Fanfare Overture for Orchestra (3')

Claude had just arrived in South Carolina to prepare for the Spoleto Festival USA, where he'd be conducting the Spoleto Festival All-State Youth Orchestra in May, and he invited me to compose a short fanfare-like overture. A wonderful opportunity, except he needed the score and set of parts in 3 weeks.

I got right to work, combining a fanfare motive for the trumpets with a jazzrock groove accompaniment, developing the interplay between the squarish stop-time fanfare, and the forward-moving syncopated strings working like a "rhythm section."

The middle section of this A-B-A form is a big brass chorale with a driving beat, another interplay between the fanfare-like brass and the forward-driving other instruments. Actually this theme was taken from a rock song I'd recently written in conjunction with several 12-year-old poets as an enrichment project at Philadelphia's Greenfield School. The Spoleto Festival's youth orchestra enjoyed playing an orchestral setting of a song whose opening lyrics are "Lunch at school, it ain't so great, it's something you could really learn to hate."

–  AUDIO EXCERPT: Daniel Dorff conducting the Haddonfield Symphony