BAY of DEW Scott Wheeler: Village Music Michael Leese: Music for Winds and Harp David Cleary: Woodwind Quintet No. 2 Owen Underhill: Bay of Dew James Russell Smith: Ballet CD, 64 minutes $15.00

Bay of Dew is Arcadian Winds' second recording. It contains five new works commissioned or written for Arcadian Winds. It was recorded in January of 1996 at Shepherd Studios in Brockton, Massachusetts. Below is the text of the CD booklet, including composers' notes and bios and bios of the guest artists. Also, see below for ordering information. Arcadian Winds information and individual bios are available elsewhere at this site.

Selected movements are available for listening and download on our Sounds Page.

CD Program

Village Music                                     Scott Wheeler
	First Arcadian Fanfare (1:29) *
	Cliff Dance (2:24)
	Second Arcadian Fanfare (0:55)
	Midnight Pastorale (2:38)
	Cliff Dance Reprise and Final Arcadian Fanfare (1:10) *
	The Man in a Sycamore Tree (2:58)

Music for Winds and Harp (10:30) *                Michael Leese
                 Jocelyn Chang, Dilling harp
                 

Woodwind Quintet No. 2 ("Berkshire Pilgrimage")    David Cleary
	Moderately slow (2:54)
	Fast (4:32) *
	Slow (5:12)
	Moderately slow-Extremely fast-Moderately (6:32)

Bay of Dew                                       Owen Underhill
	Plaintivo, espressivo (1:52)	
	Grazioso (1:53) *
	Cantabile (3:33)
	Drammatico (2:02)
	Arioso (2:51) *
                      Sandra Hebert, piano

Ballet (1994) (11:09)  *                    James Russell Smith

*movement or excerpt can be downloaded from Sounds Page

Composers' Notes and Bios

Scott Wheeler: Village Music

Village Music was commissioned for Arcadian Winds by CrossCurrents, Margaret McAllister, director. Mr. Wheeler writes: "The village in the title of this wind quintet is an imaginary one, with no specific ethnographic locale. Also imaginary is a song called The Man in a Sycamore Tree, which concludes this set of interconnected fanfares and dances."

Scott Wheeler (born 1952, Washington, D.C.) has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Koussevitsky Foundation, the Fromm Foundation, Tanglewood, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Artist Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the MacDowell Colony. His works have been featured by the orchestras of Minnesota, Houston and Indianapolis, the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston, the John Oliver Chorale, the New England Composers Orchestra, the Chicago Contemporary Players, Parnassus, the Newport Music Festival and Dinosaur Annex. Mr. Wheeler's music can be heard on GM Recordings and Northeastern Records. Scott Wheeler teaches at Emerson College in Boston, where he is Artistic Director of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble. In addition to his concert music, Mr. Wheeler has written music for films, plays and dance. He studied at Amherst College, New England Conservatory and Brandeis University. His teachers include Virgil Thomson, Arthur Berger and Lewis Spratlan.

Michael Leese: Music for Winds and Harp

The composer writes: "Music for Winds and Harp was written for the Arcadian Winds and Jocelyn Chang, Dilling harp. It was written to show the extraordinary abilities of these fine musicians. The bulk of the music was written during a stay in the inspiring Transylvanian Alps in central Romania. The work is in a modified rondo form where the sections reappear at unexpected moments and are developed more fully with each new appearance. It represents an assimilation of various elements from Western art music, rock, jazz, and African drumming."

Michael Leese holds degrees in composition from Boston University (M.Mus.) and Jacksonville University (B.Mus.). His teachers have included Theodore Antoniou, Bernard Rands, and Edwin London. His music is performed and broadcast regularly across the U.S. and has been performed and broadcast in Canada and Europe. As a flutist, he has given workshops and concerts of improvisation in San Diego, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Hartford, Boston, Sofia, Plovdiv (Bulgaria) and Berlin (Germany). He is a MacDowell Colony fellow, and performances of his music have been supported by grants from Meet the Composer, the American Music Center, the Ohio Arts Council, the Bascom Little Fund of Cleveland, The University of Akron, and the Chitalishte Foundation (Bulgaria). He currently teaches composition and theory at the Riverside Academy of Music. As a free-lance computer-aided music copyist, he has prepared materials for performance by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Boston Symphony Orchestras, as well as the Cleveland Chamber Symphony and numerous chamber ensembles.

David Cleary: Woodwind Quintet No. 2 ("Berkshire Pilgrimage")

Cleary’s work was commissioned for Arcadian Winds by CrossCurrents, Margaret McAllister, director. The composer writes: "My second woodwind quintet was composed on commission for the Arcadian Winds and is in four movements. The first movement is in slow tempo and consists of contrapuntal lines nearly always layered over held notes. These sustained pitches outline a large symmetric structure built on stacked fifths centered on the D above middle C; stacked fourth and fifth sonorities are liberally used throughout the work. The second movement utilizes a sonata-derived format and is in fast tempo. The opening idea (a two-note motif) is gradually slowed rhythmically as the movement progresses. The third movement loosely describes an arch-like structure and is in slow tempo. The fourth movement makes use of varied tempi and is laid out in a complex scheme somewhat akin to a rondo format. The slow coda recapitulates some older melodic materials and reestablishes the symmetric structure of the first movement. The piece was written for the most part at the Millay Colony for the Arts (located in the Berkshires) and is dedicated to the November 1990 residents and staff there; the month spent there was one of the most enjoyable and productive I’ve had at an arts colony."

