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SoundStroke · The University of Oklahoma Percussion Ensemble
Richard C. Gipson, Conductor
Works by Dan Welcher · David Maslanka
Blake Wilkins · Michael Hennagin
The University of Oklahoma Percussion Ensemble
The OU Percussion Ensemble (SoundStroke), conducted by Richard C. Gipson, has enjoyed a long history of success both on the OU campus and throughout the country. This disc is Gipson's and the Ensemble's third commercially-released compact disc recording, along with Laser Woodcuts (1986) and Christmas Bells, Mallets, and Drums (1990).
The OU Percussion Ensemble Commissioning Series, established in 1977 by Dr. Gipson, regularly engages outstanding composers to write for the ensemble. More than 15 new works have been commissioned and premiered by the OU group, including the five works on this disc. New works are commissioned regularly.
The Ensemble has been honored with selection to perform at three international conferences of the Percussive Arts Society International Convention (PASIC) as well as numerous other prestigious conferences, conventions, and festivals. All members of the ensemble are students in the percussion program at the University of Oklahoma.
Professor of Percussion at the University of Oklahoma since 1976, Richard C. Gipson has developed a percussion program that is internationally recognized for leadership in percussion pedagogy, ensemble performance, publishing, and recording. Through the successes of the Percussion Ensemble and Gipson's students, OU has become synonymous with excellence in percussion performance and education. In addition to his teaching duties, Gipson also serves as Principal Timpanist with the Oklahoma City Philharmonic Orchestra. His numerous published original compositions for marimba and special arrangements for percussion ensemble are performed literally throughout the world. Dr. Gipson is assisted at OU by Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Lance Drege.
Crown of Thorns - David Maslanka
The title Crown of Thorns is an obvious reference to Christ's "Crown of Thorns," but the name first came to me as a possible title for a piece from seeing a plant called "Crown of Thorns" at the New York Botanical Gardens. This is a rambling, thorny, desert plant from the Middle East, with small, green leaves, and small, very simple and pretty red flowers. The rambling, interweaving, vine-like stems suggested music to me.
As I meditated on the words "crown of thorns," and on the plant, and the idea of a work for keyboard percussion ensemble, the following image arose:
The seven-starred halo is the crown of thorns transcended. It is the crown of highest spiritual power arrived at through the greatest depth of suffering. The imagery is Christian, but the experience transcends religion, and is universal. The music is at times sober and reflective, but is, for the most part, filled with the joy and energy of liberation.
Crown of Thorns was commissioned by the University of Oklahoma Percussion Ensemble, Richard C. Gipson, Conductor. It received its premiere performance November 14, 1991, by the Ensemble at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, Dr. Gipson conducting.
David Maslanka was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1943. He attended the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music and later studied at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria and Michigan State University. His compositions have been performed throughout the world and he has been honored by the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, ASCAP, the American Music Center, and the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music.
Maslanka's works for winds and percussion have become especially well-known. In addition to Crown of Thorns, his other percussion works include Variations On Lost Love, My Lady White, and Arcadia II: Concerto for Marimba and Percussion Ensemble. In addition he has written a wide variety of chamber, orchestral, and choral pieces. His works are published by Carl Fischer, Kjos Music Co., Marimba Productions, and the OU Percussion Press. He has taught on the faculties of SUNY-Geneseo, Sarah Lawrence College, and NYU, and now lives in Missoula, Montana.
The Phantom Dances - Michael Hennagin
Hast never come to thee an hour,
bursting all these bubbles,
these eager business aims-
books, politics, art, amours-
Hast never come to thee an hour,
(At work, at play, at home, on the street,
(a phantom- dancing, gliding, rising,
bursting all these bubbles,
incessant, structured, disciplined,
racked by the strife, the ceaseless ambition,
a secret moment when you embrace,
and dance with the phantom)
Words in (italics) are the composer's annotations
The Phantom Dances was commissioned by the University of Oklahoma Percussion Ensemble, Richard C. Gipson, Conductor. It received its premiere performance November 10, 1990, by the Ensemble at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Dr. Gipson conducting.
Born in 1936 in The Dalles, Oregon, Michael Hennagin composed in virtually every medium including music for film, television, and stage. His broad repertoire includes instrumental and vocal solos, various chamber ensembles, symphonic band, orchestra, and a large body of choral music for which he is widely recognized. He received numerous awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, MTNA, and ASCAP.
Hennagin's dedication to teaching was evidenced by his participation in the MENC Contemporary Music Project Composer In Residence Program, the MENC Comprehensive Music Project, and the Kansas Flint Hills Project/Cooperative College Composers Project. He joined the faculty of the University of Oklahoma in 1972 and retired in 1992 to devote full time to his active composing schedule. Michael Hennagin died suddenly in June, 1993.
