Austin Symphonic Band
“These United States”
February 1, 2026
PROGRAM NOTES
These United States celebrates American music from the time of the American Revolution up to the present. American music incorporates numerous styles and influences, as reflected by today’s program.
American Overture for Band (1953)
Joseph Willcox Jenkins (1928-2014)
American Overture for Band is a true classic in the wind band repertoire. From the opening octave leap in the horns, it’s a high-energy ride that requires virtuoso playing from every section of the band. Jenkins wrote it in 1953 while serving as arranger for the US Army Field Band at Ft. George Meade in Maryland. It was his first work for band, written when he was 25, and remains his most widely performed composition. It is written “in a folk idiom, although there are no direct quotes from folk tunes.” It generally follows the sonata-allegro overture form that was common for single movement works for band at the time. American Overture for Band remains a popular and often programmed work by high school, college, community and service bands.
Joseph Willcox Jenkins was an American composer, arranger and professor of music. He was born in Pennsylvania and began piano lessons at age 6; he wrote a few early works while in high school. His early ambition was to become a lawyer, and he took pre-law classes while in college in Philadelphia. He also began composition and counterpoint lessons with Vincent Persichetti. Jenkins changed his degree path to music and studied composition with Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson while at Eastman (a side note: Jenkins was from Wawa, PA, and Hanson was from Wahoo, NE). He received his Master’s in Music from Eastman in 1951 and was immediately drafted into the Army, where he was assigned to the US Army Field Band. He became professor of music at Duquesne University in 1961 and taught there for nearly 40 years.
Concord (1987)
Clare Grundman (1913-1996)
Concord is a setting for symphonic band of three old New England melodies from the 1700’s. It includes “The White Cockade,” a drum and fife tune; “America,” by early American composer William Billings; and “Yankee Doodle,” a tune already popular before the Revolutionary War. Grundman mixes traditional and contemporary musical techniques in his arrangement, which was written for and premiered by the US Marine Band in 1987.
Clare Grundman was one of the most popular and prolific composer/arrangers of American band music in the 20th century. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and studied music at Ohio State University; he was briefly on the faculty there before WW2. He studied with Paul Hindemith, whom he credited for providing practical techniques for composition.
Many of Grundman’s over 100 works for band incorporate patriotic melodies and folk songs. He also co-authored the 1974 NY Times Crossword Puzzle Dictionary.
Elegy for a Young American
Ronald Lo Presti (1933-1985)
Elegy for a Young American is a testament to the vision and commitment of our 35th president, as well a deeply emotional meditation on his tragic passing. The work is often described as moving through the various stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Gentle homophonic choruses give way to discordant outbursts and massive climaxes as the composer struggles to make sense of Kennedy’s death. Finally the anguish settles into a peaceful resolution, suggesting that even in the face of tragedy there is some room for acceptance.
— notes by Kevin Simpson for the US Army Band concert program (Feb. 23, 2019).
Ronald Lo Presti was an American composer of works for band, orchestra and various small ensembles. He was born in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and later studied composition with Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson at the Eastman School in Rochester, New York. He was briefly on the faculty at Texas Tech in Lubbock, and later taught at Arizona State University in Tempe.
From Maine to Oregon (1913)
John Philip Sousa (1854-1932)
Sousa is best remembered for his numerous marches, but he also composed other works including operettas. One of his lesser known operettas was The American Maid (The Glass Blowers), which premiered on Broadway in 1913. There is an unnamed melody in the piece that is reprised several times. Sousa used this melody in composing the march From Maine to Oregon. The march never became as well known as his more famous works, but it’s certainly appropriate for today’s concert.
If there’s a top ten list for best American composers, John Philip Sousa should certainly be on it. He was enormously influential in popularizing an ‘American sound’ in a period in the 1800’s and early 1900’s, when European music was predominant. He was born in Washington, DC, of Portuguese ancestry. His musical training was as a violinist, but he also studied theory and composition. His father enlisted him in the US Marine Band in 1868 and he stayed for several years before leaving to pursue his own career. He returned to the Marine Band as its director from 1880 to 1892, and transformed the group into the premiere US service band. He left to form his own band and was active until his passing. The Sousa Band traveled over the US and the world, including 181 performances in Texas, sixteen in Austin, and one at the State Capitol in 1919.
Bright Shadow Fanfare (2022)
Nicole Piunno (1985- )
Bright Shadow Fanfare is a brief, exciting work by contemporary American composer Nicole Piunno. She says —
The intense contrast in Bright Shadow Fanfare refers to two possible meanings. It could mean bringing our darkness into the light in order to integrate it with our true self. It could also mean revealing our positive traits and gifts that we may not allow ourselves to show or give to others.
The work was premiered in 2022 by the Nevada All-State Band in Reno, NV.
Nicole Piunno is a young American composer who is gaining recognition. She grew up in Dublin, Ohio, and played trumpet in the high school band. She received a Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition and a Master of Music in Theory Pedagogy from Michigan State University. She studied with David Gillingham at Central Michigan University and with Ricardo Lorenz at Michigan State. Her music has been performed by the “President’s Own” US Marine Band.
