This piece is the first movement of a three-movement collection depicting a supernatural train moving through abandoned towns and empty canyons during the night. You can hear odes to train whistles, roaring engines, and a moving rhythmic line to showcase the train’s speed and power. This piece is rooted in American folklore and had its first movement premiered in the spring of 1994, which, was initially the only movement included in the work. The following movements were added later and premiered in 1995 along with the first movement.

Alex Harrington, Conductor

Chorale and Alleluia was completed in January 1954, and was Dr. Hanson’s first work for symphonic band. It was given its premiere on February 26th at the convention of the American Bandmasters Association at West Point with Colonel William Santelmann, leader of the U.S. Marine Band, conducting.

The composition opens with a fine flowing chorale. Soon the joyous Alleluia theme appears and is much in evidence throughout. A bold statement of a new melody makes its appearance in lower brasses in combination with the above themes. The effect is one of cathedral bells, religious exaltation, solemnity, and dignity. The music is impressive, straightforward, and pleasingly non-dissonant, and its resonance and sonority are ideally suited to the medium of the modern symphonic band.

– Program Note provided by Carl Fischer Music

Featuring the combined trombone sections of the Wind Symphony
Alex Harrington, Conductor

National Emblem March was written by E.E. Bagley in 1905. Considered one of the finest marches ever written, this march has had a wide exposure of performance throughout the world. Bagley includes melodies from The Star Spangled Banner in the first strain and trio and was also inspired by herds of buffalo to create the heavy and repetitive beats heard in the trio. Frederick Fennell considers this march as “perfect a march as a march can be” and was highly regarded by John Philip Sousa, making his list of best parade marches. This piece has 14 different arrangements includes those for band and orchestra.

…and the mountains rising nowhere holds a unique place in the repertoire for wind bands. It is scored for an extended orchestral wind section, percussionists who are responsible for 46 different instruments in the course of the piece, and amplified piano. In addition to all of the effects that Schwantner achieves with his percussion menagerie and conventional piano and wind sounds, he calls for unusual techniques in the winds such as singing, whistling, aleatoric effects, and even tuned glasses which the saxophone and euphonium sections play for more than half of the piece. These combine to make a mystical soundscape unlike anything that has come before or since. Composed in three large sections, …and the mountains rising nowhere utilizes seven as a generative tool: the amount of lines in the poem, seven-note chords, groups of whistlers, and the tonal centers are even related by an interval of a diminished-seventh. He incorporates contrast by juxtaposing seven-note scales with eight-note scales. This results in a piece that bears a tonal center in a different sense than Bach or Mozart would.

Commissioned by Donald Hunsberger and the Eastman Wind Ensemble with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, …and the mountains rising nowhere was Joseph Schwantner’s first composition for wind ensemble (and is part of a “trilogy” that includes From a Dark Millennium and In evening’s stillness). The premiere was given in College Park, Maryland, at the 1977 National Conference of the College Band Directors National Association (CBDNA) by the Eastman Wind Ensemble, Hunsberger conducting. It is dedicated to children’s author Carol Adler; its title inspired by a line in her poem Arioso:

arioso bells
sepia
moon-beams
an afternoon sun blanked by rain
and the mountains rising nowhere
the sound returns
the sound and the silence chimes

Program notes from the Wind Repertory Project

Joseph Klein (b. 1962, Los Angeles, Calif.) is an American composer and music educator.

Dr. Klein holds degrees in composition from Indiana University (DM, 1991), University of California, San Diego (MA, 1986), and California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (BA, 1984), where his composition teachers included Harvey Sollberger, Claude Baker, Robert Erickson, and Roger Reynolds.

Klein is a composer of solo, chamber, and large ensemble works, including instrumental, vocal, electroacoustic, and intermedia compositions. His music reflects an ongoing interest in processes drawn from such sources as fractal geometry, chaos, and systems theory, often inspired by natural phenomena. His works frequently incorporate theatrical elements, either as an extension of the extra-musical references or as an organic expression of the musical narrative itself. Literature is another important influence on his work, with recent compositions based on the writings of Franz Kafka, Elias Canetti, Alice Fulton, W.S. Merwin, Milan Kundera, and John Ashbery.

