Score (61 pp.) + Parts (163 pp.) / Includes two-piano version for rehearsal

Format: PDF

Duration: ca. 10 1/2 min.

Catalogue No.: 001

Program Note

The Academic Festival Rag for Piano and Wind Ensemble has gone through a number of changes since I composed the first version of the piece over 20 years ago. It began its life as a large chamber ensemble piece that featured a prominent piano part. The original Academic Festival Rag was composed in 1989 and was scored for eleven instruments (by coincidence, the same number of instruments Stravinsky used for his Ragtime, composed in 1918). Academic Festival Rag was the result of a commission from Mimi Bravar, Chair of the Music Department of Phillips Exeter Academy, and my intention was to compose a piece which could be played by the Academy’s combined instrumental music faculty members. I further hoped to make the piece fitting and proper for that institution while not being too serious about it. I decided to use the musical letters from the name, Phillips Exeter Academy, and this yielded the following melody: B-Eb-E-E-E-A-C-A-D-E.

This method has been used many times in music history, most famously by J. S. Bach in his fugue which uses the musical letters, B-A-C-H, in Die Kunst der Fuge. The letter “H” is used to designate B natural in German; the letter “B” means B flat. Importantly for my piece, the letter “S” in German signifies the note E flat (Es). Robert Schumann is another composer to whom I am indebted in this regard (see the use of musical letters in his Carnaval, Op.9).

The melody mentioned above, B-E flat-E-E-E-C-A-D-E, is used in various transpositions, inversions, and retrogrades to produce the most important tunes and motives in my composition. In addition, Ms. Bravar suggested I might also use the tune, Gaudeamus Igitur, as it is a popular school melody. Brahms had used this same melody at the end of his Academic Festival Overture. By fortunate coincidence, Gaudeamus Igitur contains three repeated notes in its second bar that resemble the three E’s in my letter-based melody, and its opening motive, a perfect fourth down followed by a perfect fourth up, contains the same intervals as the end points of my melody and its retrograde when they follow one another (i.e. B-E-E-B), and especially when the inversion is followed by the retrograde inversion (i.e. E-B-B-E). I would also like to acknowledge the inspiration I took from Ives, Stravinsky, Bartok, Ligeti, and others whose “sick” chorales inispired me to fashion my own (with apologies to J. S. Bach).

In 1990 I made a two-piano version of the original 8-minute work, and that arrangement was made possible by a summer stipend from the College of Liberal Arts of the University of New Hampshire.

I was reminded of the appeal of the “one-movement piano concertino” genre by a performance I heard of George Gershwin’s Second Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra. In 2009 I began work on a new expanded version of the Academic Festival Rag that would give the piano the role of a soloist while still allowing for a chamber music type of collaboration between the soloist and an orchestra. After I added some new sections to the piece, the concertino version follows a course through an introduction (which includes a piano cadenza), a ragtime section, a chorale (the “Phillips Exeter Academy Chorale”), a second piano cadenza, a climactic swing section, and finally, a coda. Of this most recent expanded version, there exist three instrumentations: 1) for two pianos, 2) for piano and orchestra, and 3) for piano and wind ensemble. The duration is approximately 10 1/2 minutes.

-----C. Kies, April 2012