Description:

Shawn D. Vondran, conductor

As the winter quarter comes to a close, the Symphonic Band offers a program looking to both the heavens and the earth, opening with Steven Bryant’s fanfare In This Broad Earth, inspired by his experience hiking in the Austrian Alps. Written after the death of the composer’s father, Viet Cuong’s Deciduous speaks to a healing and cyclical journey of renewal in the wake of grief and loss. Roshanne Etezady’s Anahita draws inspiration from both a Persian poem about the ancient Iranian goddess of the night and a 19th-century mural by William Morris Hunt depicting the goddess in her chariot. David Gillingham’s Waking Angels commemorates the lives lost to the AIDS epidemic, and the program closes with Omar Thomas’s uplifting Of Our New Day Begun—a work taking its title from the Black National Anthem, which opens with the phrase “Lift every voice and sing, ‘til earth and heaven ring.” 

Steven Bryant, In This Broad Earth 
Viet Cuong, Deciduous 
Roshanne Etezady, Anahita 
David Gillingham, Waking Angels 
Omar Thomas, Of Our New Day Begun