NEW WORK FOR WIND QUINTET
Marc Mellits, composer
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Commissioned to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing
The 2018-2019 season marks WindSync’s 10th anniversary, and for this milestone season, the ensemble is exploring repertoire that commemorates important historical and musical anniversaries. The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, to be celebrated in 2019, is of particular significance because we share our hometown of Houston with NASA. We were inspired by this anniversary to develop a full-length, space-themed concert program, anchored by a new piece from an American composer celebrating one of NASA’s greatest achievements.
Aligning with WindSync’s goals of educational and community outreach, the moon landing theme offers great potential for STEM-STEAM crossover and for partnerships with organizations such as the Lunar and Planetary Institute and the Johnson Space Center. While a premiere date is not yet set, the concert would foreseeably be paired with science outreach activities--a planetarium show, an astronaut meet-and-greet, or similar—that would be facilitated through our longstanding relationship with Young Audiences of Houston. The piece will be well suited to performance in a public space and memorized to ensure a close connection with the audience.
This will be our first time collaborating with Marc Mellits, but as longtime fans, we felt that he was the ideal composer for this project. Mellits shares our enthusiasm for geeky topics like outer space and low reeds. He has built a reputation for composing outstanding chamber music, having written for nearly every standard ensemble as well as many mixed-instrument ensembles. A wind quintet is notably absent from his list of works, even though Mellits’ singular writing for wind instruments is both fresh and idiomatic. A traditionally orchestrated wind quintet from this composer seems inevitable if not overdue, and WindSync intends to be the ensemble that premieres it.
Aligning with WindSync’s goals of educational and community outreach, the moon landing theme offers great potential for STEM-STEAM crossover and for partnerships with organizations such as the Lunar and Planetary Institute and the Johnson Space Center. While a premiere date is not yet set, the concert would foreseeably be paired with science outreach activities--a planetarium show, an astronaut meet-and-greet, or similar—that would be facilitated through our longstanding relationship with Young Audiences of Houston. The piece will be well suited to performance in a public space and memorized to ensure a close connection with the audience.
This will be our first time collaborating with Marc Mellits, but as longtime fans, we felt that he was the ideal composer for this project. Mellits shares our enthusiasm for geeky topics like outer space and low reeds. He has built a reputation for composing outstanding chamber music, having written for nearly every standard ensemble as well as many mixed-instrument ensembles. A wind quintet is notably absent from his list of works, even though Mellits’ singular writing for wind instruments is both fresh and idiomatic. A traditionally orchestrated wind quintet from this composer seems inevitable if not overdue, and WindSync intends to be the ensemble that premieres it.
ORIGIN STORIES
Ivan Trevino, composer and percussionist
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A new work for amplified wind quintet and percussion
As our 10th anniversary season approaches, we at WindSync are excited to share an upcoming collaboration with percussionist Ivan Trevino, scheduled for fall 2018 at the Miller Outdoor Theatre in Houston, Texas. Ivan will write a new work for amplified wind quintet and multi percussion, and he will join us for the premiere in a shared concert.
The theme for our 2018-2019 season, “Origin Stories,” holds deep and broad meaning for us as we reflect on 10 years as an ensemble embedded in the Houston community. Our programming will explore ideas of heritage, childhood, heroes, history, and storytelling. It is our hope that our audience, particularly within the cultural diversity of the Houston area, will be able to find a reflection of themselves, pieces of their own personal stories and dreams for the future. Relating to music in this way has become ever more important in the last few months as Hurricane Harvey has hit the reset button for so many families across our city.
With an interest in programming music by Texans, for Texans, we immediately put Ivan at the top of our collaborator wish list. Having grown up in South Texas, Ivan can relate to the love of Tex Mex food, fierce independence, and swampy heat that informs our audience. On his blog, Ivan has written about his childhood in Victoria, his mother’s life as a Mexican immigrant, and his influential teachers. We have been moved by his openness in sharing his musical origin stories, and we can’t wait to hear how he writes to this theme.
