FOSTERING BRASS CHAMBER MUSIC
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Photo: Daniel Island, SC


Memorial Day
May 31, 2021
​

"As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words but to live by them."
​

John F. Kennedy
​

Our Memorial Day Musical Sulute

AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL
​arr. Warren Kellerhouse


Annapolis Brass Quintet
​1974

Haldon  Johnson trumpet;  David Cran, trumpet;
Calvin Smith, horn;
  David Kanter, trombone;
Robert Posten, bass trombone


(Duration: 02'24")
To listen Tap > Below
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Today's Featured Work:

Rudy Shackelford's
 

Nighthawks

for brass quintet
​(1976)

​

Rudy Shackelford (b. 1944) studied composition at Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Illinois.  From 1971 he has been a freelance composer and writer with residencies at Yaddo, the McDowell Colony, and the Ossabaw Island Project.  In 1977, on a Rockefeller Foundation grant, he was a fellow of Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy.
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EDWARD HOPPER'S PAINTING NIGHTHAWKS 
(1942)​


RUDY SHACKELFORD'S COMPOSITION NIGHTHAWKS
(1976)


While serving as composer in residence at McDowell Colony in 1976, Rudy Shackelford composed Nighthawks for brass quintet.  This work was inspired by the collection of Edward Hopper’s oils, watercolors and prints in reproductions assembled and annotated by Lloyd Goodrich, published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York.  ​

Three Edward Hopper paintings were selected 
as the basis of the first three movements of Nighthawks:  Approaching a City (1946), The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., Nighthawks (1942), The Art Institute of Chicago, and Early Sunday Morning (1930), The Whitney Museum, New York. 

1982 Rockport Chamber Music Festival
Annapolis Brass Quintet

Robert Suggs, trumpet; David Cran, trumpet; Marc Guy, horn;
Wayne Wells, trombone; Robert Posten, bass trombone.
performing
Rudy 
Shackelford's 

Nighthawks
three cityscapes after Edward Hopper
​for brass quintet

To listen tap > below.
(There may be a 10 to 20 
second delay before sound begins.)

I. Approaching a City
II. Nighthawks
III. Early Sunday Morning
IV Epilogue: The Man on the Bed ​
​(poem by Debora Greger)

To highlight Hopper's three paintings for movements
I. II. III.  
Tap on each photo:
I. Approaching a City (1946)
I. Approaching a City (1946)
II. Nighthawks (1942)
II. Nighthawks (1942)
III. Early Sunday Morning (1930)

IV. Epilogue:  The Man on the Bed 
In the fourth movement, Epilogue, members of the quintet in turn recite lines from Debora Greger's poem about Hopper to the accompaniment of a montage of fragments from the previous movements.

Debora Greger:  “In late September 1958, I visited Edward Hopper's South Truro studio and saw on the easel not an unfinished painting, nor even a stretched canvas, but a large empty stretcher.  ‘He’s been looking at that all summer,' his wife Jo Hopper said.”

The Man on the Bed by Debora Greger

​He lay on the bed, thinking 
of what he could see from the window
​as a little landscape of failure,
glittering after the rain,
the roses within reach but rusted,
a red bird lost in the thick
wet leaves of the oak,
the tree, caught in mirrors, shaking.
He lay on the bed,
his shirt turning blue with evening
thinking that in the dark a red bird
might as well be black.


He slept then and dreamt of a man
who slept with his glasses on,
the easier to find them when he woke.
The room seemed smaller,
the wind against the corner
of the house stronger.
If the heart is a house, he thought,
it is rented to strangers
who leave it empty.
If the heart is a house,
it is also the darkness around it
through which a black bird flies, unseen,
and unseeing, into a window,
beating and beating its wings against the glass.

Postlude:
The Guardian​ 
(27 Mar. 2020)  
A commentary on loneliness in the coronavirus age:
We are all Edward Hopper Paintings Now
​

To see & read
​Tap
 HERE

FOSTERING BRASS CHAMBER MUSIC

The score and parts for Rudy Shackelford's Nighthawks for brass quintet, along with the entire ABQ music library, are available for research and performance from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music Library.
Direct access to the Annapolis Brass Quintet Special Collection @ Oberlin
Tap Here​
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