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The primary celebration this evening is that of the 60th anniversary of the IC Saxophone studio, featuring a world premiere concerto by Sally McCune performed by Eric Troiano. Overall, this concert explores how composers transform visual, emotional, and spiritual experiences into sound, tracing a path from external environments to inner renewal. James David’s Urban Light captures the kinetic energy of Los Angeles through layered rhythms, bold colors, and tightly constructed motives inspired by Morse code, mirroring the assemblage of streetlamps that gave the work its name. That sense of building meaning from fragments continues in Mountain Lake and Other Paintings…, which draws on surrealist imagery to move from darkness toward light, reflecting themes of broken communication, creative necessity, and eventual clarity through shifting harmonic tension and release. Old Wine in New Bottles by Gordon Jacob, performed by the Chamber Winds, draws on traditional English folk melodies. The work reimagines familiar material through a modern lens, pairing historical source with fresh orchestration and wit. In doing so, it introduces a central idea of the program: that meaning can be reshaped and renewed across time, with the past serving as a foundation for new expression. David Maslanka’s Symphony No. 4 brings these ideas to a profound spiritual level, shaped by meditation, psychology, and historical reflection. Incorporating hymn tunes and inspired by the life and legacy of Abraham Lincoln, the symphony confronts chaos, suffering, and opposing forces in order to affirm unity, rebirth, and joy. Together, the works suggest that out of complexity and urban, artistic, or human struggle can emerge connection, illumination, and hope.

Urban Light (2021) is a brilliant display of colors, forward momentum, and intertwining rhythmic layers that is inspired by the iconic Los Angeles landmark of the same name. Created by conceptual art pioneer Chris Burden in 2008, the original work is an assemblage of historic streetlamps that were transplanted from various cities in California and also Portland, Oregon. The tight spacing and repetitive forms interact with the famously dynamic LA sunlight transitioning to the exciting nighttime glow of the city.

Primary melodic and rhythmic motives are derived from Morse code for the word “California,” creating an asymmetrical and syncopated groove that continuously builds in energy. Parallel “barre” chords reveal a classic rock/metal influence that reaches its zenith with a heavy percussion backbeat. Polyrhythmic layers and prismatic colors move over, around, and under each other, leading towards a hopefully thrilling and intense finale.

This work was commissioned by the National Band Association for its 60th anniversary and is dedicated to my wife who introduced me to the West Coast’s beauty and spirit.

- Program note by composer

As a native of southern Georgia, Dr. James David began his musical training under his father, Joe A. David, III, a renowned high school band director and professor of music education in the region. This lineage can be heard in his music through the strong influence of jazz and other Southern traditional music mixed with contemporary idioms. Dr. David received degrees in music education and music composition from the University of Georgia and the Florida State University College of Music.
He studied composition with Guggenheim recipient Ladislav Kubik, Pulitzer recipient Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Lewis Nielson, and Clifton Callender, as well as jazz composition and arranging with Sammy Nestico.

Commissioned by a Consortium of Schools, Soloists and Ensembles, led by Ithaca College

Emerging in the aftermath of World War I, Surrealism sought to express the unconscious mind, producing works of art that blurred the lines between the rational and irrational. In the visual arts, common features included dreamlike imagery, juxtaposed unrelated objects or familiar subjects placed in absurd contexts. Other common features included contradictory perspectives, symbolism, metaphor, automatism and metamorphosis.

As prompts for each of the three movements, I selected three contrasting Surrealist paintings.

Movement I: Salvador Dalí's "Mountain Lake" (1938) depicts a dark scene. The objects in the painting - a telephone receiver with a cut cord perched on a crutch next to something that resembles a lake (but also looks like a dead fish) - was meant to evoke the fragility and eventual breakdown in communication leading to war.

How does this translate into music??
I was interested in what the scene conveys but also how we arrived at this scene. I chose to use Morse code, employing primary rhythmic motives derived from the first official message that Morse sent to the White House in 1844: "What hath God wrought?" In terms of melody, harmony and texture, nightmarish "screams" and distorted march and circus music along with a large battery of percussion heighten the intensity of the narrative. The dialogue breaks down. In the end, the observer is left bereft. The form is through-composed and an experiment in automatism.