Twilight Offering Music-Blake Wilkins
Twilight Offering Music is one of the most distinctive pieces in the growing body of works for large percussion ensemble. With a duration of 27 minutes it is by far one of the longest and most expansive compositions for the medium, and this alone secures its singularity. This work was written between June 1984 and December 1986 for the University of Oklahoma Percussion Ensemble and was awarded Second Prize in the 1988 Percussive Arts Society International Composition Competition. For its premiere, Wilkins provided the following program notes:
Twilight Offering Music is an impression for percussion ensemble, an evocation that traverses some two million years into our past. It recalls that monumental epoch when humankind first emerged from the depths of the evolutionary chain and looked upon the earth and sky with a mind that for the first time was able to wonder. This music is at once poignant and forceful; at times, contemplative, and at others, ritualistic; constantly bordering between undulating calm and volatile spontaneity. It does not attempt to draw from and expound upon any documented fragment of primitive music. Instead, Twilight Offering Music strives to recreate the awe, confusion and wonder that these primordial ancestors must have experienced as they stood below the night sky and looked to the celestial bodies above. Out of fear, or perhaps, simply out of desperation, they would soon have begun to regard them as conscious and superior entities and would have ultimately surrendered to them sacrifices of appeasement úan event that would serve as the very dawn of the religious thought to permeate the ideologies of the human race for the entirety of its existence.
Twilight Offering Music was commissioned by the University of Oklahoma Percussion Ensemble, Richard C. Gipson, Conductor. It received its premiere performance April 21, 1987, by the Ensemble at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, Dr. Gipson conducting.
At first glance, the eight years that separate Twilight Offering Music and Compendium seem to bear witness to a drastic change in aesthetic orientation for Blake Wilkins: on the surface, the differences between these two pieces are striking. Yet Compendium is not fundamentally that far removed from Twilight Offering Music. They seem more to occupy different points on a continuum. Compendium simply brings to the forefront and provides an enhanced focus on the primary issues that have informed the bulk of Wilkins' compositions to date: a fascination with coherent organic structures; a preoccupation with the interaction of disparate closed-ended processes; the cultivation of virtuosity in the context of ensemble playing; and the generation of unique and compelling sound worlds.
Written between June and September of 1994, Compendium is the result of a commission granted by the University of Oklahoma Percussion Ensemble. It began as a significantly different piece bearing the title 17 Essays on Parametric Transmogrification Presented Coetaneously and In a Single Movement. Wilkins quickly discovered, however, that the broad outline of abstract principles he intended the work to embody would have resulted in a composition that rivaled Twilight Offering Music in length. The composer's central strategy was to isolate the normally integrated parameters of music ú rhythm, melody, harmony, texture, timbre and so forth ú and submit them to various closed-ended transformational processes. The seventeen resulting processes, or "essays," would be of different lengths, starting and ending at different points in the music. Some would last for less than a minute, others would extend through the entirety of the piece. They would overlap and intersect, yet always remain self-contained.
This strategy is also the primary focus of Compendium, which even uses some of the music intended for original. Thus, Compendium is precisely that ú a summary of the principles developed in the 17 Essays, focusing mostly on those processes dealing with rhythmic and melodic transformations. But while derivative of the 17 Essays, Compendium is a substantially different work. "As for the fate of 17 Essays on Parametric Transmogrification," writes the composer, "I am loath not to complete it, lest I might disappoint those who have assured me the title is too good to waste...."
Compendium was commissioned by the University of Oklahoma Percussion Ensemble, Richard C. Gipson, Conductor. It received its premiere performance November 18, 1994, by the Ensemble at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention in Atlanta, Georgia, Dr. Gipson conducting.
Even those who are intimately involved with chamber music for percussion are only now becoming aware of composer Blake Wilkins. This should come as no surprise: given that he was born in 1965 he is, comparatively speaking, a youngster amongst American composers. This anonymity has been further ensured by the fact that, true to his generation, Wilkins has thus far revealed an ambivalence toward cultivating the conventional trappings of compositional "success." This indifference has allowed him to nurture a commitment to an artistic vision wholly lacking in compromise.
Wilkins has received various degrees in both composition and percussion performance from the University of Oklahoma and the University of Southern California. Amongst others, he has studied composition with Robert Moore, James Hopkins, and Michael Hennagin, and he has studied percussion with Richard Gipson. While it may be inevitable that an extensive background in percussion should result in works for percussion ensemble, his catalog reveals compositions of equal scope for a variety of media; his primary orientation has been toward chamber music for non-traditional combinations of instruments, though his output includes works for orchestra and wind ensemble.
