In 1999, award-winning composer and conductor David R. Holsinger (b. 1945) joined the faculty of Lee University, Cleveland, Tennessee. He is the inaugural conductor of the Lee Wind Ensemble and teaches composition, orchestration, and conducting. For fifteen years prior to his position at Lee, Holsinger served as music minister, worship leader, and composer in residence to Shady Grove Church in Grand Prairie, Texas.

He holds degrees from Central Methodist College, Central Missouri State University, and the University of Kansas, Lawence. His primary composition studies were completed under the direction of Donald Bohlen and Charles Hoag. Among recent honors, Holsinger was awarded the Distinguished Music Alumni Award from Central Missouri State, and Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia's Orpheus Award. In 1995, the composer was honored by Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minnesota, with the conferral of a Doctor of Humane Letters Degree for lifetime achievement in composition, and the Gustavus Fine Arts Medallion, the Division's highest award, designed and sculpted by renowned artist, Paul Granlund. Holsinger, as the fourth composer honored with this medal, joins a distinguished roster which includes Gunther Schuller, Jan Bender, and Csaba Deak.

Dr. Holsinger’s compositions have won four national competitions, including two ABA Ostwald Awards. His works have also been finalists in the NBA and Sudler composition competitions.  In the summer of 1998, Holsinger was featured as the Heritage VI composer during the Texas Bandmasters Association convention in San Antonio. An elected member of the American Bandmasters Association, Holsinger has received recent honors, including the Distinguished Music Alumni Award from Central Missouri State University, CIDA’S 1999 Director of the Year Citation, Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia’s Orpheus Award, the 2003 Distinguished Alumni Award from Central Methodist College, and the 2003 Excellence in Scholarship Citation from Lee University.

In the past twelve years, Holsinger has served as Visiting Distinguished Composer in Residence at eleven American colleges or universities, including the Acuff Chair of Excellence in the Creative Arts at Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, Tennessee.   

In addition to his university duties, Holsinger spends much of his energies as a guest composer and conductor with All-State organizations, professional bands, and university ensembles throughout the United States. When not composing or conducting, he models HO scale trains.

Holsinger's music is noted for its "unrelenting tempos, ebullient rhythms, fluctuating accents over set ostinati, polylineal textures, vigorous asymmetrical melodies, and high emotional impact." Scrappy Bumptoe is no exception to his style, but rather an ideal display of these characteristics.

Written in 1982 for the Kansas Brass Quintet, Scrappy Bumptoe's Picture Cards & Ragtag Diary is the musical travelogue of a retired Scrappy and his wife Ethel as they jaunt about "Yewrupp," a trip they have saved every spare penny to take after years of blue-collar life and child-rearing. It is a whirlwind tour, full of joyful intensity broken only by a brief moment to pay homage to the fallen heroes of World War II. Each of the five short movements represents a new adventure for the Bumptoes - and for the audience as well.

Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) is considered Denmark's most outstanding composer with an international reputation. A student of Niels Gade at the Royal Conservatory in Copenhagen, Nielsen is known outside Denmark primarily through his six symphonies, his solo concertos, and the Wind Quintet scheduled on our concert. Although he composed in all the major genres, his operas, songs, incidental music, piano pieces, choral and other chamber works are seldom performed ouside his native country.

Nielsen began composing while at the Conservatory and garnered some brief success with his Suite for Strings, later published as his Opus one. But to survive, he was forced to play second tier second violin in the Chapel Royal orchestra. He served in that position for 16 years, never rising above second chair. It was during his tenure with the Chapel Royal that he gradually became known for his serious extended compositions, with his First Symphony gaining a degree of international note. As his stature grew in musical circles and as his reputation spread throughout Europe, he took on conducting - as well as composition - duties as a source of livlihood.

Carl Nielsen

The genesis of the Wind Quintet is an interesting anecdote of the role chance plays in the realization of a musical composition. Nielsen's initial impulse to compose the quintet came during a telephone conversation in the autumn of 1921 with his friend Christian Christiansen, a pianist who was at the moment rehearsing Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for Winds in E-flat major, K297b with the Copenhagen Wind Quintet. Christiansen was playing the orchestral part, but when he answered the phone, the soloists continued on with the rehearsal. Nielsen, taken with what he was hearing, asked to attend the practice, and once there, he became intrigued with Mozart's individual treatment of the unique characteristics of each instrument.

