Edward Gregson was born in Sunderland, County Durham, England, in 1945. He graduated from London’s Royal Academy of Music in 1967, having studied piano and composition (with Alan Bush), and then completed a B.Mus (Hons) degree at London University. He is a composer of international standing whose music has been performed, broadcast, and recorded worldwide. He has written orchestral, chamber, instrumental, and choral music, as well as making major contributions to the wind and brass repertoire. He has also written music for the theatre, film, and television.

His orchestral music has been performed by many orchestras and conductors worldwide, including all the BBC orchestras, the London Symphony, Royal Scottish National, Hallé, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, and Bournemouth Symphony orchestras; with conductors such as Martyn Brabbins, Edward Downes, Rumon Gamba, Alexander Gibson, Gunther Herbig, Kent Nagano, Gianandrea Noseda, Bramwell Tovey, and soloists including Ole Edvard Antonsen, Wissam Boustany, Olivier Charlier, Michael Collins, Nelson Goerner, Guy Johnston, Nobuya Sugawa, and Richard Watkins. His chamber music has been performed and recorded by groups including the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble, London Brass, the Navarra and Nightingale string quartets, and the Nash Ensemble, whilst his music for brass bands has been performed by all the major ensembles in the world.

This work was commissioned by the “Besses o’ th’ Barn Band with funds provided by the Arts Council of Great Britain. It was written for, and is dedicated to, John Fletcher, who gave the first performance in Middleton Civic Hall, near Manchester, on 24 April 1976, with Besses o’ th’ Barn Band conducted by the composer. The Tuba Concerto has established itself as one of the main works in the solo tuba repertoire. It has been performed and broadcast in over 40 countries all over the world. There are currently six commercial recordings of the concerto in its various versions. The concerto exists in three versions: with brass band (1976), orchestra (1978), and wind band (1984).

The Allegro Giocoso is light and breezy in style and is cast in rondo form. After a brief introduction, the tuba announces the main rondo theme, which is dance-like and a little jaunty. There are two episodes: the first a broad sweeping tune, the second a slowish waltz and a little jazz-like. After a virtuoso cadenza, reference is made to the very opening of the concerto before the work ends with a triumphal flourish.

Ellison Kern is a senior at Davenport Central High School and a student of Dr. Golden Lund and Professor John Manning. Ellison is a member of Davenport Central’s Wind Symphony, Marching Band, Jazz 1, and Orchestra. She has been selected to be a member of the Iowa All-State honor band for the past two years and was honored to be first chair this past year. Additionally, Ellison has been a member of the Quad City Youth Symphony for four years. After high school, she will be attending the University of Iowa to major in music education and tuba performance.

Personally, Ellison writes:

I would like to thank my family for supporting me and pushing me to be the best I can be. I would also like to thank Dr. Lund and Professor Manning for guiding and instructing me throughout my musical journey that led me to this point. Without my instructors and parents, I would not be where I am now. Thank you to the Quad City Wind Ensemble for this wonderful experience. 

Joseph Willcox Jenkins was born in Philadelphia and started composing at the same time he began taking piano lessons as a young boy. He studied formally with composer Vincent Persichetti at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music while simultaneously pursuing a pre-law degree at the nearby St. Joseph’s College. Further musical studies followed at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where Jenkins earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees and counted among his mentors more luminaries of American classical music, including Howard Hanson and Bernard Rogers. Jenkins went on to serve as chief arranger of the U.S. Army Chorus at Fort Myer, Virginia, and in 1961, he joined the faculty of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, where he taught until his retirement in 2000. This work was composed for the United States Army Field Band while the composer was on the arranging staff for the group. The instrumentation of this work is based on the players in the Field Band. 

The work was dedicated to the Army Field Band's conductor, Chester E. Whiting. It was written in a neomodal style, being flavored strongly with both Lydian and Mixolydian modes. Its musical architecture is a very free adaptation of sonata form. The musical material borders on the folk tune idiom, although there are no direct quotes from any folk tunes. The work calls for near-virtuoso playing by several sections, especially the French horns, and is a favorite of advanced high school and university bands. Although American Overture was Jenkins's first band piece, it remains his most successful work and, in his words, he is "hard-pressed to duplicate its success."

