Welcher: Haleakala / Prairie Light / Clarinet Concerto

Description

Dan Welcher (b.1948)Born in Rochester, New York, in 1948, composer-conductor Dan Welcher has been gradually creating a body ofcompositions 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-playedcomposers of his generation. Dan Welcher first trained as a pianist and bassoonist, earning degrees from theEastman School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music. He joined the Louisville Orchestra as its PrincipalBassoonist in 1972, and remained there until 1978, concurrently teaching composition and theory at the Universityof Louisville. He joined the Artist Faculty of the Aspen Music Festival in the summer of 1976, teaching bassoonand composition, and remained there for fourteen years. He accepted a position on the faculty at the University ofTexas in 1978, creating the New Music Ensemble there and serving as Assistant Conductor of the AustinSymphony Orchestra from 1980 to 1990. It was in Texas that his career as a conductor began to flourish, and hehas led the premi?¿res of more than 150 new works. He now holds the Lee Hage Jamail Regents Professorship inComposition at the School of Music at UT/Austin, teaching Composition and serving as Director of the NewMusic Ensemble. In 1990 he was named Composer in Residence with the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra throughthe Meet the Composer Orchestra Residencies Program. In addition to Haleakala: How Maui Snared the Sun, hehas written a 38-minute Symphony No. 1 for the Honolulu Symphony, which had its premi?¿re in 1993. More recentcommissions have come from the Boston Pops, the Utah Symphony, the Handel and Haydn Society, and theRochester Philharmonic. A pair of one-act operas on Christmas themes, Della's Gift and Holy Night, had itspremi?¿re in 2005. Dan Welcher has won numerous awards and prizes from institutions such as the GuggenheimFoundation (a Fellowship in 1997), National Endowment for the Arts, The Reader's Digest/Lila WallaceFoundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Bellagio Center, the AmericanMusic Center, and ASCAP. His orchestral music has been performed by more than fifty orchestras, including theChicago Symphony, the St Louis Symphony, and the Atlanta Symphony. Welcher lives in Bastrop, Texas. Hismusic is published by Theodore Presser Company.Haleakala: How Maui Snared the Sun (1991) Prairie Light: Three Texas Watercolors ofGeorgia O' Keeffe (1985) Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra (1989)The tone-poem Haleakala: How Maui Snared the Sunwas crafted as both a children's story and a piece ofmature contemporary music, designed to appeal onmany levels. The music, using three ancient Hawaiianchant-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 retellingof one of th