J.A.C. Redford THE GROWING SEASON Music for Orchestra 1. October Overtures – 10:37 Kyiv Symphony Orchestra – J.A.C. Redford, Conductor Recorded at Radio and Television Studio, Kyiv, Ukraine, on 11 August 2007. 2. The Growing Season – 10:36 London Studio Orchestra – J.A.C. Redford, Conductor Recorded at Abbey Road, Studio 1, on 25 November 2013. 3. The Ancient of Days – 26:21 Kyiv Symphony Orchestra – J.A.C. Redford, Conductor Recorded at Radio and Television Studio, Kyiv, Ukraine, on 11 August 2007. R.C. Sproul, Narrator 4. arkexit – 5:51 5. Tidestar Pulling – 12:18 6. while half asleep and dreaming – 3:28 London Studio Orchestra – J.A.C. Redford, Conductor Recorded at Abbey Road, Studio 1, on 25 November 2013. J.A.C. Redford is a composer, arranger, orchestrator and conductor of concert, chamber and choral music, film, television and theater scores, and music for recordings. Artists and ensembles that have performed his work include Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Joshua Bell, Cantus, Chicago Symphony, De Angelis Vocal Ensemble, Israel Philharmonic, Kansas City Chorale, LA Chamber Singers, LA Master Chorale, London Symphony Orchestra, Anne Akiko Meyers, Millennium Consort Singers, New York Philharmonic, Phoenix Chorale, St. Martin's Chamber Choir, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Utah Chamber Artists and Utah Symphony. His music is published by G. Schirmer, Roger Dean, Fatrock Ink, AnderKamp, Fred Bock and Plough Down Sillion Music. His many recordings include five collections of his concert, chamber and choral music: Eternity Shut in a Span, Evening Wind, The Alphabet of Revelation, Let Beauty Be Our Memorial and Waltzing with Shadows. JAC has written the scores for more than three dozen feature films, TV movies or miniseries, including The Trip to Bountiful, Oliver & Company and Newsies. His 500 episodes of television include multiple seasons of Coach and St Elsewhere, for which he received two Emmy nominations. His collaborations with other artists include conducting The Little Mermaid, and orchestrating the scores for Avatar, Bridge of Spies, Finding Dory, Spectre, WALL-E and Skyfall, for which he also arranged and conducted Adele’s Oscar-winning title song. NOTES by Jon Burlingame We have an unfortunate tendency to pigeonhole artists. We seem to need to package and label everything for quick and easy consumption: a painter creates “abstracts,” a composer is a “minimalist,” a writer pens “fantasy” or “Gothic romance.” The reality tends to be more complex – especially in our postmodern world where artists are influenced by art, and fellow artists, from every discipline and every corner of the globe. This is especially true in the realm of music written for films and television. This music generally assumes a supporting role, guiding the audience in the appropriate emotional response to the material on screen. It is often dismissed as “commercial,” in the sense that composers are paid to come up with “music to order,” create it quickly to specific instructions, and generally do not own or control what they write. Again, however, the reality is that great composers (from Copland and Bernstein to Walton and Vaughan Williams) have not only toiled in this field but enjoyed the challenge, creating works that are now considered classic. Many film and TV composers work solely in those fields and don’t feel the need to branch out and write music for the concert hall. But those who do are invariably interesting, and their “art music” demands to be heard – in part because years of work in a pressure-filled media environment has provided them with the necessary skills of composition and orchestration to convey musical ideas that are accessible and that communicate quickly to a wide audience. J.A.C. Redford is not just a “film composer.” Over nearly four decades of work for big screens and small, he has also continued to devote substantial time and resources to his concert music. There is now a wealth of Redford music for orchestra, choirs, chamber groups and solo instruments; this album alone contains six major works for orchestra composed over a 30-year period. Redford calls this album The Growing Season, and not just because that’s also the title of the second work you’ll hear – as with every artist, he has grown personally and professionally over these many years. But what I find most satisfying about this wonderful collection is how much of this music is rich and warm and thoughtful – much like the composer himself. When he wrote October Overtures, his divertimento for orchestra from 1980, he had been working in television for four years, scoring episodes of shows like James at 16 and Starsky and Hutch. “To evoke the Muse,” Redford recalls, “I left the record-breaking smog in Los Angeles for the canyons of Utah where, surrounded by the brilliant variety of color in the monumental stillness of that country, I found ideas began to form, patterns to emerge. October Overtures revels in its sources of inspiration and has no deeper ambition than to delight the ear and heart with sound responding to nature.” Indeed, the piece is infused with joy, conjuring up images of Western landscapes and even adding a touch of cowboy humor. There is a folk dance with apparent Celtic roots, some reflective moments, horn calls and, throughout, a firm grasp of music we can instantly recognize as that of the American West. By the time Redford composed The Growing Season in 1987, he had become a veteran of both films and TV, including music for the Oscar-winning film The Trip to Bountiful, the miniseries The Key to Rebecca, and more than a hundred episodes of the Emmy-winning medical series St. Elsewhere (earning two well-deserved Emmy nominations for his music along the way). Constantly busy with one film commission after another, Redford became proficient in every conceivable style of music. The Growing Season, a single-movement work for string orchestra, demonstrates the composer’s ability to create a mood and paint vivid colors with music. Redford likens its opening to “the sun on a steamy patch of dew-soaked earth.” He wrings drama out of his impressive string players, finding angry rhythms, melancholy moments and even, as Redford puts it, “a spare and philosophic conclusion.” The largest-scale work in this collection is Redford's dramatic music narrative The Ancient of Days, composed in 1993. Based on the seventh chapter of Daniel, Redford