Joni Greene is an American composer and holds MM and BM degrees from Indiana University. Her instructors include Michael Gandolfi, Sven-David Sandstrom, Kevin Puts, Don Freund, David Dzubay, Claude Baker, and Rafael Hernandez. Ms. Greene is an up-and-coming young composer who has had her works performed by numerous ensembles and artists throughout the United States, France, and China. 

Recent awards include the 3rd International Frank Ticheli Competition, the ACC Band Directors Association Emerging Artist Grant, ASCAP/Lotte Lehmann "Damien Top Prize," 2nd International Frank Ticheli Competition, VocalEssence Essentially Choral Readings, and the Indiana University Contemporary Vocal Ensemble Composition Competition. Universities, high schools, middle schools, and consortia frequently commission Ms. Greene. She most recently received a commission from a consortium of twelve U.S. universities for her work for wind ensemble, The Moon Glistens.

About Glow, Joni Greene writes:

Glow was written in the summer of 2018 in only two weeks. For years, I had imagined this work as bursting clusters. And when I sat down to write it, the music poured out of me. The work features shining harmonies and melodic lines in small instrument pairings, like my other works. Using an ABA format, pulsing harmonic rhythms and falling sixteenths create a minimalistic background. The B section was my favorite part of this work. True to the format, it offered a moment to break away from the previous ideas. This section is quiet and dry, presenting the music in a falling motive in the woodwinds while creating glowing effects in the mallet percussion and muted trumpet. Once the original A material returns, the syncopated sixteenth note motive repeats several times. Thicker scoring, along with the pulsing sixteenths, culminate in a final burst to close out the piece.

Glow is dedicated to Maestro Paul Popiel and was premiered on September 20, 2018, by the University of Kansas Wind Ensemble.

Alfred Reed was an American composer, arranger, conductor, and educator. Born into a family of Austrian descent that cherished music, Alfred Reed began his musical studies at age ten on trumpet, and by high school age, he was performing professionally in the Catskills at resort hotels. He served as a musician and arranger during World War II in the 529th Army Air Force Band, for which he created more than 100 works, and following the war was a student of Vittorio Giannini at Juilliard.

He was staff composer and arranger for both the National Broadcasting Corporation and the American Broadcasting Corporation. In 1953, Mr. Reed became conductor of the Baylor Symphony Orchestra at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, at the same time completing his academic work; he received his B.M. in 1955 and his M.M. in 1956. His master’s thesis was the Rhapsody for Viola and Orchestra, which later won the Luria Prize. It received its first performance in 1959 and was subsequently published in 1966. During his two years at Baylor, he also became interested in the problems of educational music at all levels, especially in the development of repertoire materials for school bands, orchestras, and choruses. This led, in 1955, to his accepting the post of editor at Hansen Publishing in New York. In 1966, he left this post to join the faculty of the School of Music at the University of Miami, holding a joint appointment in the Theory-Composition and Music Education departments, and to develop the unique (at the time) Music Industry degree program at that institution, of which he became director.

With over 250 published works for concert band, wind ensemble, orchestra, chorus, and various smaller chamber music groups, many of which have been on the required performance lists in this country for the past 20 years, Mr. Reed was one of the nation’s most prolific and frequently performed composers.

Armenian Dances, Part I is half of Alfred Reed's four-movement suite for concert band or wind ensemble based on authentic Armenian folk songs from the collected works of Gomidas Vartabed (1869-1935), the founder of Armenian classical music.

Part I, containing the first movement of this suite (the remaining three movements constituting Part II), is an extended symphonic rhapsody built upon five different songs, freely treated and developed in terms of the modern, integrated concert band or wind ensemble. While the composer has kept his treatment of the melodies within the general limits imposed on the music by its very nature, he has not hesitated to expand the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic possibilities in keeping with the demands of a symphonic-instrumental, as opposed to an individual vocal or choral, approach to its performance. Nevertheless, it is hoped that the overall effect of the music will be found to remain true in spirit to the work if this brilliant composer-musicologist, who almost single-handedly preserved and gave to the world a treasure trove of beautiful folk music that to this day has not yet become as widely known in the Western world as it so richly deserves. Hopefully, this new instrumental setting will prove to be at least a small step in this direction.

Part I of the Armenian Dances was completed in the summer of 1972 and first performed by Dr. Harry Begian (to whom the work is dedicated) and the University of Illinois Symphonic Band on January 10, 1973, at the C.B.D.N.A. Convention in Urbana, Illinois.