Ivan’s piece will be a multi-movement work, and each short movement will feature a different timbral mix of percussion plus winds—completely new sounds for the tradition of the wind quintet. Each instrument will be amplified, allowing us to take the piece to “untraditional” venues without worrying about acoustic challenges. The premiere concert will also feature Ivan as a soloist and WindSync performing original music by quintet members. The resulting project will be scalable for touring and will be the focus of a future WindSync recording.
The setting of the new work’s premiere is key to its origin story. Miller Outdoor Theatre, located in 445-acre Hermann Park near downtown Houston, offers an 8-month season of professional entertainment free of charge to the public. This makes it the largest “always free” program of its kind in the country and provides an ideal venue for assembling young WindSync fans who might see themselves in the origin stories of the musicians onstage. Through our continuing relationship with the Houston Youth Symphony (HYS), we have become friends and mentors to the Sistema-inspired Coda Music Program in Houston’s Near Northside neighborhood, and these students will receive a VIP field trip invitation to this concert. We will also invite students from the HYS chamber music program and beneficiaries of the Music & Instrument Fund for Harvey Victims to be featured in a pre-concert performance.
The theme for our 2018-2019 season, “Origin Stories,” holds deep and broad meaning for us as we reflect on 10 years as an ensemble embedded in the Houston community. Our programming will explore ideas of heritage, childhood, heroes, history, and storytelling. It is our hope that our audience, particularly within the cultural diversity of the Houston area, will be able to find a reflection of themselves, pieces of their own personal stories and dreams for the future. Relating to music in this way has become ever more important in the last few months as Hurricane Harvey has hit the reset button for so many families across our city.
With an interest in programming music by Texans, for Texans, we immediately put Ivan at the top of our collaborator wish list. Having grown up in South Texas, Ivan can relate to the love of Tex Mex food, fierce independence, and swampy heat that informs our audience. On his blog, Ivan has written about his childhood in Victoria, his mother’s life as a Mexican immigrant, and his influential teachers. We have been moved by his openness in sharing his musical origin stories, and we can’t wait to hear how he writes to this theme.
Ivan’s piece will be a multi-movement work, and each short movement will feature a different timbral mix of percussion plus winds—completely new sounds for the tradition of the wind quintet. Each instrument will be amplified, allowing us to take the piece to “untraditional” venues without worrying about acoustic challenges. The premiere concert will also feature Ivan as a soloist and WindSync performing original music by quintet members. The resulting project will be scalable for touring and will be the focus of a future WindSync recording.
The setting of the new work’s premiere is key to its origin story. Miller Outdoor Theatre, located in 445-acre Hermann Park near downtown Houston, offers an 8-month season of professional entertainment free of charge to the public. This makes it the largest “always free” program of its kind in the country and provides an ideal venue for assembling young WindSync fans who might see themselves in the origin stories of the musicians onstage. Through our continuing relationship with the Houston Youth Symphony (HYS), we have become friends and mentors to the Sistema-inspired Coda Music Program in Houston’s Near Northside neighborhood, and these students will receive a VIP field trip invitation to this concert. We will also invite students from the HYS chamber music program and beneficiaries of the Music & Instrument Fund for Harvey Victims to be featured in a pre-concert performance.
Listen to WindSync's world premiere of Paul Lansky's quintet The Long and Short of It as performed on Oct. 24, 2015 at the Library of Congress, alongside works by living American composers, Adam Schoenberg, David Maslanka and other classical masterpieces for wind quintet. Lansky studied with George Perle and Milton Babbitt and played horn briefly in the Dorian Quintet before joining the composition faculty at Princeton University. His new nine-movement work, commissioned by the Carolyn Royall Just Fund in the Library of Congress and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, was inspired by the third movement Adagio of Mozart’s Serenade for Winds K. 361.
This on-demand music is part of a partnership between Q2 Music and Concerts from the Library of Congress to share works that the Library of Congress either commissioned or presented as world or US premieres dating back to the 2009-2010 season.
