Concert Band Plays Music Responding to Violence, February 17

“Let This Be Our Response,” the Dartmouth College Wind Ensemble’s powerful Winter program, features works that stand up to violence and political oppression, including an elegy to the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The concert takes place on Sunday, February 17, 2 pm, in Spaulding Auditorium.

Front and center will be the brand new Into the Silent Land, a haunting tribute to Sandy Hook by Steve Danyew, an alumnus of the school himself. The program also responds to political strife with Musica Boema, a work that had to be smuggled out of Warsaw Pact Czechoslovakia for its Michigan premiere; Salvation is Created, a 1957 band transcription of the 1912 sacred work by Russian composer Pavel Tschesnokoff, whose career nosedived when faced with Soviet edicts against religious art; and William Schuman’s 1957 Chester Overture, based on a song sung by Revolutionary War forces. In addition, the program also includes works by Pulitzer Prize- winning Joseph Schwantner and prolific composer David Maslanka, deeply inspired by Vietnamese Buddhist writings.

Besides rehearsing for this concert, many of the Wind Ensemble members are also serving as volunteer mentors in the Dartmouth Youth Wind Ensemble, a program for middle school students in which they play side by side with college student musicians. The Youth Wind Ensemble rehearses Saturday mornings and will showcase its accomplishments in a free, public concert on Saturday, March 2, 1:30 pm in Spaulding Auditorium.