All-American Carillon Recital for July 5
On
July 5, John Gouwens will present an
all-American program. In honor of the
nearby Independence Day holiday, the
recital will feature settings of patriotic
songs (
America
, The National Anthem) as well as settings
of some traditional American hymns and
folk songs.
It
will also include a broad range of
American compositions for carillon. The
first true American concert music for the
carillon originated with a group of
talented composers active in the 1950s at The
University of Kansas, with much
encouragement from University Carillonneur
(at that time) Ronald
Barnes. KU Composition
professor John
Pozdro wrote a piece in 1953,
“Landscape,” for Barnes, and much he
later wrote several more advanced and
extensive pieces. This early Pozdro piece
will be included in the July 5 recital.
Kansas
piano professor Roy
Hamlin Johnson showed a special
talent for writing carillon music, and he
quickly became the most highly-respected
American composer for carillon,
acknowledged worldwide. One of Johnson’s
unique contributions to the literature was
a new way of harmonizing traditional
melodies – in a way perfectly suited to
the sonorities of the bells. He applied
these techniques in a variety of ways
through a large collection of “hymn
preludes.” One of the finest of these
will be included in the recital: a setting
of the Easter plainchant “Victimae
paschali laudes.”
Composer
Gary
White was introduced to the carillon
when he was a student at The University of
Kansas (with John Pozdro among his
teachers). He received several commissions
to write additional carillon pieces after
he was himself a composition professor, at
Iowa
State
University
. His atmospheric “Asteroids” is the
most recent of those pieces, written in
1991, and is strikingly effective on the
carillon. (White is alive and well, but
retired from composing.) Daniel Robins had
a short but brilliant career as a
carillonneur before his untimely death in
1970 (at age 33). He began his carillon
studies with Barnes at
Kansas
, later studying in The
Netherlands before becoming University
Carillonneur at University
of Chicago. He wrote few
compositions, but the pieces he did write
were well-crafted, inspired pieces of
work. The July 5 program will include
Robins’s three-movement “Sonate,”
which was written in 1960 (while he was in
The Netherlands), but which was
unpublished until this year.
Barnes
left
Kansas
in 1963, and was followed in that position
by Albert
Gerken, an outstanding
carillonneur. Gerken wrote some fine
pieces also, but the most effective of all
of them is the “Pastel in Bronze.”
That piece is included, as well as a
virtuosic “Waltz” by Culver
carillonneur John Gouwens. (Gouwens
studied with Albert Gerken, so here also
there is a
Kansas
connection.)
Much
earlier, in the 1930s, Samuel
Barber, then a young composition
student, studied carillon as part of a
special project of the Curtis
Institute of Music in
Philadelphia
. Barber went on to be a noted
“mainstream” composer for opera,
piano, and other media. One of the pieces
that resulted from his brief encounter
with the carillon is a somber but highly
effective “Dirge.” The program will
end on a brighter note, however, with the
Appalachian White Spiritual, “Clear the
Way, the World is Waking,” in a
brilliant setting by Ronald Barnes.
Printed
programs will be available near the South
doors of the Chapel. After the recital,
Mr. Gouwens will conduct a tour of the
tower and demonstrate the
carillon to all who are interested.
The recital is open to the public.
Additional carillon recitals are scheduled
every Saturday afternoon in July at 4:00
P.M. (Eastern Daylight Time).
Follow
this link for the full schedule.