Chameleon Music Dan Welcher
Chameleon Music, composed for ten percussionists by Dan Welcher, is based on a short story by Truman Capote, entitled "Music for Chameleons." Welcher writes:
"More a vignette about a person and a place than an actual story, the piece described a visit by Capote to Martinique, and the home of a woman there. She lives on the edge of the jungle, and had on her terrace a grand piano that had been played by a number of famous visitors. The music she played for Capote was Mozart, and the result of the little recital was the inspiration for my Piece. It seemed that the little lizards living nearby had become accustomed to her playing and had grown to be quite discerning in their taste. The composer they responded most to was Mozart whenever she would play a sonata of his, the chameleons came out in droves from the jungle. They would sneak tentatively forward at first, then (emboldened by Wolfgang?) come right up to lie
at her feet while she played. When she finished, she'd stamp her feet on the tiles, and the lizards would 'scatter, like the shower of sparks from an exploding star.'
"The music describes this scene, but more than that. It attempts to show in a rather abstract fashion how music Mozart's music, specifically can cast a spell over otherwise uncivilized beings. The piece has four subtitled sections: 'The Jungle at Night,' 'The Chameleon Circle,' 'The Spell,' and 'The Retreat.'
In the first section, marimbas provide a chordal curtain of sound, with four kinds of wind chimes adding a scent of the tropics. After the atmosphere of the place has been established, the second section proceeds immediately. 'The Chameleon Circle' presents the cast of characters, in the form of three different motives (played on xylophone, glockenspiel, and bass marimba respectively). These could be thought of as some of the chameleons waiting at the edge of the jungle but they carry within themselves the seeds of the music of their 'favorite composer.' In the ensuing passage, the tempo picks up and we hear these characters growing bolder. When the tempo slows again, we are in "The Spell." No fewer than four Mozart sonatas are quoted: K. 279, K. 281, K. 330, and K. 332. Elements of the melodic turns in these fragments seem somehow familiar, and in fact we've just heard them slightly disguised in 'The Chameleon Circle.' As the Mozart music overlaps and combines in ways in which Mozart never intended (but which, I think, he might have approved...) the night is filled with charmed animals, crickets, and of course, chameleons. At the height of their reverie, though, there is a stamping of feet a scattering of tiny legs and the sounds of the jungle at night return, with the barest echoes of Mozart still lingering in the breeze."
Chameleon Music was commissioned by the University of Oklahoma Percussion Ensemble, Richard C. Gipson, Conductor. It received its premiere performance November 8, 1988, by the Ensemble at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, Dr. Gipson conducting.
Born in Rochester, New York in 1948, composer-conductor Dan Welcher has been gradually creating a body of work unequaled by any American composer of his generation. With over sixty works to his credit, more than half of which are published, Welcher has written in virtually every medium, including opera, concerto, symphony, vocal literature, piano solos, and various kinds of chamber music.
Dan Welcher has won numerous awards and prizes from institutions such as the National Endowment for the Arts, The Reader's Digest/Lila Wallace foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the American Music Center, and ASCAP. His orchestral music has been performed by more than fifty orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony, the St. Louis Symphony, and the Dallas Symphony. His most recent large works include Bright Wings, commissioned by the Dallas Symphony in 1996, Zion for wind ensemble, premiered in Colorado in 1995, Symphony #2 ("Night Watchers"), premiered in Arizona in 1994, and a huge Piano Concerto ("Shiva's Drum") commissioned by pianist James Dick and premiered by that artist at the 1994 Round Top International Festival.
The works recorded on this compact disc represent the very finest in contemporary composition for the percussion ensemble. All of the works utilize a large array of instruments and are scored for between eight and twelve players. All were commissioned and premiered by the University of Oklahoma Percussion Ensemble.
Produced by Richard C. Gipson and James D. Wayne · Recorded by James D. Wayne, Silverdisc Productions, White Plains, NY. · Digital Mastering by Toby Mountain, Northeastern Digital Recording, Inc., Southborough, MA.
Jim Alme · Julia Hillbrick · Adam Brennan · Brian Johnson · Glen Buecker · Chris O'Donnell · Drake Billings · Joe Ragan · Doug Carson · Staci Stokes · Jeremy Green
Richard C. Gipson, conductor
Cover Art: Carol Beesley, Sunset on the Grand Canyon
The University of Oklahoma Percussion Ensemble
Richard C. Gipson, Conductor
The Phantom Dances (10:33)
Twilight Offering Music (27:16)
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