Historical notes on Gomidas Vertabed (by Violet Vagramian, Professor of Music at Florida International University):

Gomidas Vartabed (1869-1935) is credited with collecting well over four thousand Armenian folk songs. Born Soghomon Soghomonian in Keotahya, a small town in Anatolia, Turkey, he would later be given the name Gomidas. His exceptional lyric voice led the prelate of the region to select the orphan Soghomon, at the age of eleven, to study at the Kevorkian Seminary in Etchmiadzin, Armenia. He was ordained an Apegha (monk) in 1895, at which time he assumed the name Gomidas, after the Armenian architect-musician Catholicos Gomidas. His desire for further musical training led him first to studies with Magar Yekmalian in Tiflis, Georgia, and from 1896-1899 to Berlin, where he studied at the Richard Schmidt Conservatory, as well as the Friedrich Wilhelm University, under eminent musicians of the time. In 1899, he graduated from both the Conservatory and the University, receiving his Ph.D. in musicology; his dissertation topic was Kurdish Music.

Gomidas was a founding member of the International Music Society (1899-1912), for which he read important papers on Armenian neumatic notation, the structure of Armenian sacred melodies, and folk melodies. At the age of forty-six, at the apex of his career, Gomidas was exiled, together with other Armenian intellectuals, by the Turks in April 1915, at which time the genocide of one and a half million Armenians took place. He was released within a short time, but the sufferings and atrocities which he had witnessed resulted in a complete mental and physical breakdown from which he never recovered. He died in Paris in 1935. His legacy to the Armenian people and the world's ethnic music is invaluable, and his major contribution lies in preserving so many centuries-old melodies from obscurity or oblivion.

Part I of the Armenian Dances is built upon five Armenian folk songs which were first notated, purified, researched, and later arranged by Gomidas for solo voice with piano accompaniment, or unaccompanied chorus. In order of their appearance in the score, they are: Tzirani Tzar (The Apricot Tree); Gakavi Yerk (Partridge's Song); Hoy, Nazan Eem (Hoy, My Nazan); Alagyaz and Gna, Gna (Go, Go).

The Apricot Tree consists of three organically connected songs, which were transcribed in 1904. Its declamatory beginning, rhythmic vitality, and ornamentation make this a highly expressive song.

The Partridge's Song is an original song by Gomidas; it was published in 1908 in Tiflis, Georgia. He originally arranged it for solo voice and children's choir, and later for solo voice with piano accompaniment. It has a simple, delicate melody which might, perhaps, be thought of as depicting the tiny steps of the partridge.

Hoy, Nazan Eem was published in 1908, in a choral version arranged by Gomidas. This lively, lyric love song depicts a young man singing the praises of his beloved Nazan (a girl's name). The song has dance rhythms and ornamentation, which make it an impressive, catchy tune.

Alagyaz (name of a mountain in Armenia) was first written by Gomidas for solo voice with piano accompaniment, and in a choral arrangement. It is a beloved Armenian folk song, and its long-breathed melody is as majestic as the mountain itself.

Go, Go is a humorous, light-textured tune. In performance, Gomidas coupled it with a contrasting, slower song, The Jug. Its repeated note pattern musically depicts the expression of laughter. This song is also in recitative style.

Camille Saint-Saëns was a composer chiefly remembered for his symphonic poems — the first of that genre to be written by a Frenchman — and for his opera Samson et Dalila. Saint-Saëns was notable for his pioneering efforts on behalf of French music, and he was a gifted pianist and organist as well as a writer of criticism, poetry, essays, and plays. 

A child prodigy on the piano, Saint-Saëns gave his first recital in 1846. He studied organ and composition at the Paris Conservatory, and in 1855 his Symphony No. 1 was performed. He became organist at the famed Church of the Madeleine in Paris in 1857, an association that lasted for 20 years. Liszt, whom he met about this time and with whom he formed an enduring friendship, described him as the finest organist in the world. From 1861 to 1865, he was professor of piano at the Niedermeyer School, where his pupils included Gabriel Fauré and André Messager.

