By Julia Pekala
May 14, 2024, was the Hackettstown Band Program’s Spring concert. The Wind Ensemble, Concert Band, Jazz Band, and Saxophone Quartet played a collective amount of fourteen pieces, including the World Premiere of a new piece composed by Grace Baugher. The theme of the concert focused on American composers and ideals, with work by Leonard Bernstein, Frank Ticheli, Travis Weller, and Jim Colonna. With countless hours of perfecting these pieces, learn more about the behind-the-scenes that worked to put Grace Baugher’s new piece “Vicious Cycles” onto the stage.
The process to commission a piece starts long before its performance, with Mr. Freeman contacting Grace Baugher around two years ago. Next, a committee of members from the Concert Band and Wind Ensemble started brainstorming ideas for this new piece; settling on the piece being inspired by the artwork “Can’t Help Myself”: a robot cleaning up an oil spill of its own making, rusting over time due to its work. This inspiration was chosen due to the many meanings this art piece could take: for some, it could symbolize a continuous cycle they are stuck in, or other issues they struggle with, such as mental health struggles, social struggles, and more. During an interview with the band members with Grace, she revealed that she had her own personal connection to the piece: she felt like she was stuck with the constant struggles that come with being an independent artist, but it was her own decision to become one.
Grace went through many years of schooling to get to where she is today. She studied Music Composition and French Horn at Kansas State University and earned a Masters in Music Composition at the University of Tennessee, as well as a Graduate Certificate in Music Theory Pedagogy. While working towards a Graduated Certificate in Music Education, Grace learned to play several instruments as a course requirement, which helped her learn the strengths and weaknesses of each instrument, improving her compositional abilities. During COVID-19, Grace was going back to school to become a teacher, but her track was changed when she was commissioned to write a piece for the Midwest Band Clinic. For the band world, the Midwest Band Clinic is considered to be like the Superbowl of Band Clinic: it’s a big deal. After Grace’s first commission was received well, she decided to become a composer full-time. She has written several famous band pieces, most notably “Remember the Remarkables,” a piece about the women’s suffrage movement. Grace has a very noticeable style, in her own words she “can’t write anything angry or virtuosic,” but her style was perfect for the band’s commission because of the more hopeful perspective on the topic.
Grace revealed that her composing process differs from piece to piece, but explained that she wrote “Vicious Cycles” by creating a main melody and picking apart aspects of this melody to create motifs to use throughout the rest of the piece. The repetition of this melody represents the repetitive tasks the machine completes. The piece begins slow, representing the machine starting up its tasks, then begins to speed up: the machine falling into a cycle, and then slows down again: the machine breaking down due to its own actions. Throughout the piece, there are moments of tension, with chords that hold notes that seem out of place, representing how the machine’s task is ultimately harming it. The song finishes on an unresolved chord, representing the unknown future of the machine.
The world premiere of the piece was performed by members of the Wind Ensemble, Concert Band, and several alumni since this piece was a long-term project which several grades were involved with. The piece was performed as the finale and showcased how years of practice and fundraising done by the music program have paid off. “Vicious Cycles” portrays how oftentimes people feel trapped in their everyday lives but reminds us how at the end of these cycles we have the opportunity to start anew.