thinks of it as “a movie without pictures.” (In the interim, he had scored the Disney films Oliver & Company and Newsies; the television Westerns Independence and Conagher; and the short-lived but critically appreciated family drama The Road Home.) Daniel’s prophetic visions, voiced by a narrator, are accompanied by what we might consider “cinematic gestures” in the music. The work was originally commissioned by the Westminster Brass and written for brass quintet, organ and percussion. Fourteen years later, the composer expanded it for large orchestra including triple woodwinds and six French horns. It is both thrilling and nightmarish, as the composer uses his film experience to, as he says, “color the literary images with specific musical effects intended to bring the images to life between the listeners’ ears.” He depicts the four great beasts of Daniel's vision: a lion with eagle's wings, suggesting the Babylonian Empire under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar, with the music taking the form of “a garish, bloody hunt”; a bear, symbolizing the Medo-Persian Empire, with low brass and woodwinds depicting the huge, lumbering creature; a leopard with wings, representing Alexander the Great and his empire, as trumpeters play in staccato rhythms accompanied by xylophone; and the final, ten-horned beast with iron teeth, musically depicted as “a fugue that never quite gets off the ground,” Redford says. The arrival of God, the Ancient of Days, is accompanied by music rooted in the Protestant hymn tradition, “suggesting divine order and inevitability,” according to the composer. The musical imagery is so striking that one can easily picture Sunday Bible studies built around this piece – or, even better, a movie made to accompany it. The remaining three works were composed in the first decade of the 21st century. By this time, Redford was dividing his time successfully between his classical commissions and his Hollywood work (scoring more films and shorts for Disney, including A Kid in King Arthur's Court and The Mighty Ducks II and III; the acclaimed television films What the Deaf Man Heard and The Color of Love: Jacey's Story; and several seasons of the popular sitcom Coach). Redford's Christmas cantata Welcome All Wonders, with texts ranging from the 16th to the 20th centuries, was written in 1993 and has become a holiday staple for thousands of listeners. Sticking with Biblical themes, Redford's 2002 arkexit, another divertimento for orchestra, is an especially clever concoction. As the composer explains, it is “essentially a piece made of pairs, with themes announced by instrumental duos, accompaniments in two parts, and orchestrations blending tandem colors.” The title refers, of course, to Noah’s floating zoo. “Although no specific relationship is intended between the music and details of the Deluge, the more metaphorically minded might find hints of a playful romp after long confinement, or delight found in the freshness of air and sky on the first sunrise after weeks of rain,” the composer hints. Exuberance is the order of the day here. Tidestar Pulling, an elegy for orchestra from 2004, was commissioned by the Clear Lake Symphony, located in a Houston suburb where many NASA workers live. The work is both mysterious and moving, in an almost constant state of motion; listening, one can imagine restless wayfarers setting out on a shimmering sea or into interstellar space. Yet the piece embodies a sadness, perhaps for families left behind, their loved ones never to be seen again. As Redford explains: “It's music that mirrors the questing spirit, manifest through journeys into the unknown, both across the sea and into outer space. If the opening bars were paired with images, I imagine they would be those of a sailing ship cutting across dark swells toward a landless horizon counterpointed with a probe moving out into a silent starscape.” The final work, while half asleep and dreaming, was inspired by the memory of awakening from a nap on a “sun-drenched afternoon” in Milan in 1973, when the composer was nineteen. The mood soon coalesced into a poem beginning with these words: “While half asleep and dreaming, and sultry in the afternoon, these ethereal sprites are ushered in, dancing down a sun's tail.” The poems ends with “a figure that recalls the angel set to bar fallen mankind’s return to Eden”: “…a solitary sentinel, marking their passage from our world of iron, keeping our exile from their world of dreams.” Originally set for chorus, then revised for string orchestra in 2008, this short, initially propulsive and gradually more sedate piece suggests Redford as a modern-day minstrel, a storyteller who wants to speak to us via both music and words. But unlike the wandering, strumming and singing musician of an earlier era, J.A.C. Redford has the orchestra at his disposal – and, thanks to his years of work in films and television, an undeniable ability to create drama and emotion in music, provoking our imaginations as he encourages our hearts to listen. CREDITS Producer – J.A.C. Redford Kyiv Symphony Orchestra – John M. Duncan, Executive Producer Taras-Mak Productions, Orchestra Management Misha Vasilev, Concertmaster London Studio Orchestra – Isobel Griffiths, Orchestra Contractor Thomas Bowes, Concertmaster Recording Engineers – Kent Madison (October Overtures, The Ancient of Days). Simon Rhodes (The Growing Season, arkexit, Tidestar Pulling, while half asleep and dreaming). Mixing & Editing – Kent Madison (October Overtures, The Ancient of Days). Simon Rhodes (October Overtures, The Growing Season, The Ancient of Days, arkexit, Tidestar Pulling, while half asleep and dreaming). Mastering – Shantih Haast, Studio 770, Brea, CA. Design & Artwork – Jon Strong, Brea, CA Cover Image – The Atlas by Michelangelo Buonarroti POEM while half asleep and dreaming – Copyright © 1973 by J.A.C. Redford. Used by permission. MUSIC October Overtures – Copyright © 1980 by J.A.C. Redford. All rights reserved. The Growing Season – Copyright © 1987 by J.A.C. Redford. All rights reserved. The Ancient of Days – Copyright © 1993 by J.A.C. Redford. All rights reserved. arkexit – Copyright © 2002 by J.A.C. Redford. All rights reserved. Tidestar Pulling – Copyright © 2004 by J.A.C. Redford. All rights reserved. while half asleep and dreaming – Copyright © 2008 by J.A.C. Redford. All rights reserved. © ℗ 2016 by J.A.C. Redford. All rights reserved.