In 1871, after the Franco-Prussian War, he helped found the National Society of Music, which promoted performances of the most significant French orchestral works of the succeeding generation. In the same year, he produced his first symphonic poem, Le Rouet d'Omphale (Omphale's Spinning Wheel), which, with Danse macabre, is the most frequently performed of his four such works. His opera Samson et Dalila, rejected in Paris because of the prejudice against portraying biblical characters on the stage, was given in German at Weimar in 1877, on the recommendation of Liszt. It was finally staged in Paris in 1890 at the Théâtre Eden and later became his most popular opera.

In 1878, Saint-Saëns lost both of his sons, and three years later, he separated from his wife. Over the following years, he undertook extensive tours throughout Europe, the United States, South America, the Middle East, and East Asia, performing his five piano concertos and other keyboard works and conducting his symphonic compositions. As a pianist, he was admired by Richard Wagner for his brilliant technique and was the subject of a study by Marcel Proust. From roughly 1880 until the end of his life, his immense production covered all fields of dramatic and instrumental music. His Symphony No. 3 (1886), dedicated to the memory of Liszt, made skilled use of the organ and two pianos. In the same year, he wrote Le Carnaval des animaux (The Carnival of Animals) for small orchestra, a humorous fantasy not performed during his lifetime that has since won considerable popularity as a work for young people's concerts. Among the best of his later works are the Piano Concerto No. 5 (1895) and the Cello Concerto No. 2 (1902).

The Pas Redouble is a "quickstep" concert march reminiscent of the galops by Offenbach and other 19th-century composers. Originally written for four-hand piano in 1887 and published in 1890, this transcription was made by Arthur Frackenpohl in 1972 and dedicated to Harry Phillips and the Crane Wind Ensemble at the State University at Potsdam, New York.

Florence Bea(trice) Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on 9 April 1887. She began learning music from her mother at an early age and gave her first piano performance at age four, reportedly publishing a composition (now lost) at age eleven. She graduated from high school at the age of sixteen and in that same year was accepted into the New England Conservatory (Boston).

More than any other instrument or ensemble, the piano was the primary outlet for Price’s inexhaustible musical imagination. It was the instrument on which she received her earliest musical education and, together with the organ, was the focal point of her education at the New England Conservatory (Boston), where she completed two diplomas at the age of nineteen in 1906. It was the centerpiece of her music teaching at the Cotton Plant Academy (a large co-educational boarding school near Arkadelphia, Arkansas, for Black Americans) from 1906 to 1910, and of her work as head of the Music Department of Atlanta University from 1910-1912. And she taught piano privately from 1912 until only months before her death in 1953 – not only to dozens of beginning, intermediate, and advanced students in Arkansas and her adopted hometown of Chicago, but also to her daughters. 

Small wonder, then, that compositions for piano make up some 216 of Price’s total surviving output of 458 works – about 47%, more than any other single category, followed next by songs and arrangements of spirituals (all of which also include piano).  Nor is it surprising that it was a composition for piano (the suite In the Land o’ Cotton that secured her recognition as a composer – a tie for second prize in the Holstein Competition sponsored by Opportunity Magazine in 1926 – or that it was piano compositions that fueled her rising renown in the early 1930s: a Cotton Dance won honorable mention in the Rodman Wanamaker Composition Competition for Composers of the Negro Race in 1931; her Piano Sonata and Fantasie nègre 4 in B-minor won prizes in the same competition in 1932; and her Piano Concerto in One Movement was performed three times in 1933-34: at the commencement exercises of Chicago Musical College and the national convention of the National Association of Negro Musicians (both of these with Price herself as soloist), and with the Woman’s Symphony Orchestra of Chicago at the Century of Progress World’s Fair in 1934 (this with Margaret Bonds as soloist). 

Florence Price’s style began to change in the late 1930s, more overtly embracing modernist idioms in addition to the Afro-Romantic ones that characterized her earlier works – but the piano remained her constant musical companion to the end, with lyrical gems such as the Three Roses and Your Hands in Mine and evocative masterworks such as Clouds, the Scenes in Tin Can Alley, and her final major suite, Snapshots, rounding out the compositional products of her lifelong love of the instrument.  She was preparing to leave to receive an award in France when she was hospitalized in May of 1953. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage on  June 3, 1953, leaving behind a handful of published works and hundreds of unpublished ones that are only now beginning to become known.

