Ravinia 2024 Issue 2

BRIAN RAPHAEL NABORS (b.1991) Distant Worlds Scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals, suspended cymbal, xylophone, vibraphone, and strings “Like many kids growing up, I had a very vivid imagination,” composer Brian Raphael Nabors recalled. “One of my greatest interests, which still remains to this day, is the fascination with other planets and our eventual exploration of worlds outside our own. I believe the most amazing and humbling discovery we’ve made as a species has been that we are just one small planet in a star system of billions, in a galaxy among billions! I’m always looking for new ways to explore this incredible fact musically.” Distant Worlds represents Nabors’s most recent musical expression of his planetary fixation. Originally conceived for string orchestra, Dis- tant Worlds was commissioned by the Nation- al Orchestral Institute + Festival as part of the K–12 New Music Project at the University of Maryland, College Park. The K–12 New Music Project commissions composers from histor- ically excluded populations to write works for elementary, middle school, high school, and youth orchestras. Scores produced as part of this initiative are available to schools from the Amer- ican Composers Alliance. Nabors continued: “Writing for high school musicians is a joy, as I get to share much of that remaining fascination with the next generation in hopes that our great universal communicator, music, can continually inspire us to ‘reach for the stars’ in whatever we do in life.” The full-orchestra version of Distant Worlds presented on this concert was commis- sioned by the National Orchestral Institute for a side-by-side performance with the National Seminario Ravinia Orchestra, comprising stu- dents from El Sistema–inspired programs across North America and internationally. Brian Raphael Nabors As a child growing up in Birmingham, AL, Na- bors found spiritual and artistic inspiration in Baptist worship, a reverence for nature deep- ened by outdoor activities with his father, and a synesthetic association between colors and musical keys, days, and months. Equally cru- cial to his later formation as a composer was an inquisitiveness and openness to wide-ranging musical styles such as gospel, jazz, R&B, funk, and classical. This rich collective of experiences coalesced in a vibrant, expressive, polychromat- ic musical style. Nabors studied music theory and composition as an undergraduate in the Samford University School of the Arts in Birmingham. He pursued graduate studies at the University of Cincin- nati College-Conservatory of Music, receiving master’s and doctoral degrees in composition. A 2020 Fulbright scholarship supported further studies with Australian composer Carl Vine at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Nabors won first prize in the Rapido! National Compo- sition Contest—presented by the Atlanta Cham- ber Players and Antinori Foundation—and received fellowships with the American Com- posers Orchestra EarShot program (Detroit Symphony) and Nashville Symphony’s biennial Composer Lab & Workshop—all in 2019. In ad- dition, he was a 2021 Composition Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center. Since Fall 2022, Na- bors has served as Assistant Professor of Com- position at Louisiana State University. Though Nabors has written his share of music in traditional forms such as string quartet, so- nata, theme and variations, and concertos, the largest portion of his compositions engage some element of storytelling, often drawing from his cultural roots, personal past, or explorations of time and space. The orchestral Of Earth & Sky: Tales from the Motherland (2023) is a four-move- ment festival of Africa, comprising three legends and a celebratory finale. Kwanzaa Suite (2021) for tenor and string quartet dedicates one move- ment to each of theThe Seven Principles (Nguzo Saba) of Kwanzaa. The elegy for viola, cello, and harp Freedom Is Breathing (2020) is a tribute to the life of George Floyd. Caged , a work for string quintet (two cellos), was created as a gift of mu- sic during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nabors por- trays the death of a red giant star in Supernova (2017) for electronic media. JOHN WILLIAMS (b.1932) Great Movie Adventures (arranged by Michael Sweeney) Scored for a five-part ensemble with flexible instrumentation for brass, woodwinds, percussion, and optional strings No single title encapsulates the versatile talents of John Williams—pops conductor and pianist extraordinaire , award-winning film composer, and Olympic-caliber American musician. A na- tive of Flushing, NY, he began piano lessons at the age of 8. Williams first experienced the glit- ter of Hollywood after his family moved to Los Angeles. For a period, he served as arranger and conductor of the US Air Force Band. Williams returned to New York after military service for one year of studies at Juilliard with renowned piano pedagogue Rosina Lhevinne. Discretion- ary hours were spent playing in nightclubs or recording studios. His formal education contin- ued at UCLA with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and his freelance activities moved into movie and television studios. Williams developed quickly as a composer, learning tricks of the trade from Hollywood’s finest craftsmen: Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Newman, and Franz Waxman. His first assign- ments during the 1960s included weekly music for the “Kraft Theatre.” Independent film proj- ects became more common during the next de- cade. Among these were the great disaster mov- ies The Poseidon Adventure , Earthquake , and The Towering Inferno . Williams’s initial collabo- rations with director George Lucas resulted in a record-breaking series of science-fiction action films: Star Wars (Episode IV, 1977) The Empire Strikes Back (Episode V, 1980), and Return of the Jedi (Episode VI, 1983). Almost simultaneously, Williams developed a professional association with director Steven Spielberg. Their wide-rang- ing movie ventures began with Close Encounters of the Third Kind , continued with the Indiana Jones series ( Raiders of the Lost Ark , Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ), and culminated in Ju- rassic Park , Schindler’s List , and The Lost World: Jurassic Park . Williams’s film scores contain an eclectic blend of a sophisticated jazz idiom, the formalism of the classics (especially Wagnerian music dra- mas), programmatic aspects of Richard Strauss, and a lush orchestral sound influenced by Wag- ner, Mahler, and Strauss. Modernist techniques, such as Debussyan impressionism and atonal John Williams RAVINIAMAGAZINE • JULY 1 – JULY 21, 2024 68 LEFTERISPHOTO(WILLIAMS)