Gustov Holst (1874-1934) was an Englishman who spent much of his creative life writing music based on English folk songs. Holst was a trombonist, thus his interest in wind bands, but he also wrote many pieces for orchestra (including his most famous The Planets), eight operas, and many choral works. Each of the movements in the Second Suite are based on English folk songs. The “March” has four distinct melodies. It opens with a Morris Dance tune, “Glorishears” a broad and lyrical folk song, which leads to a second Morris Dance tune, “Blue Eyed Stranger.” He then shifts to “Swansea Town,” featuring the euphonium, followed by “Claudy Banks,” an Irish folk song which has a lilting, swinging feeling derived from its compound duple meter. Holst composed the Second Suite in 1911, but he was so preoccupied (and later fatigued) by the details of supervising a performance by Morley College students of Purcell’s Fairy Queen (the first since the 17th century) that he forgot about the work until asked to compose another suite for military band in 1921. Featured today on solo euphonium is Aaron Hughes.

Eric Whitacre (b. 1970) is an American composer, conductor, and lecturer, most widely known for his choral works. Whitacre holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Nevada and a master’s degree from the Julliard School where he studied with John Corigliano and David Diamond. At the age of 23 he completed his first piece for wind orchestra, “Ghost Train,” and later the popular wind piece “Godzilla Eats Las Vegas.”

Commissioned by the Texas Music Educators Association for their 2005 All-State Band, “Lux Aurumque” is an adaptation of one of Whitacre’s most popular choral works. For his choral setting, Whitacre had the original poem by Edward Esch (b. 1970) translated into Latin. Here is Esch’s original poem:

            Light,

            warm and heavy as pure gold

            and the angels sing softly

            to the new-born baby.

When Eric Whitacre was interviewed about this piece of music he so eloquently spoke of this piece as a “breathing exercise” (just ask our clarinet section), and that is immediately noticeable from bar one as the music crescendos and diminuendos or “expands and contracts” like one’s breath in a state of meditation.

Fisher Tull (1934-1994) was an American composer, arranger, educator, administrator, and trumpeter. After earning three degrees from the University of North Texas, he went on to teach at Sam Houston State University where he served as chairman of the music department.

As a composer he received numerous commissions including those from the National Endowment for the Arts, Houston Symphony Orchestra, Houston Ballet, Houston Music Guild, International Trumpet Guild, the U.S. Army Band, and the U. S. Air Force Band. Throughout his career he composed over 80 works for orchestra, band, chorus, and various chamber ensembles.

Composed in 1971, “Sketches on a Tudor Psalm” is based on Thomas Tallis’ sixteenth-century setting of the Second Psalm. Originally published in a collection of vernacular psalm settings, Tallis’ work consisted of eight psalm settings and one ordinal for the psalter. Though Tallis’ setting is a paraphrase of the second Psalm, it maintains the psalmist’s message, which is to embrace God and be blessed, or defy Him and be damned. Despite the existence of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ well-known Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, a work based on the same source material, Fisher Tull was drawn to the famous Tallis melody. Using the preexisting uneven metrical structure, Tull deconstructed the original tenor melody (first stated in its original form by the alto saxophone) into six distinct segments before utilizing them in this set of variations, which concludes with a glorious return of the original psalm melody.

Claudio Grafulla (1812-1880) was born on a small island off the coast of Spain, emigrating to the United States in 1840 to become a musician in New York City. Horn was his primary instrument, but he also excelled at arranging and composing.

“Washington Grays” was composed for the 8^th Regiment, New York National Guard and is considered one of the finest American contributions to military band literature. The 8^th New York was created in May 1784 when a company of militia artillery was organized in New York City by Capt. Jacob Sebring. After marching in George Washington’s inaugural parade on April 30, 1789, and known for their gray uniforms, the company adopted the name “Washington Grays.”

There are elements of Italian and German marches in this march. The running sixteenth notes and responding bass voices create a wonderful counterpoint. Frederick Fennell wrote of this march, “masterfully simple, effectively contrasting, its incessant flow of musical ideas is overwhelmingly convincing. It is a march of great passion. A real indoor rouser from 1861.”

Robert Russell Bennett (1894-1981) is best known for his work as an arranger and orchestrator of Broadway shows such as Oklahoma!, Showboat, The Sound of Music, Camelot, and My Fair Lady and television and motion pictures, but he was a prolific composer in his own right, writing concerti, symphonies, art songs, chamber music, operas, incidental music for stage plays, and music for concert band. In 1948, after hearing the Goldman Band perform, he was inspired to write Suite of Old American Dances, which he originally titled “Electric Park” after an amusement park in Kansas City which he visited as a child.

Movement one, “Cakewalk,” is based on a dance first demonstrated at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. It was highly competitive and only the most agile and accomplished dancers would compete. The winners would receive a huge cake, and thereafter the dance was known as the “cakewalk.”

Movement two, “Schottische,” isn’t Scottish at all, as the name might suggest, but is a polka-like dance originating in Bohemia, the western half of the current Czech Republic. It is one of the oldest dance forms and shares a four-beat pattern with the polka, but on the fourth beat of each pattern a polka dancer will rest, while schottische dancers perform a hop.

Movement five, “Rag,” involves a syncopated style of music originating in the 1890s. The syncopation in the music was first referred to as “ragged time,” then the form itself began to be called “ragtime,” and finally, “rag” and was made popular by composers such as Scott Joplin and Joseph Lamb.

American composer and conductor H. Owen Reed (1910-2014), a professor at Michigan State University, spent five months in Mexico over the winter of 1948-49. After several weeks in Mexico City and Cuernavaca, with side trips to Taxco and Acapulco, he spent a couple of months in Chapala. This trip, funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, was the inspiration for his most famous composition, La Fiesta Mexicana: a Mexican Folk Song Symphony for Band. The work was premiered by the U.S. Marine Band in 1949. The first major-label commercial recording, released in 1954, “burst on the classical record scene and became an overnight sensation. Music lovers were dazzled by the color and inventiveness of the score.” (Philip Nones, 2013. “H. Owen Reed at 103:  The Dean of American Composers Celebrates a Birthday.” Blog post, 19 June 2013.)

According to the composer, while in Chapala, “the two-against-three rhythm of the two bells used throughout La Fiesta Mexicana was a standard cliché of the young musicians who seemed to have little respect for my early morning sleep.” The third movement, “Carnival,” makes use of a mariachi rendition of “El Son de la Negra.”  The score includes the following notes from Reed on “Carnival”:

Mexico is at its best on the days of the fiesta, a day on which passion governs the love, hate and joy of the Mestizo and the Indio. There is entertainment for both young and old-–the itinerant circus (first part of the movement), the market, the bull fight, the town band, and always the cantinas with their band of mariachis-–on the day of days: fiesta