The symphonic or concert band is the true native voice of American classical music, much more so than a symphony orchestra. It was through concert bands that Americans of an earlier age were first acquainted with symphonic music, and doubtless there were plenty of people who never made it to an orchestra concert or opera house, and the way they know something like the overture to La Forza del Destino is through a band arrangement.
Millions of Americans, too, have their first experiences playing in instrumental ensembles as members of the school band rather than a school orchestra. It’s not for nothing that the instruments of jazz are the instruments of the concert band, but in addition to the groundbreaking music created by jazz artists, there also is a huge corpus of vital classical music for band written by American composers.
Ron Nelson, born in Joliet, Ill., in 1929, is the kind of composer that our country has reliably fostered for decades even if the general public at large may never have heard of him (Nelson taught for 37 years at Brown University before retiring in 1993). At the end of June, Boca Raton’s Klavier Music Productions released a disc featuring Nelson’s music, along with a 21-minute interview with the composer conducted in 2003.
The eight works heard here, played by the Keystone Wind Ensemble (based at Indiana University of Pennsylvania) under director Jack Stamp, reveal a composer with a fine ear for color and melody who knows how to write a powerful piece that will command a listener’s attention. Three of the works are designed to do just that above all: Fanfare for the Kennedy Center, Fanfare for a Celebration, and Fanfare for the New Milliennium.
Although each fanfare has a different character, especially the millennium fanfare with its overlapping double brass choirs, these three works have the right feeling of momentousness and sonic grandeur that you would expect for pieces written to accompany a great occasion. But there’s a nice quirkiness to them, too. The chattering dissonance pileup just before the end of the Kennedy Center fanfare, for instance, adds a nice bite to the otherwise solemn proceedings.
The disc’s major works include a one-movement mini-concerto for alto saxophone and winds called Danza Capriccio, written in 1985 for the soloist who plays it here, Keith Young. This is a high-spirited, vigorous work that offers plenty of opportunities for Young to scoot around all over his horn and to scamper up into the far reaches of the altissimo register. He’s clearly an excellent player, and he makes a good case for the work, though he doesn’t sound all that comfortable doing the super-high notes. (I chalk that up to the uncongeniality of the sound itself rather than an inability to make it work.)
The Danza is an exciting piece, with a tender, attractive slow-movement middle section that provides effective contrast. It’s fun to listen to and probably great fun for Young to play.
The other works show other aspects of Nelson’s style, such as the Mayflower Overture of 1958, which includes thunder sheets to describe a storm at sea as the Pilgrim ship heads to the New World. It’s the climax of the piece that’s most interesting, as high winds race up and down in scale passages while lower brasses intone the Old Hundredth. It’s heavily reminiscent of Scheherazade, but still impressive.
I also enjoyed Savannah River Holiday (1953), which has a good, bumptious energy, and Pastorale: Autumn Rune, written in 2006. This latter work essentially is one long , slowly building arc that begins in murmuring darkness and expands into a flowering of melodic warmth about halfway through the piece before fading away at the end.
The Keystone Winds, about 60 strong, generate a great deal of mighty sound on this record, and Klavier has engineered it with plenty of room for maximum impact. Even on my car’s sound system, I could really feel the full band kick in during the closing bars of the Kennedy Center fanfare.
The interview with Nelson that closes the record is interesting and useful; one of the more important things Nelson and Stamp, his interviewer, discuss is the point that wind band music is truly contemporary classical music in a way that orchestral music is not. Orchestras tend to program many of the same things season after season, but fresh wind band music is folded right into the mainstream and gets repeated performances.
That fact has allowed dozens of American composers to build respectable, busy careers in a curious parallel universe to the more well-known classical circuit, built around the major orchestra halls. This is also true of American choral music, which constantly hears new pieces that quickly join the repertory.
Generally, the American composers who specialize in band and choral music tend to draw from the same basic tonal well of conservative 20th-century harmonic practice enriched by the language of jazz and other popular music, and Ron Nelson, although not exclusively a band writer, is no exception. That may help account for the repertory success of his pieces and the works of other composers like him, but it’s high time that the classical world at large acknowledged the work of these writers more prominently than it has.
Although American composers have found entry into the European mainstream of classical music difficult, they have been busy creating a large body of music for non-orchestral ensembles that deserves much more of our attention.
1 Comment
September 24, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Greg,
Thanks for the review of the Ron Nelson disc. Do you have all of the discs in the series? We have Norman Dello Joio, H. Owen Reed, William Schuman, and Alfred Reed. We have just finished one on the music of Robert Washburn. All of these have interviews. Let me know if you don’t have any of these. I’d be happy to send them to you.
Jack Stamp