The Trebuchet Wind Trio is the faculty wind trio of the University of South Alabama Department of Music. Each of the members perform on multiple instruments: Andra Bohnet: flutes, piccolo, alto flute, bass flute, whistles, Irish flute, Scottish smallpipes Rebecca Mindock: oboe, English horn, bass oboe, bassoon, contrabassoon Kip Franklin: Bb, A, and Eb clarinet, bass clarinet They are joined by pianist Jasmin Arakawa on tracks 1, 5-8, and 13-15. The Music: Camille Saint-Saëns: Caprice sur des airs Danois et Russes, op. 79 French composer Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) wrote his Caprice on Danish and Russian Airs for a very specific set of circumstances; in collaboration with flutist Paul Taffanel, oboist Georges Gillet, and clarinetist Charles Turban, Saint-Saëns gave a series of seven concerts in St. Petersburg during Easter Week of 1887, organized by the Russian Red Cross and including performances for the royal court. The choice of Russian and Danish Airs as the piece’s framework serves as an excellent homage to its dedicatee, the Tsarina Maria Feodorovna, who married into the Russian court but was the daughter of the King of Denmark. The work includes many broad soloistic passages, befitting each of the renowned performers who saw the work’s premiere, and is otherwise characterized by an uncomplicated but charming presentation of the original airs, building in volume and scope into a crowd-pleasing and satisfying finale. Philip Wharton: Sonatina for flute (piccolo, penny whistle), oboe (English horn), and clarinet (bass clarinet) American composer Philip Wharton (b. 1969) provides the following notes for his Sonatina (2015): “The wind trio presents two main challenges: there can only be three pitches sounding at any time and it has an almost entirely treble range. Unless you also double with bass clarinet. I did. But for a thicker harmonic language than three pitches normally allow, I used illusion. The piece begins with Scamper, a miniature arch form as sonata form with a shift in register from low to high through the movement. The two main themes contrast by texture. The first is a melody in the oboe accompanied by surrounding arpeggiation. The second, imitation between the instruments, hints at a fugue. (I still love a fugue.) Lullaby is a true illusion of rich, lush harmonies with only three voices. Here it is the English horn that sings while the two other instruments create lush harmonies. Trifle is a rhythmic play on the traditional rondo. I adore rondos (a form that has a refrain) and I love reinvention of ideas. Each time the theme returns it is transformed rhythmically. The second episode—the music between refrains—recalls music from the previous movements. A tiny flurry provides the coda.” Trebuchet commissioned this work from Wharton by means of an Arts and Humanities Small Grant awarded by the University of South Alabama in Fall 2015, and performed its world premiere in the Laidlaw Performing Arts Center on the USA campus on April 21, 2016. Jean-Michel Damase: Quatuor pour flûte, hautbois, clarinette et piano (1991) French composer Jean-Michel Damase (1928-2013) greatly admired his fellow nationals Gabriel Fauré and Maurice Ravel, and this predecessorial influence is more than evident in his music, colored by vaguely impressionistic harmonies, abrupt and whimsical changes of character, and sweepingly diaphanous figuration. While many of his contemporaries composed in increasingly experimental ways, Damase maintained a more traditional and familiar style, more novel in its character than in its harmony or construction. Damase frequently collaborated with renowned flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal, and these collaborations as well as Damase’s subsequent association with many of Rampal’s students and colleagues lead to the creation of a significant number of enchanting solo and chamber works for the flute. His Quatuor for flute, oboe, clarinet, and piano (1991) showcases Damase’s style both at its most capricious and luxurious, employing the full range of each instrument in order to access a staggering variety of brilliant colors. Charles Huguenin: Trio No. 1 - Style Ancien, op. 30 Swiss composer Charles Huguenin (1870-1939) was a choir master and specialist in Protestant religious music, well evidenced in the many choral and vocal works he published as the founder of publishing company Editions Huguenin-Schola Cantorum. His chamber instrumental works, including his Trio No. 1 – Style Ancien, op. 30, display both a gift for melody and an accessibly elegant style that make the works suitable for students and professionals alike. While this small collection of Baroque and Classical era dance movements was originally penned as a reed trio for oboe, clarinet, and bassoon, our choice of substituting the oboe with flute – easily done thanks to the range of the oboe part – lends the work a charming lightness, fluidity, and variety of color. Philip Wharton: 4 in Motion for flute (piccolo), oboe, clarinet, and piano Wharton provides the following note: “4 in Motion is one of my earliest works still allowed out to be heard (youth and inexperience being what it is), because it displays a fierce rhythmic style I continue to use. The piece was written for friends performing at the 1993 International Double Reed Convention. Parody March is a theme and variations, a form I rarely use. Making the form more interesting, I designed the four variations so that the final variation combines the previous three. Haunted Echoes is based on one chord: the minor/major seventh—the eerie, horror movie chord. Heard both as a chord and linearly as melodies, this sonority also goes through wild tempo fluctuations (slow and fast) and textures (thin and thick). The final movement, Perpetuum Mobile, is an explosion of virtuosity: speed; conflicting harmonic worlds; rhythmic play shifting the beat; and two fugues—remember that fugue means flight—all giving the listener notice that the piece is dashing to its end!” Michael Praetorius: Bransles de Villages from "Terpsichore" (1612) German Renaissance composer Michael Praetorius (1571-1621) was greatly prolific in the realm of sacred vocal music, but it is his lone surviving secular and instrumental work, the compendium Terpsichore, for which he is best known, largely in part due to the fact that the work is one of our best surviving examples of secular instrumental music from the time period. The “bransle,” a French dance whose name literally translates to “side-by-side movement,” would typically be understood to be a circle or line dance with simple side-to-side steps. In choosing and adapting this five-voiced selection for our trio, we aimed to use the modern convention of multi-tracking to suggest the more renaissance-era convention of alternating instrumental consorts; the arrangement features an all-double-reeds consort, an all-clarinets consort, and an all-flutes consort each created by one member of our trio recorded on multiple tracks. These one-man like-instrument consorts alternate regularly with a contrastingly diverse grouping of winds (pennywhistle, flute, oboe, B-flat clarinet, and bassoon). The arrangement reaches its climax as the meter shifts from its familiar duple to a rollicking triple and as the full gamut of woodwinds, from the sparkling highs of the tinwhistle to the rumbling depths of the bass oboe and contrabassoon, join in for the final merry dance.