Composed two years before her death, Price’s Adoration is originally for organ but has been transcribed for various ensembles since. As the title suggests, the brief 3-minute work channels a sacred devotion common with liturgical hymnody. The form is ternary, beginning with a long meditative melody accompanied by a bed of harmony. A responsorial section leads to a richer, slower section that rises and falls in melodic contour, reaching its expressive peak. The work ends returning to the opening melody, cadencing the musical prayer in Amen.

Percy Grainger was an Australian-born composer, pianist, and champion of the saxophone and the concert band, who worked under the stage name of Percy Aldridge Grainger. Grainger was an innovative musician who anticipated many forms of twentieth-century music well before they became established by other composers. As early as 1899, he was working with "beatless music", using metric successions (including such sequences as 2/4, 2½/4, 3/4, 2½/4).

In December 1929, Grainger developed a style of orchestration that he called "Elastic Scoring". He outlined this concept in an essay that he called, "To Conductors, and those forming, or in charge of, Amateur Orchestras, High School, College and Music School Orchestras and Chamber-Music Bodies".

In 1932, he became Dean of Music at New York University and underscored his reputation as an experimenter by putting jazz on the syllabus and inviting Duke Ellington as a guest lecturer. Twice he was offered honorary doctorates of music, but turned them down, explaining, "I feel that my music must be regarded as a product of non-education."

Themes from Green Bushes is subtitled “Passacaglia on an English Folksong.” Of this work, originally written between 1905 and 1906, Percy A. Grainger wrote:

Among countryside folksongs in England, Green Bushes was one of the best known of folksongs -- and well it deserved to be, with its raciness, its fresh grace, its clear-cut lines. Green Bushes strikes me as being a typical dance, a type of song come down to us from the time when sung melodies, rather than instrumental music, held countryside dancers together. It seems to breathe that lovely passion for the dance that swept like a fire over Europe in the Middle Ages -- seems brimful of all the youthful joy and tender romance that so naturally seek an outlet in dancing.

Arturo Márquez is a Mexican composer. He began his musical training in La Puente, California, in 1966, later studying piano and music theory at the Conservatory of Music of Mexico and composition at the Taller de Composición of the Institute of Fine Arts of Mexico with such composers as Joaquín Gutiérrez Heras, Hector Quintanar, and Federico Ibarra. He also studied in Paris privately with Jacques Castérède, and at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick, Stephen Mosko, Mel Powell, and James Newton.

In recent years, Marquez has written a series of danzones, works based on an elegant Cuban dance that migrated to Veracruz, Mexico. His Danzon No. 2 is among the most popular Latin American works to emerge since the 1950s, enhanced by its use by Gustavo Dudamel with the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra in their 2007 tour of the United States and Europe. In February 2006, Arturo Marquez received the Medalla de Oro de Bellas Artes (Gold Medal of Fine Arts), the highest honor given to artists by Mexico’s Bellas Artes. That evening the concert El Danzon según Márquez (The Danzón according to Márquez) was presented at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. The concert included six danzons, all contained on a forthcoming CD.

Arturo Marquez writes this about the piece: 

The idea of writing the Danzón No. 2 originated in 1993 during a trip to Malinalco with the painter Andrés Fonseca and the dancer Irene Martínez, both of whom are experts in salon dances with a special passion for the danzón, which they were able to transmit to me from the beginning, and also during later trips to Veracruz and visits to the Colonia Salon in Mexico City. From these experiences onward, I started to learn the danzón’s rhythms, its form, its melodic outline, and to listen to the old recordings by Acerina and his Danzonera Orchestra. I was fascinated and I started to understand that the apparent lightness of the danzón is only like a visiting card for a type of music full of sensuality and qualitative seriousness, a genre which old Mexican people continue to dance with a touch of nostalgia and a jubilant escape towards their emotional world; we can fortunately still see this in the embrace between music and dance that occurs in the state of Veracruz and the dance parlors of Mexico City.

The Danzón No. 2 is a tribute to the environment that nourishes the genre. It endeavors to get as close as possible to the dance, to its nostalgic melodies, to its wild rhythms, and although it violates its intimacy, its form, and its harmonic language, it is a very personal way of paying my respects and expressing my emotions towards truly popular music. Danzón No. 2 was written on a commission by the Department of Musical Activities at Mexico’s National Autonomous University and is dedicated to my daughter Lily.