He writes: “Against the gusts of blank repose, a threshold that persists” is dedicated to the memory of my son, Gabriel Paul Klein, who took his in life September 2015 at the age of 23. The work’s title is derived from two lines in Alice Fulton’s poem “Silencer”, from the collection “Powers of Congress) – a poem that itself deals with the subject of suicide–and is an allusion to the persistent struggle with that boundary between life and death (“blank repose”).

The work is characterized by sharp juxtapositions of contrasting—often conflicting—musical elements, including sections of restless energy, obsessive ostinato figures, and intrusive interjections, occasionally relieved by stretches of placid, suspended music. The disjunct, fragmentary structure that results, combined with the inherently static, non-developmental nature of the material itself, is intended to subvert the typical linear narrative. An important unifying element of the work is the pitch cell G-A-Bb-E, which is the basis of a repeating interval sequence used to generate the symmetrical, non-octave-repeating scale that is used pervasively throughout the work. This scale is most clearly presented in the ascending quasi-ostinato bass line that first occurs after the slow introductory section. Prime numbers and rhythmic patterns based on Morse Code are also used as unifying structural elements.

Against the gusts of blank repose, a threshold that persists, originally composed for wind orchestra, was completed in September 2016.

Alex Harrington, Conductor

Strange Humors represents another of Mackey’s works (after “Redline Tango”) that has been transcribed for wind ensemble. The first version of “Strange Humors” was a student piece for string quartet and djembe that Mackey wrote while pursuing his graduate degree at The Juilliard School. It was later adapted for use by the Parsons Dance Company, with choreography by Robert Battle. Its transcription came at the behest of Richard Floyd on behalf of the American Bandmasters Association. The piece represents a merging of musical cultures — the modal melodies and syncopated rhythms of middle Eastern music with the percussive accompaniment of African drumming.

At the heart of the work lies the pulse of the djembe, which remains from the original version. The djembe, an hourglass-shaped drum played with bare hands, is a major part of the customs of west African countries such as Mali and Guinea, where djembe ensembles accompany many functional celebrations of society.

The piece opens with a sultry English horn solo, a line laced with Phrygian influence representing the “typical” melodies of the most northeastern parts of the African continent — most notably Egypt, but also parts of the Arabian peninsula. Later, the saxophones emulate the snaking lines of the English horn. The addition of brass and auxiliary percussion to the original orchestration makes for particular impact during the shout sections of the piece, and the groove of the djembe combined with the quirky rhythms throughout leave an impression that lingers in the listener’s mind long after its conclusion.

Program note by Jake Wallace

Irish Tune from County Derry is among the most beloved of Grainger’s many folk song settings for wind band. During the course of his career, he produced multiple arrangements of this song, including versions for mixed chorus, solo piano, string orchestra, and symphony orchestra. This setting for military band (as opposed to the all-brass bands common in much of Western Europe when this music was written) was one of Grainger’s first contributions to concert band literature. Mark Rogers, the head editor for band music at Southern Music Company, produced this edition to better fit modern wind band instrumentation and to remove the dozens of errors present in the earlier sets of parts. In particular, he retained the use of the soprano saxophone, one of Grainger’s favorite instruments. The lyrics of the song belie the emotion and drama contained within the music:

O Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountainside
The summer’s gone, and all the flowers are dying
‘tis you must go, and I must bide

But come ye back, when summer’s in the meadow
Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow
And I’ll be there, in sunshine or in shadow
O Danny Boy, O Danny boy, I love you so.

 And if you come, when all the flowers are dying
And I am dead, as dead I well may be
You’ll come and find the place where I am lying
And say an “Ave” there for me.

 And I shall hear, tho’ soft you tread above me
And all my dreams shall warmer, sweeter be
If you’ll not fail to tell me that you love me
I simply sleep in peace until you come to me. 

The lyrics seem a fitting tribute to the death of my father, who passed away quite recently, in February of 2026. I am grateful to the Wind Ensemble for helping me say goodbye to him with music, since words do not seem adequate to capture the complexity of emotions created by his loss.

Notes by Thomas Bough

Alex Harrington is currently a Graduate Student at Northern Illinois University studying Wind Conducting and assisting with all operations of the NIU band program. Prior to NIU, she taught K-12 band and general music in Novi, MI and taught private woodwind and piano lessons to children and adults. She received a Bachelor of Music Education degree from Olivet Nazarene University where she was a drum major for the Tiger Marching Band for two years. She has been an active conductor at the NIU Wind Conducting Symposium and has recently attended the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee and Illinois State Conducting Symposiums as a conducting participant.