Welcher: Haleakala / Prairie Light / Clarinet Concerto
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Dan Welcher (b.1948) Born in Rochester, New York, in 1948, composer-conductor Dan Welcher has been gradually creating a body of compositions in almost every...
Dan Welcher (b.1948)
Born in Rochester, New York, in 1948, composer-conductor Dan Welcher has been gradually creating a body of
compositions in almost every imaginable genre including opera, concerto, symphony, vocal literature, solo piano,
and various kinds of chamber music. With over one hundred works to his credit, Welcher is one of the most-played
composers of his generation. Dan Welcher first trained as a pianist and bassoonist, earning degrees from the
Eastman School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music. He joined the Louisville Orchestra as its Principal
Bassoonist in 1972, and remained there until 1978, concurrently teaching composition and theory at the University
of Louisville. He joined the Artist Faculty of the Aspen Music Festival in the summer of 1976, teaching bassoon
and composition, and remained there for fourteen years. He accepted a position on the faculty at the University of
Texas in 1978, creating the New Music Ensemble there and serving as Assistant Conductor of the Austin
Symphony Orchestra from 1980 to 1990. It was in Texas that his career as a conductor began to flourish, and he
has led the premières of more than 150 new works. He now holds the Lee Hage Jamail Regents Professorship in
Composition at the School of Music at UT/Austin, teaching Composition and serving as Director of the New
Music Ensemble. In 1990 he was named Composer in Residence with the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra through
the Meet the Composer Orchestra Residencies Program. In addition to Haleakala: How Maui Snared the Sun, he
has written a 38-minute Symphony No. 1 for the Honolulu Symphony, which had its première in 1993. More recent
commissions have come from the Boston Pops, the Utah Symphony, the Handel and Haydn Society, and the
Rochester Philharmonic. A pair of one-act operas on Christmas themes, Della's Gift and Holy Night, had its
première in 2005. Dan Welcher has won numerous awards and prizes from institutions such as the Guggenheim
Foundation (a Fellowship in 1997), National Endowment for the Arts, The Reader's Digest/Lila Wallace
Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Bellagio Center, the American
Music Center, and ASCAP. His orchestral music has been performed by more than fifty orchestras, including the
Chicago Symphony, the St Louis Symphony, and the Atlanta Symphony. Welcher lives in Bastrop, Texas. His
music is published by Theodore Presser Company.
Haleakala: How Maui Snared the Sun (1991) Prairie Light: Three Texas Watercolors of
Georgia O' Keeffe (1985) Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra (1989)
The tone-poem Haleakala: How Maui Snared the Sun
was crafted as both a children's story and a piece of
mature contemporary music, designed to appeal on
many levels. The music, using three ancient Hawaiian
chant-tunes, many authentic percussion instruments,
and six Polynesian scales, is capable of standing alone,
and in fact the work can be performed without narration.
The text is a highly evocative and poetic retelling
of one of the most famous myths about the Polynesian
demigod Maui, known as 'the trickster.' We meet Maui
by reputation first with the recounting of two earlier
legends, and then in the story of Haleakali. Maui finds
his mother weeping because the sun moves so quickly
that 'the kapa (tapa cloth) will not dry, and the kalo
(taro) and sweet potatoes are withering'. Maui is
determined to fix this, and devises a plan to entrap the
sun as it enters the chasm at Haleakala, the sacred
volcano on the island that now bears Maui's name.
Once all sixteen legs (rays) of the sun have been snared
in a vigorous battle, Maui extracts a promise from the
sun to go more slowly for six months of the year,
creating the winter and summer seasons.
The score is almost cinematic; it assigns motives to
the various characters and follows the dramatic moods
of the narration without ever resorting to the stop-andgo
method commonly found in works with a narrator.
In fact, the story proved so fruitful as musical
inspiration that I was able to make use of formal
devices to illustrate the action: for instance, Maui's
actual snaring of the sixteen-legged sun is set as a
quicksilver fugue, in which particular notes are 'caught'
and held by the brass.
The piece is set as a ritual ceremony. It opens with
the blowing of a conch shell and immediately proceeds
to a chant-tune played by horns and pahu drums.
Following this 'frame,' the music follows forms
suggested by the narration. Episodic sections describe
Maui's earlier escapades, the sun's frantic flight over
the islands (with evocative cluster-chords in the upper
strings suggesting heat and blazing light), and the
fantastic trip beneath the ocean in search of the magic
elements needed to weave the nooses. Three related
interludes called Dreamscales introduce the main
sections: Maui's confrontation with his mother, the trip
to Haleakala, and the morning following the battle with
the sun. At the end of the story the opening chant
returns, completing the ritual frame in a musical circle.
Haleakala had its première in September 1991. It
was commissioned by the Honolulu Symphony as part
of the Meet the Composer Orchestra Residency
Program.