David Cleary (b. 1954) received a D.M.A. from the College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati; M.M. from the Hartt College of Music, University of Hartford; and B.M. from the New England Conservatory. His works have been performed and broadcast throughout the U.S., Europe, and Australia, including festival performances at the Tanglewood, June-in-Buffalo, Conductors’ Institute, and Warebrook festivals. His work has received many awards, including prizes from the Harvey Gaul Contest and Cincinnati Composers’ Guild; grants from the Ella Lyman Cabot Trust, Meet the Composer, National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, and Harvard University; arts colony residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Millay, Ragdale, Cummington, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; and commissions from Alea III, Dinosaur Annex Ensemble, Northwestern University Trombone Ensemble, Boston Chamber Ensemble, Arcadian Winds, Artaria Quartet of Boston, and Eos Ensemble. His compositions appear on CD on the Centaur and Vienna Modern Masters labels. His article on composing careers is published by Gale Research and his biography appears in the latest editions of Marquis "Who’s Who in the World" and "Who’s Who in the East." He is currently co-director of Composers in Red Sneakers.

Owen Underhill: Bay of Dew

Mr. Underhill writes: "I have long been fascinated by the unusual and poetic place-names for lunar features which were created by Johannes Ricciocoli in the mid-seventeenth century. One such name is the 'Bay of Dew' or 'Sinus Roris' in Latin. The 'Bay of Dew' is in fact a crater on the moon, but in my mind, I envisaged a tiny body of water that had been entirely created by the gradual collection of precious drops of dew as they formulated in the early morning hours. I saw myself as having created the composition in a similar way, by waiting for and collecting melodies and harmonies. The work is in five short movements; the longest and most substantial being the third. The movements are all interrelated, often using the very same groups of diatonic pitches, or slight variations. Bay of Dew was written for the Arcadian Winds in 1991, and is dedicated to my sister Janet Underhill."

Owen Underhill, composer and conductor, lives in Vancouver, Canada where he is Director of the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and Artistic Director of the contemporary music organization "Vancouver New Music." His works have been performed by such groups as the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, ArrayMusic, the continuum ensemble of London, the Elmer Iseler Singers and the Austrian Ensemble for New Music. His opera, The Star Catalogues (written with librettist Marc Diamond), was premiered in Vancouver in 1994. As a conductor, he has specialized in contemporary repertoire. Among the composers he has worked with are Louis Andriessen, Sofia Gubaidulina, Giya Kancheli, Rudolf Komorous, Steve Reich, Toru Takemitsu and Judith Weir.

James Russell Smith: Ballet

"Ballet for Woodwind Quintet" is a composition that conjures up images of dance. However, it is composed more in the spirit of dance for the players themselves and the manner in which their parts interact. Structured as a single movement, it consists of constantly shifting tempos which usually increase in intensity through the contrapuntal interplay of cross-rhythmic figures. The texture is nearly always full with two or three simultaneous and constantly shifting layers of sound. More than any other feature however, Ballet is based on melody, which is the ubiquitous element binding everything together. The final section of the piece resolves in an "adagio" where the rhythmic intensity subsides allowing the force of melody to have the final word. This composition is dedicated to the Arcadian Winds.

James Russell Smith (b.1950 in Memphis, Tennessee) is a composer, conductor and percussionist who has lived in the Boston area since 1983. His compositions and numerous commissions span a wide variety of genres and styles from chamber and orchestral music to film, stage, jazz and pop. A former marimba soloist with the U.S. Marine Band ("The President's Own"), he is presently an Associate Professor of Composition at the Berklee College of Music where he has taught since 1986. He is the Assistant Conductor for the Arlington Philharmonic Orchestra of Arlington, MA., and has been a member of the performing ensemble "Dinosaur Annex" since 1989. He holds a DMA in composition from Boston University, and in addition to his duties at Berklee and his composing he is a active free-lance percussionist in and around Boston.

Guest Artists

Guest Artist JOCELYN CHANG is the leading proponent of the revolutionary new Dilling harp. Her enthusiasm for the instrument has led her to develop a body of literature for it through commissions and transcriptions. Her entertaining lectures and concerts have introduced this wonderful instrument to audiences around the world. Jocelyn has performed in numerous venues throughout the U.S., Canada, Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Taiwan, and China. She is the harpist and a founding member of the award-winning Cleveland Chamber Symphony. Her talent for improvisation has been showcased in collaborations in music, dance, theater, and performance art, and she appears on more than a dozen recordings which have been released over the last two decades. She founded the harp department at the Chinese Cultural University in Taiwan and taught there full-time from 1977-1981. She currently teaches at Cleveland State University, Baldwin Wallace Conservatory of Music Preparatory/Adult Education Department, Cleveland Music School Settlement, and Riverside Academy of Music. She holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music.

The Dilling harp, a revolutionary new invention, was conceived by the late harpist Mildred Dilling, noted as the teacher of Harpo Marx. According to legend, the instrument appeared to her in a dream and she pursued its development throughout her lifetime. While the patent for the instrument is dated from around 1920, its production did not begin until the early 1980's, due entirely to the persistence of Mildred Dilling. There are only 80 instruments in existence to date. The Dilling harp is the only non-pedal harp with the single action mechanism of the pedal harp. Weighing only 18 pounds, this unique instrument boasts a four and one-half octave range, and combines the chromatic versatility of the pedal harp with the convenient size of the Celtic harp. It uses a special seven-lever, single-action mechanism mounted on its neck curve, which allows the use of either hand or both hands to make quick and multiple chromatic changes which would be impossible on the Celtic harp.

Ordering Information

Send orders to:

Make checks payable to "Arcadian Winds, Inc." and include $3.00 for shipping and handling. Please allow two weeks for delivery.
Questions? E-mail to Mark Miller