Baylor Wind Ensemble in Concert Oct. 5

by Richard Veit

Baylor University's Wind Ensemble, conducted by Michael Haithcock, associate professor of conducting and director of bands, will present its first concert of the 1995-96 season at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 5, in Jones Concert Hall, located in the Glennis McCrary Music Building.
The concert, will also feature guest conductor Gerald Luckhardt, who serves as director of the Golden Wave Band.
The program will open with a set of contrapuntal pieces for wind instruments, loosely grouped under the title "Three English Polyphonies." Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Flourish for Wind Band" was written in 1939 as an overture to London's Music and the People Pageant. His "Toccata Marziale" of 1924 has been described as "one of the most significant pieces of music ever contributed to band literature - a contrapuntal masterpiece in which textures are juxtaposed in massed effects with large sections of reeds and brasses."
Between the Williams' works will come Percy Grainger's 1907 musical tribute to the Western Highlands of Scotland, his "Hill-Song Number 2."
Igor Stravinsky's "Octet for Wind Instruments," which dates from 1923, is unusually scored for four woodwind instruments (flute, clarinet, and two bassoons) and four brass instruments (pairs of trumpets and trombones). It is in three movements, played without pause.
The "Suite Française" of Darius Milhaud was composed near the end of World War II as a patriotic wind piece for high school band. It makes use of folk tunes from five of the French provinces: Normandy, Brittany, the Ile-de-France, Alsace-Lorraine and Provence.
Also to be played will be the Ramon Ricker transcription for wind band of "Mein junges Leben hat ein End" by the 16th-century Dutch organist/composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck and Morton Gould's familiar "American Salute" of 1943 (which makes use of the song "When Johnny Comes Marching Home.")
The concert is free and open to the public. For more information, call the Baylor University School of Music at 755-3991.