Prairie Light is based on three highly unusual
watercolors that Georgia O'Keeffe painted during her
year of teaching in Canyon, Texas in 1917. O'Keeffe is,
of course, well-known for her expressionistic cow
skulls and sensual flowers, but these three early works
show a naive, almost primitive sensitivity to light and
shadow. I chose to place them in the order of sunrise,
mid-day and night.
The work begins with Light Coming on the Plains,
which follows O'Keeffe's visual imagery in broad
washes of orchestral colour. The painting shows a flat
horizon line with outwardly expanding concentric ovals
of blue light emerging from the centre, just before
sunrise. The music has a static bass line (the horizon),
three extended phrases of a constantly growing melodic
line, and a sense of expansion and increasing warmth as
the sun becomes visible.
The second section, Canyon with Crows, is more
solidly grounded. The painting shows the convolutions
of the Palo Duro Canyon, with gently rolling green and
red-brown hills. Above it, three childlike crows appear,
almost pasted onto the sky. The music is bubbling,
bouncing and effervescent - staccato chords of brass
suggest hopping birds and animals, and the three crows
are suggested in solo lines of clarinet, oboe and flute. As
the light begins to fade, an extended passage for muted
strings accompanies the farewell songs of two of the
crows.
Starlight Night has a rather unorthodox (for
O'Keeffe) mechanical quality. The stars are arranged in
regular rows, and they are squares and rectangles
instead of points of light. Otherwise, the painting shows
the exact same vantage point as Light Coming on the
Plains: the horizon, the oval sky, and the shape of the
canyon rim. The music begins with a sweet nighttime
flute solo, echoed by high violins. Midway through, the
orchestra stops its singing and hovers, while a piano and
a xylophone begin a somewhat startling, percussive
mantra - the square stars, the regularity of the universe.
Over this gamelan-inspired pattern, the orchestra grows
until a climax is reached, with the nighttime melody
combined with the sunrise melody of the first
movement. A 24-hour cycle of light has been
experienced, with the evolving colours of nature as seen
from a single viewpoint.
Prairie Light was commissioned by the Sherman
(Texas) Symphony in celebration of its twentieth
anniversary season. It was first performed by that
orchestra, with the composer conducting, on 1st March,
1986.
First given by the Honolulu Symphony in October
1989, Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra was
commissioned by Bil Jackson. I had known Bil both as
a symphonic clarinettist and a jazz player, so the
resulting work, while not a 'jazz concerto', takes
advantage of the checkered history of the clarinet. Cast
in two lengthy movements and scored for a rather small
orchestra, it is a sort of 'uptown big brother'to my 1974
Flute Concerto.
The mostly serious first movement is a Fantasia.
Beginning with odd-metred fanfares and flourishes, it
gradually gives way to an elegiac theme in the high
violins, and the clarinet fills in the pauses with the
plunging arpeggios at which the instrument excels.
Little by little the spectre of ragtime peeks around the
corner, but never fully appears. The elegy theme
gradually emerges from the dance music, and the
orchestra swells back into prominence. The fanfares
from the opening reappear, but in a 2/4 metre. The
fanfare becomes a repetitive little machine over which
the clarinet is allowed to sing two echo-phrases of the
elegy before a quick and resolute cadence ends the
movement quietly.
The second movement is entitled Blues and
Toccata (on the name 'Benny Goodman'). The first
half is a slow 5/4 song with a repeated bass line as an
ostinato. A solo trumpet joins the clarinet for some
sweet, sad polyphony, and the mood is broken only
slightly in a central section of lighter interplay with
flute and woodwinds. The notes derived from the name
of Benny Goodman form a chord that is quite blue in
nature: B flat, E, G, D and A, and by adding a transposed
parallel group of five notes, a quite beautiful scale is
constructed. The entire movement comes from these
materials. The Toccata is another ground-bass ostinato,
a jaunty, shifty pattern that is repeated ten times. In the
middle of the movement, however, jazz gives way
momentarily to a rather polite rock-'n'-roll episode,
functioning as a contrasting central 'trio.' By the end,
the orchestra has been pared down to the components of
the jazz quartet: clarinet, vibraphone, bass and drums.
A parody of the 'call and response' chorus from the
1940s brings the concerto to an amusing, rousing finish.
Dan Welcher
Heleakala: How Maui Snared the Sun (more info)
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Heleakala - How Maui Snared the Sun - 22:32
Prairie Light: 3 Texas Watercolors of Georgia O'Keeffe (more info)
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I. Light Coming On The Plains - 4:44
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II. Canyon with Crows - 4:55
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III. Starlight Night - 4:42
Clarinet Concerto (more info)
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I. Very Fast - Slowly - Dancing - 9:39
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II. Blues and Toccata (on the name Benny Goodman) - 10:33