September 25, 2007

'Moods of Music' to open Purdue Bands concert season Sept. 30

The concert will be at 2:30 p.m. in the Long Center, 111 N. Sixth St., Lafayette. Admission is free.

Pastoral musical landscapes by British composer Percy Grainger will set the first mood with the Fall Concert Band under the direction of Andrew King. Grainger was a folk musicologist who roamed the British countryside in the early 1900s collecting and recording traditional tunes on wax cylinders, said Kathy Matter, Purdue Bands public relations director.

Grainger's works were inspired by the pieces he collected and often contained direct references to his collection, Matter said. The two pieces that will be performed Sept. 30 include "Ye Banks and Braes O' Bonnie Doon," which was inspired by a Robert Burns poem, and a dance tune titled "Shepherd's Hey."

The Fall Concert Band also will perform Gustav Holst's buoyant "First Suite in E Flat," a piece filled with musical counterpoint that's considered one of the hallmarks of concert band repertoire, Matter said.

The mood will change when the Purdue Symphonic Symphonic Band, under the direction of Jay Gephart, takes the stage. The two featured pieces – "Shadow Rituals" by Michael Markowski and "Apocalyptic Dreams" by David Gillingham – are very dark, Gephart said.

"'Apocalyptic Dreams' musically depicts the event up to and including the Apocalypse as chronicled in Revelations," he said.

Gephart said "Shadow Rituals" recently won the Frank Ticheli Concert Band Composers Contest for Markowski.

"It is totally contemporary and not classical sounding at all," he said. "Featuring a lot of percussion, the piece sounds more like an African tribal ritual. Its pace is frenetic at times."

In contrast, the Symphonic Band also will present John Philip Sousa's "With Pleasure," which is different than what audiences usually expect from the composer, Matter said. Edwin Goldman's "Chimes of Liberty" will introduce a traditional concert band march to the concert line up.

Steven Bryant's "Dusk" projects the calm, colorful moments that surround sunset, Gephart said.

"It's a musical description of the light disappearing and the beautiful colors that happen at sunset," he said. "All the pieces on this concert are very programmatic in that they're more like movie music. You can picture the events they describe, and you can picture them anyway you want to and interpret it anyway you want to. That's one of the great attributes of live performance."

Writer: Christy Jones, (765) 494-1089, christyjones@purdue.edu

Source: Kathy Matter, (765) 496-6785, kcmatter@purdue.edu

Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu

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