Movement II: René Magrite created four paintings entitled "The Human Condition." Each challenges the viewer's perception of reality by displaying a canvas on an easel that supposedly depicts the landscape behind it. My favorite is the fourth (1935) which is from the perspective of a cave. There is a small fire burning, and the canvas depicts mountains in the distance, one with a remote castle nestled in a steep slope. For me, the mood is contemplative and expresses the desire and need to recreate what we see and experience - a yearning to connect with and understand 'what's out there', a yearning for meaning.

This painting translated musically for me into a kind of a love song. Patterns in the music that serve as ostinati eventually come to the fore. As the piece progresses, a 27-note pattern is shared amongst the instruments, creating individual lines that fit into a larger musical mosaic. The idea is that different experiences can be drawn from the same larger whole depending on one's interpretation. The overall structure is strophic.

Movement III: I was inspired as much by Mary Wykeham's remarkable life as I was by her work (much of which was lost or destroyed when she became a nun). I chose to focus on her "Detail from Dream" (1979), an energetic abstract painting featuring colorful, softened geometric shapes, lines and crepuscular rays that evoke refracted sunlight against desert mountains in spring - a surreal alpenglow. A politically and socially aware young woman from England, Wykeham gave up her inheritance to pursue her art.
In Paris, she found success as a painter and printmaker, studying with Fernand Léger and Henry Moore. She was also a nurse, helped evacuate Jews from Nazi danger in Germany, studied Taoism, became a nun, left the church, then started painting again. She continued to paint until she died in 1996 at age 87.

This movement is full of angular juxtapositions of meter and harmony with brightly colored voicings, changes of mood and technically challenging passages and tessitura for the soloist. The form is rondo. The pitch collection (scale) used for this and preceding movements is nonatonic (9 notes).

- Program notes by Sally Lamb McCune

Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, David Maslanka earned a bachelor of music education degree from Oberlin College and graduate degrees in composition from Michigan State University, where he studied with H. Owen Reed. He served on the faculties of the State University of New York at Geneseo, Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and City University of New York at Kingsborough. Maslanka has written for a wide variety of chamber, orchestral, and choral ensembles, but his works for winds and percussion have become especially well known.

By 1981, Maslanka was living in New York City and teaching music composition at Sarah Lawrence College and New York University. He was rapidly becoming interested in psychology, psychotherapy, and meditation, and was particularly captivated by the writings of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Maslanka began to incorporate self-hypnosis and lucid dreaming into his meditative exercises, which heavily influenced his musical thought. He began to notice specific symbols in his “mental landscape” that he translated into music. Today, Maslanka’s unique compositional technique is known for its emphasis on meditation, psychoanalysis, self-discovery, and the accession of one’s own subconscious energies. His search for spiritual and metaphysical discovery ultimately spurred him to leave New York City in 1990, and move to Missoula, Montana, where he lived and worked until his death.

Maslanka writes of Symphony No. 4:

The sources that give rise to a piece of music are many and deep. It is possible to describe the technical aspects of a work -- its construction principles, its orchestration -- but nearly impossible to write of its soul-nature except through hints and suggestions. 

The roots of Symphony No. 4 are many. The central driving force is the spontaneous rise of the impulse to shout for the joy of life. I feel it is the powerful voice of the Earth that comes to me from my adopted western Montana, and the high plains and mountains of central Idaho. My personal experience of the voice is one of being helpless and torn open by the power of the thing that wants to be expressed -- the welling-up shout that cannot be denied. I am set aquiver and am forced to shout and sing. The response in the voice of the Earth is the answering shout of thanksgiving, and the shout of praise.


Out of this, the hymn tune Old Hundred, several other hymn tunes (the Bach chorales Only Trust in God to Guide You and Christ Who Makes Us Holy), and original melodies which are hymn-like in nature, form the backbone of Symphony No. 4.

