flashback presented by the Georgia State University Symphonic Wind Ensemble

One of the most interesting works by Florent Schmitt is his Lied et Scherzo, Op. 54, which he composed in 1910. The piece was first conceived as a work for double wind quintet, with one of the French horns acting as soloist throughout. The work was dedicated to Schmitt’s fellow French composer Paul Dukas, who was famous for his own concertante work for French horn, the Villanelle (composed four years earlier in 1906).

Musicologist Pierre Barbier describes Lied et Scherzo as a “surprising diptych” that begins in a “dreamy, passionate” mood followed by a “fantastic, biting scherzo.” American music critic Steven Kruger goes even further, characterizing the music as follows:

“Florent Schmitt has a remarkable ability to suggest richly implicit drama. This seemingly perky piece for ten winds begins with a slow “pregnant moment” in danger of being destabilized by nervous happenings. It then brings to life a gentle French horn romance and its Petrushka-like disturbances — coincidently, Stravinsky’s ballet being composed at exactly the same time — as if painting a scene for us from the texture of daily life. It’s such a terrific piece, you forget it was written for a small group of players.”

- Program Note by Philip Nones

Gustav Holst was incredibly interested in Indian culture, going so far as to teach himself Sanskrit. Some evidence suggests that he tried to incorporate Indian rāgas into his works, and after investigating Holst’s resources and analyzing his Planets, I believe that Holst tried to reference rāgas that evoked similar characters to those of the planets in his suite. Holst’s access to the authentic performance of Indian music was limited, however, and like many composers -- especially as a British composer entrenched in modal composition during the English folk song revival of the early twentieth century -- he took what he understood of rāgas and filled in the gaps with Western theoretical knowledge, resulting in the treatment of what were once rāgas as scales or modes.

I decided to compose a suite that traces Holst’s footsteps but applies his musical experimentation to a new topic: Tarot. Like astrology, Tarot cards have been used for divination, and as each planet in modern astrology represents specific characteristics and personality traits, so too does each Tarot card. Some elements of the Hindustani thāts, Karnātak mēlakarta rāgas, and pitch sets Holst references in his Planets are referenced in Tarot using a similarly Western approach to portray Tarot card analogs.

In Tarot, the suit of cups corresponds with emotional energy and the element of water. A deeply empathic soul, the King of Cups tempers his emotions by balancing his heart with his head. The King leads diplomatically through compassion. The second movement, The King of Cups, references the pitches of mēlakarta rāga Dhavalāmbari from Neptune as a nod to a fellow intuitive and ruler of the sea, and additionally employs the pitches of the Bhairavī that are found in Venus to allude to the King’s kind and gentle countenance.

- Program Note by composer

A Child's Garden of Dreams was commissioned by John and Marietta Paynter for the Northwestern University Symphonic Wind Ensemble. It was composed in the summer of 1981 and premiered by Northwestern in 1982.

The following is from Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung:

“A very important case came to me from a man who was himself a psychiatrist. One day he brought me a handwritten booklet he had received as a Christmas present from his 10-year-old daughter. It contained a whole series of dreams she had had when she was 8. They made up the weirdest series of dreams I have ever seen, and I could well understand why her father was more than just puzzled by them. Though childlike, they were uncanny, and they contained images whose origin was wholly incomprehensible to the father...In the unabridged German original, each dream begins with the words of the old fairy tale: ‘Once upon a time.’ By these words the little dreamer suggests that she feels as if each dream were a sort of fairy tale, which she wants to tell her father as a Christmas present.

The father tried to explain the dreams in terms of their context. But he could not do so because there appeared to be no personal associations to them...The little girl died of an infectious disease about a year after that Christmas. The dreams were a preparation for death, expressed through short stories, like the tales told at primitive initiations.The little girl was approaching puberty, and at the same time, the end of her life. Little or nothing in the symbolism of her dreams points to the beginning of a normal adult life. When I first read her dreams, I had the uncanny feeling that they suggested impending disaster.

These dreams open up a new and rather terrifying aspect of life and death. One would expect to find such images in an aging person who looks back on life, rather than to be given them by a child. Their atmosphere recalls the old Roman saying, 'Life is a short dream,' rather than the joy and exuberance of its springtime. Experience shows that the unknown approach of death casts an ‘adumbratio’ (an anticipatory shadow) over the life and dreams of the victim. Even the altar in Christian churches represents, on one hand, a tomb and, on the other, a place of resurrection –- the transformation of death into eternal life.”

I selected five of the twelve dreams as motifs for the movements of this composition:

I. There is a desert on the moon where the dreamer sinks so deeply into the ground that she reaches hell.

II. A drunken woman falls into the water and comes out renewed and sober.

III. A horde of small animals frightens the dreamer. The animals increase to a tremendous size, and one of them devours the little girl.

IV. A drop of water is seen as it appears when looked at through a microscope. The girl sees that the drop is full of tree branches. This portrays the origin of the world.

V. An ascent into heaven, where pagan dances are being celebrated; and a descent into hell, where angels are doing good deeds.

- Program Note by composer