It is evident that Nielsen was not firmly set in his outline for the Quintet when he began composition of the piece in February 1922 while on a conducting sojourn in Göteborg, Sweden. In March, he visited Copenhagen to conduct Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique in which an oboist friend played the English horn solo off-stage. An idea struck Nielsen and he called his friend later that evening and asked him if it were feasible for an oboist to switch to the English horn during the performance of a piece. The oboist assured Nielsen that it was indeed possible. Thus, in the Quintet the oboist shifts to the English horn in the Praludium of the third movement then back to the oboe for the Tema con variazioni. The variations, incidentally, are on a hymn tune by Nielsen, Min Jesus, lad mit Hjerte faa.

The Quintet for Winds, Opus 43, was completed in April 1922, and premiered later that month in a private performance at the home of one of Nielsen's friends. The piece's first public performance took place on October 9, 1922, in Copenhagen with the Copenhagen Wind Quintet as the performers.

The Quintet is in three movements, of which our players will perform the first and second movements. Like most of his later works, the Quintet has no home key, with the final key being arrived at only after a great sturggle. One can expect to hear characteristics of the dominant styles of Nielsen's era - late Romanticism, Neoclassicism, and the Modern.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791) completed some 26 string quartets, the first in 1770, at the age of fourteen, and the last in June 1790, the year before his death, when he wrote the first three quartets of a proposed set of six for King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia.

Mozart wrote his first series of six string quartets during his third Italian trip from late October 1772 to early 1773. These early "Milanese" quartets conform themselves to the traditions of their Italian models - each quartet has three movements with the middle movements in an expressive minor key.

The first violin and the cello carry the main melodic and harmonic parts of the quartets with some of the most extraordinarily passionate writing of Mozart's youthful works found in the middle movements. The final movements are always either a rondo or a tempo di menuetto. Alfred Einstein considers that, with this set of quartets, Mozart’s “shift to chamber music was definitely made.”

Leopold, Wolfgang's father, had hoped that his son would be offered a position at the court of the governor of Milan, the Archduke Ferdinand, son of the Austrian Empress, but in this he was disappointed. The next opportunity to seek advancement came in the summer of 1773. Father and son travelled to Vienna, where they remained from mid-July until late September, and here Mozart wrote a further set of six string quartets, works that were in the four movement form familiar to the Viennese. Like the set of six that immediately preceded them, these "Viennese" quartets are in a related sequence of keys and were written in August, while he and his father continued to hope for some positive sign of court patronage.

The String Quartet in F major, K. 168, is the first of the set. The opening Allegro theme is followed by an imitated triadic figure, later used to open the central development. The movement is succeeded by an F minor Andante in which the instruments are muted, entering at first in contrapuntal imitation one of the other. There is a similar element of contrapuntal imitation between the instruments in the second part of the B flat major Trio, framed by a cheerful Minuet. The final Allegro is in fugal form, the instruments entering one after the other in descending order with the subject. Other contrapuntal devices are used before the end of the movement, in which all join, the upper three instruments in unison, supported by the cello an octave below.

Murray Houllif (b. 1948) is a native of Woodbourne, New York. He holds degrees from the State University of New York at Potsdam and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His teachers include Raymond Des Roches, Richard Fitz, James Petercsak, Sandy Feldstein, Dom famularo, and Bey Perry. After serving as coordinator of percussion at North Texas State University in Denton, Houllif has recently retired from 32 years as a band director and percussion specialist in the public schools of Smithtown, New York.

As a member of the percussion section of the Long Island Symphony under Seymour Lipkin and the Nassau Symphony directed by Andrew Schenk, he has performed with Dave Brubeck, Marian McPartland, Itzhak Perlman, Byron Janis, Stanley Drucker, Julius Baker, Lynn Harrell and Phil Smith. He co-founded, wrote for, and performed with the Ambira Mallet Quartet. Houllif currently performs with the Atlantic Wind Symphony, Theatre Three, and as a free-lance percussionist in the New York-Metro area. He endorses Pro-Mask sticks and Grover Pro-Percussion products.

With approximately 200 concert and pedagogic publications to his credit, he has written numerous articles for professional journals such as Percussive Notes, The Instumentalist, School Band and Orchestra Magazine, and the Music Educator's Journal.

Clint Miller taught public school music in Colorado for 22 years and holds degrees from Colorado State University and from Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is  a member of the Grand Junction Symphony French horn section and a member of the Gunnison Brass Band. His Tres Fl'Amigos was written in 1994 for his students.

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