Woodwind Quintet opens new series at Pellissippi State

Our new Q-Series makes its debut at 7:00 pm Thursday night at Pellissippi State! The KSO Woodwind Quintet will perform music of Bizet, Gunther Schuller, Dvorak and others at PSTCC’s Clayton Performing Arts Center in a FREE concert.

I know better than to expound upon a subject that I, a string player, really know very little about (woodwind quintet repertoire). I’m much more qualified to tell you what marvelous people our principal Quintet are. Flutist Ebonee Thomas and horn player Jeffery Whaley have only been on the scene for a couple years, and bassoonist Aaron Apaza only a couple months, but they have already improved Knoxville’s quality of life in beautiful ways. By comparison, I knew oboist Phyllis Secrist and clarinetist Gary Sperl before I moved here (Spoleto ‘85). They and I have been playing in the KSO for a combined 103 years. We have seen it all.

The works to be performed will be the Passacaille by French composer Adrien Barthe, Bizet’s suite Jeux d’enfants “(Child’s Play),” Paul Valjean’s 1955 Dance Suite, and Gunther Schuller’s Suite for Woodwind Quintet.  The concert will conclude with arrangements of three Gershwin piano preludes and Dvořák’s “American” String Quartet.

The Dvořák is, of course, a staple in the string quartet literature, as well as one of the earliest nods by a major composer to the United States. Those who know the score will be interested to hear who gets to do what.

American composer Gunther Schuller was a guest conductor for my undergrad orchestra at the Hartt School in Connecticut. We performed a large-scale work of his whose title I forget, but it was outrageously complex. The way he stored his baton in his hair was quite amusing, as was his music. I remember one day, it was a Wednesday.....

I drove an orange and white VW bus back then. (This was in Hartford, I know, but it was 1979, before the big basketball rivalry started). I needed to practice Mr. Schuller’s music; it was all over the cello, and still is, but I couldn’t find a practice room. Luckily my bus had the middle seat removed and I was able to shed some riffs in it. But in the meantime a storm had gathered, and right as rehearsal was supposed to start, sheets of rain and frequent cloud-to-ground lightening all around me caused me to choose between education and death. I stayed in the bus, and was a little late to rehearsal, but come to find out later that the Bradley Air Museum– and many area homes and businesses as close as  five miles away– were destroyed by what has been called “the 9th most destructive tornado in American history.” A link to some photos of the damage can be found here.

I haven’t performed any of Mr. Schuller’s music since then, but with this memory, I am happy to leave such a performance to others this time around. I’m going to leave it to the WIND players...