The University of Texas Wind Ensemble will present the first concert of our 50th Anniversary Season continuation this Sunday, September 15th, at 4:00 PM CDT in Bates Recital Hall. We will continue to offer a batch of seats for students to attend Wind Ensemble concerts free of charge. All requests for student group comp tickets should be sent directly to the Butler School Box Office at tickets@mail.music.utexas.edu. The earlier you make a request, the more likely it is that we'll have seats still available!
The concert will open with Adam Schoenberg’s Cool Cat, composed in 2023 for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The composer writes, “Cool Cat is inspired by the extraordinary life of P-22. The mountain lion that captured the heart of Los Angeles and beyond. This playful and celebratory concert-opener, aka fanfare, is meant to get the party started. It is dedicated to my son, Leo, our very own cool cat.” Next the Wind Ensemble will perform Gustav Holst’s First Suite in Eb for Military Band. This cornerstone of the repertoire will be followed by a consortium premiere of Jessica Meyer’s Go Big or Go Home. Conducted by doctoral conducting assistant T j Anderson, this brief but thrilling composition closes the first half.
Following intermission, the second half will be devoted entirely to a performance of David Maslanka’s landmark composition, A Child’s Garden of Dreams. Maslanka wrote: A Child’s Garden of Dreams was commissioned by John and Marietta Paynter for the Northwestern University Symphonic Wind Ensemble. It was composed in the summer of 1981 and premiered by Northwestern in 1982. The following material is from Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung:
A very important case came to me from a man who was himself a psychiatrist. One day he brought me a handwritten booklet he had received as a Christmas present from his ten-year-old daughter. It contained a whole series of dreams she had had when she was eight. They made up the weirdest series of dreams I had ever seen, and I could well understand why her father was more than just puzzled by them. Though childlike, they were uncanny, and contained images whose origin was wholly incomprehensible to the father. In the unabridged German original, each dream begins with the words of the old fairy tale: “Once upon a time….” By these words the little dreamer suggests that she felt each dream were a sort of fairy tale, which she wants to tell her father as a Christmas present. The father tried to explain the dreams in terms of their context. But he could not do so because there appeared to be no personal associations with them….The little girl died of an infectious disease about a year after that Christmas….”The dreams were a preparation for death, expressed through short stories, like the tales told at primitive initiations. The little girl was approaching puberty and at the same time, the end of her life. Little or nothing in the symbolism of her dreams points to the beginning of a normal adult life…. When I first read her dreams, I had the uncanny feeling that they suggested impending disaster….These dreams open up a new and rather terrifying aspect of life and death. One would expect to find such images in an aging person who looks back upon life, rather than to be given them by a child…. Their atmosphere recalls the old Roman saying, “Life is a short dream,” rather than the joy and exuberance of its springtime…. Experience shows that the unknown approach of death casts an adumbratio (an anticipatory shadow) over the life and dreams of the victim. Even the altar in Christian churches represents, on the one hand, a tomb, and on the other, a place of resurrection – the transformation of death into eternal life.”
I have selected five of the twelve dreams as motifs for the movements of this composition:
There is a desert on the moon where the dreamer sinks so deeply into the ground that she reaches hell.
A drunken woman falls into the water and comes out renewed and sober.
A horde of small animals frightens the dreamer. The animals increase to a tremendous size, and one of them devours the little girl.
A drop of water is seen as it appears when looked at through a microscope. The girl sees that the drop is full of tree branches. This portrays the origin of the world.
An ascent into heaven where pagan dances are being celebrated; and a descent into hell where angels are doing good deeds.
We hope that you and your students can join us for what will be a terrific concert as we continue our 18-month-long celebration of this storied ensemble’s golden anniversary.
The entire program will be:
Sunday, September 15, 4:00 p.m.
Adam Schoenberg – Cool Cat
Gustav Holst – First Suite in Eb
Jessica Meyer – Go Big or Go Home
T.j. Anderson, guest conductor
David Maslanka – A Child’s Garden of Dreams
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