We hope that you will be able to join us for the second concert of the 2025-26 season of The University of Texas Wind Ensemble. The concert will be held in Bates Recital Hall at 4:00 p.m. on Sunday, October 12. We would like to extend complimentary admission to you and your students. 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! I would like to request that accurate numbers be requested, please. At several concerts last year, schools requested large numbers of tickets but less than half of those were actually claimed. It would be helpful to receive an accurate number, or an email informing us that a smaller number will be required so that we can accommodate as many patrons as possible.
The concert will open with Dmitri Shostakovich’s October, conducted by Master’s conducting assistant Jimmy Santos-Rivera. Shostakovich often quoted his own music in newer works as an autobiographical signature of sorts, so it is not unusual that October opens with such a quote. However, that music is borrowed from the beginning of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, a work written shortly after Stalin’s death in part to celebrate the long-awaited relief from his tyranny. Following the Shostakovich, Butler School of Music Director of Operations mezzo-soprano Page Stephens will join the Wind Ensemble for a performance of Gustav Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer. This extremely effective transcription was made for the United States Marine Band by Howard Bowlin.
Following intermission, the program will conclude with David Maslanka’s remarkable, Symphony No. 8. Symphony No. 8 is in three distinct movements, bur the musical layout suggests a single large-scale panoramic vista. The composer wrote:
I began the composition process for this symphony with meditation and was shown scenes of widespread devastation. But this music is not about the surface of our world problems. It is a response to a much deeper vital creative flow which is forcefully at work, and which will carry us through our age of crisis. This music is a celebration of life. It is about new life, continuity from the past to the future, great hope, great faith, joy, ecstatic vision, and fierce determination.
The old is continually present in the new. The first movement touches the “Gloria” from my Mass: “Glory to God in the highest,” whatever that may mean to you: the power of the universe made manifest to us and through us.
The second movement is a large fantasia on the old Lutheran chorale melody Jesu meine Freude (Jesus My Joy). The old form of the organ chorale prelude underlies this movement – new language out of the old.
The third movement is a music of praise and gratitude for all that is. It can be traced to the very end of the favorite old hymn tune All Creatures of Our God and King – the part with the joyous descending major scale where all the bells ring out. I recently used this tune for a set of variations in a piece called Unending Stream of Life, a name which could also be a fitting subtitle for this symphony.
We hope that you and your students can join us for what will be a terrific concert which will be livestreamed: https://vimeo.com/event/5407240
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