Michael Daugherty: WINTER DREAMS for Concert Band (Score)

Publisher: Michael Daugherty Music
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Duration: 9:27
Program Note:
Winter Dreams for concert band was commissioned in recognition of the 50th anniversary of the North Hills High School Commission Series and premiered by the North Hills High School Wind Ensemble, conducted by Len Lavelle at the NAfME All-Eastern Conference, Providence, Rhode Island on April 10, 2015.
Winter Dreams is a contemporary musical reflection on the creative world of Iowa artist Grant Wood (1891-1942). Composed in memory of my father, Willis Daugherty (1929-2011), the music also reflects on the years when I grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa as the oldest of five sons in the Daugherty family.
I first became aware of Grant Wood, who resided in Cedar Rapids, when I was a ten-year-old boy enrolled in art classes at the Public Library (now the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art). Prominently displayed in the room where we learned to draw and paint was Grant Wood’s original painting of his mother, entitled Woman with Plant (1928). I realized that Grant Wood was everywhere in Cedar Rapids: his paintings and lithographs at the Museum of Art; his farm mural at the old Montrose Hotel; his carved wooden Mourner’s Bench in the principal’s office at McKinley Junior High School; his stained glass Memorial Window at the Veteran’s Memorial Building. I often rode my bicycle past the artist’s studio at 5 Turner Alley, where Grant Wood created his most famous painting, American Gothic (1930).
My father was a fan of Grant Wood’s regionalist art. Willis was a tour guide at the Grant Wood Studio and displayed reproductions of American Gothic and Stone City (1930) at his home. He was like a character in the background of a Grant Wood painting or lithograph from the 1930s-1940s. As a young boy, Willis milked the cows and fed the horses early every morning on the family farm before walking several miles down a desolate gravel road to a one-room country grade school located near Walker, Iowa.
In 2012, I returned to Cedar Rapids to revisit the small towns of Eastern Iowa. I drove along the back roads and farms where my father grew up and where Grant Wood found inspiration for the people and places captured in his art. All the while, I was collecting musical ideas and mental images to create an emotional framework for my composition.
Winter Dreams is inspired by the bleak winter scenes of rural Iowa depicted in Grant Wood’s paintings and black and white lithographs of the 1930s-1940s, such as “January” and “February.” A haunting melody evokes a cold winter wind whistling “down in the valley”. The title of this movement also hearkens back to Jay Sigmund (1885-1937), an Iowa poet and close friend of Grant Wood. It was Sigmund, who was instrumental in persuading Wood to turn his attention from Europe back to Iowa for artistic inspiration. In a poem entitled “Grant Wood,” Sigmund describes how “time found a new son / Dreaming on the plain.”
--Michael Daugherty
Distributed by Hal Leonard Corporation