To explain the presence of these hymns, at least in part, and to hint at the life of the Symphony, I must say something about my long-time fascination with Abraham Lincoln. Carl Sandburg's monumental Abraham Lincoln offers a picture of Lincoln in death. Lincoln's close friend, David Locke, saw him in his coffin. According to Locke, his face had an expression of absolute content, of relief at having thrown off an unimaginable burden. The same expression had crossed Lincoln's face only a few times in life; when after a great calamity, he had come to a great victory. Sandburg goes on to describe a scene from Lincoln's journey to final rest at Springfield, Illinois. On April 28, 1865, the coffin lay on a mound of green moss and white flowers in the rotunda of the capitol building in Columbus, Ohio. Thousands of people passed by each hour to view the body. At four in the afternoon, in the red-gold of a prairie sunset, accompanied by the boom of minute guns and a brass band playing Old Hundred, the coffin was removed to the waiting funeral train.

For me, Lincoln's life and death are as critical today as they were more than a century ago. He remains a model for his age. Lincoln maintained in his person the tremendous struggle of opposites raging in the country in his time. He was inwardly open to the boiling chaos, out of which he forged the framework of a new unifying idea. It wore him down and killed him, as it wore and killed the hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the Civil War, as it has continued to wear and kill by the millions up to the present day. Confirmed in the world by Lincoln, for the unshakable idea of the unity of all the human race, and by extension the unity of all life, and by further extension, the unity of all life with all matter, with all energy and with the silent and seemingly empty and unfathomable mystery of our origins.

Out of chaos and the fierce joining of opposite comes new life and hope. From this impulse I used Old Hundred, known as the Doxology -- a hymn to God; Praise God from Whom all Blessings Flow; Gloria in excelsis Deo -- the mid-sixteenth century setting of Psalm 100. I have used Christian symbols because they are my cultural heritage, but I have tried to move through them to a depth of universal humanness, to an awareness that is not defined by religious label. My impulse through this music is to speak to the fundamental human issues of transformation and re-birth in this chaotic time.

FLUTE
Mad Andrus*
Emily Dupuis
Gianna Gassira
Stephen Kim
Sydney Tomishina

OBOE
Reid Canham
Natalie Gilbert
Brady Santin*

BASSOON
Thomas German
Griffin Harrell*
Rebecca Williams

CLARINET
Anthony Angelillo*
Kaitlin Barron
Phoebe Donaghy-Robinson
Grace Gonoud
Joseph Ha
Amanda Haussmann
Liam Kearney
Will Lesser
Fitz McAlpine
Leah Trezza

SAXOPHONE
James Baker
Lauren Bradbury
TJ Lanks*
Elora Kunz
Bryson Sauer

PIANO
Andrew Woodruff

ORGAN
Erik Kibelsbeck

HARP
Sunshine Quan

TRUMPET
Nathan Felch
Cal Fitanides*
Camilo Mamani
Ian Manchester
Thomas Papke
Jared Wallis
Lamar Williams

HORN
Lucas Ferguson
Sarah Griffin
Kate Martin*
Hope Massey
Simon Stainbrook

TROMBONE
Elvis Lazo
Meghan Liang
Miguel Lopez
Elias Orphanides*
Will Shanton

EUPHONIUM
Jamie DiSalvo*
Tyler Phoebus

TUBA
Nick Smith
Noah Smith*

PERCUSSION
Madelyn Krebs
Elloit Liberty
Jillian Mihalik
Rebecca Muller
Olivia Okin
Peter Stenberg

STRING BASS
Gabe Rogers

ELECTRIC GUITAR
Clover Rayne

* indicates section manager
Members of the Wind Ensemble are listed alphabetically to acknowledge each performer's unique contribution. Every individual is considered to be a principal player.

FLUTE
Tori Hollerbach
Gianna Gassira

SAXOPHONE
TJ Lanks
Rebecca Wielhouwer

CLARINET
Atnhony Angelillo
Fitz McAlpine

DOUBLE BASS
Nellie Cordi

BASSOON
Griffin Harrel
Nearah Sanon

TRUMPET
Lamar Williams
Anthony Reyes

HORN
Kate Martin
Madison Stolarski