Suite of Old American Dances (1949)
Robert Russell Bennett (1894-1981)
Suite of Old American Dances is a classic of the American wind band literature. The work is in five movements, and is reminiscent of the music Bennett heard in dance halls when he was growing up in Kansas City, MO. The work was dedicated to and premiered by the Goldman Band in Central Park, New York City, in 1949.
Bennett says that when he heard the Goldman Band, led by Edwin Franko Goldman at a 1948 Carnegie Hall concert, “… I suddenly thought of all the beautiful sounds an American concert band could make that it hadn’t yet made. That doesn’t mean that the unmade sounds passed in review in my mind at all, but the sounds they made were so new to me after all my years with orchestra, dance bands, and tiny “combos” that my pen was practically jumping out of my pocket begging me to give this great big instrument some more music to play.”
Interestingly, Bennett did not write a full score of the suite. He wrote a condensed “short” score (essentially a piano score), and transposed and copied out the parts individually when he had time to do so between writing orchestrations for Broadway shows and films. A full score to the piece was not created until 1999, nearly 20 years after his passing.
Robert Russell Bennett is considered the dean of American orchestrators; he virtually invented the sound of the Broadway musical. He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, to two professional musicians who taught him piano, violin and trumpet. Bennett moved to New York in 1919 and worked for T.B. Harms, a prominent music publisher. He soon began writing orchestrations for Broadway shows and worked with songwriters Jerome Kern, Richard Rogers and George Gershwin.
The shows for which he created original orchestrations set the standard for the American musical theater. Among these are: Show Boat (1927) by Jerome Kern, Girl Crazy (1930) and Of Thee I Sing (1931) by George and Ira Gershwin, Anything Goes (1934) by Cole Porter, Oklahoma (1943) by Rogers and Hammerstein, Annie Get Your Gun (1946) by Irving Berlin, and My Fair Lady (1956) by Lerner and Lowe. He wrote the orchestrations for all of the Rogers and Hammerstein shows in the 1940’s and ‘50’s, from Oklahoma to The Sound of Music. Bennett also collaborated with Rogers for the 1953 NBC special presentation of Victory at Sea. He scored several of the popular Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers films in the 1930’s, and provided orchestrations for many of the motion picture versions of the shows he had originally scored for Broadway. He won an Oscar for Best Scoring in 1956 for Oklahoma, and a special Tony award in 1957 for his contribution to orchestration. (See his bio on IMDb.)
The Yellow Rose of Texas
Arranged by Carmen Dragon, adapted for concert band by R. Mark Rogers
Mark Rogers had some interesting and entertaining recollections about the premiere of Carmen Dragon’s arrangement of The Yellow Rose of Texas. At that time he was a bassoonist and the librarian for the Lubbock Symphony. The following is part of a conversation with Mark about the premiere:
In the middle 1970’s, Carmen Dragon came to Lubbock to conduct the Lubbock Symphony on two occasions. On the second of these occasions … he was going to make an arrangement of The Yellow Rose that was to be premiered by the Lubbock Symphony on our concert. In those days … the schedule for the Lubbock Symphony … started with a Sunday night rehearsal. We took Monday off, we had a Tuesday night rehearsal, we took Wednesday off … we’re in Texas, so Wednesday night’s a church night. Then we had Thursday, Friday rehearsals … and the concert was Saturday. So, because of the shortness of time, they needed to hire somebody to copy parts. I had been doing that for [the Texas Tech] marching band … so I was contracted to do that.
I contacted Mr. Dragon and asked him when will I have the score to start working on this? And he said, come to my hotel first thing Monday morning, and I’ll have something for you. So about 10 o’clock Monday morning after the Sunday rehearsal, I showed up at his hotel room, and he had the first half of the score. And I said, ok, when will I have the second half of the score, and he said tomorrow morning, ten o’clock...I met him in the in the lobby of the hotel, maybe there was a reception room or something. I said is there a piano here? How are you working out this arrangement? And he looked at me like, you poor dumb kid, and he just tapped himself on the forehead, and he said, you know, it starts here, and it goes to the paper … he was a trombone player, apparently he had one of those minds where he could conceive, sketch out the arrangement in his head and go straight to paper, without sitting at a piano or anything else.
So I showed up Tuesday and picked up the rest of the score, and, of course, we didn’t have the parts ready for Tuesday night, but I was copying like mad, and we read through it Thursday night, and it was sensational. It was really terrific and we played on Saturday night and it was very well received.
Now as the week went by, a couple of things began to dawn on me. One of them was that the reason he didn’t start the arrangement until after the Sunday night rehearsal, was that he wanted to scout out the orchestra, and find out where the good players were, and where the bad players were. I came to realize the little Alberti bass thing that’s divided up between the two bassoons at the beginning of the piece … he wrote that for me and my teacher, Richard Meek. It didn’t dawn on me until much later … it was like, “Wow! How neat! He heard us in the Sunday rehearsal and said, these are the people who can play.”
Several years later, Rogers received permission from the Dragon family estate to make a concert band adaptation, which is the version performed today.
Program notes by Clifton Jones
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