The County Line Woodwind Ensemble
The County Line Woodwind Ensemble consists of Gwen Rakoff (flute), Gary Smith (clarinet), and George Smith (bassoon), all active musicians in the Huntsville area. Gwen is the band director at Journey Middle School in Madison, performs frequently in the area, and has degrees in music education and flute performance. By day, an account manager in the tech world, Gary Smith studied clarinet with Dr. Bill Bigham and has played clarinet and saxophone in several ensembles. George Smith studied bassoon with Dr. John Jinright while at Troy University, and is working with the Alabama Department of Revenue while also completing a master’s of accountancy. Locally, he’s played with the Madison City Community Orchestra and the Twickenham Winds.
June 13 Program
Tonight’s program will contain a number of different music styles – from Beethoven to Cole Porter! A woodwind trio is frankly an ensemble which is of necessity going to play a lot of transcriptions from piano and string ensembles. The flute and clarinet mainly cover soprano and alto ranges – there is a lot of overlap but you’ll generally hear the flute on the top lines (like violin) and the clarinet is often harmonizing on a 2nd voice that might be 2nd violin, viola, or occasionally down there with the upper end of the ‘cello. The bassoon is solidly a tenor instrument (like a ‘cello), and you’ll often hear it anchoring melody lines with straight quarter or eighth note beats (but everyone gets a few melody lines here).
In our opinion, the smaller an ensemble is, the shorter the piece should be. An orchestra or large wind ensemble has several sections that can take melodies and themes, pass them around, and bring it back home. Full symphonies are often works written later in a composer’s life, when they may have decided that just the coda ought to be longer than Stairway to Heaven. But for a performance like this, “brevity is the soul of wit.” We’ll play one 20 minute piece in four movements, Beethoven’s Trio for Two Oboes and English Horns Op. 87, and the rest of the pieces will be 2-5 minutes long.
Another way to keep it interesting is to demonstrate a number of musical styles, and we’ll play not only a number of contrasting styles of music traditionally considered chamber music, but also a tango and a handful of familiar tunes!
When to Applaud
We only bring this up because audience members get uptight about it. Does anyone worry about this at a Taylor Swift concert? You should applaud any time:
- We aren’t right in the middle of playing something.
- You feel like it.
If you want more rules, Emily Post has an article on this.
Music We’ll Be Performing
We have a bit more than an hour’s worth of music, and we want to keep our program to an hour so you have time to enjoy the rest of the museum. So some pieces from this list may not be played. We won’t announce every tune, but we’ll let you know if we skip something.
German Dance (Franz Joseph Haydn, 1732-1809)
Largo (Antonín Leopold Dvořák, 1841-1904) – you may have heard this melody as a vocal – Goin’ Home, with lyrics by William A Fisher (1861-1948)
Scarborough Fair – a very old English folk song, often played and sung by very old folk singers.
Tango in D, from España, Op. 165, No. 2 (Isaac Albéniz, 1860-1909) – Originally written for piano, but often performed as a classical guitar piece.
Trio Op. 87 (originally for two Oboes and English Horn) (Ludwig van Beethoven 1770-1827)
- Allegro
- Adagio
- Menuetto
- Finale
Loch Lomond – Scottish Folk Song
Songs by Cole Porter (1891-1964)
Cole Porter contributed several songs to the “Great American Songbook.” Usually written for Broadway shows or for film, the best of these tunes became standards performed by big bands, cocktail crooners, and headliners from Frank Sinatra to Harry Connick Jr., and have lived on when the shows they came from were forgotten.
- Anything Goes (from the show Anything Goes)
- I’ve Got You Under My Skin (from Born to Dance)
- It’s Delovely (from Red, Hot and Blue!)
Elves’ Dance from Lyric Pieces, Book 1, Op. 12 (Edvard Grieg, 1843-1907) – Originally from a suite of piano pieces.
Allegro from Sonatina 6 (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1756-1791) – The suite this is taken from may have originally been scored for two clarinets and bassoon. It’s often heard as a piano piece today.
Sarabande and Corrente (Arcangelo Corelli, 1653-1713) – this may be the most distinctly baroque piece we’ll play. Corelli was a virtuosi violinist and an influential conductor and composer whose “music was key in the development of the modern genres of sonata and concerto” and even “establishing the preeminence of the violin.” (Wikipedia)
German Dance No. 3, K605 (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1756-1791) – Mozart wrote these in Vienna, relatively late in his short life. Mozart loved to dance himself, and wrote these for the Imperial court of Emperor Joseph II.
American Folk Suite (Arranged by R. Hervig, 1917-2010) – This piece is the closest we’ll come to a “harmonically challenging” arrangement of old American folk tunes, typical of mid-20th century ensemble arrangements. Mr. Hervig may have been listening to Aaron Copland (1900-1990) at the time.
Passepied No. 1 from Orchestral Suite No. 1 in C major, BWV 1066 (Johann Sebastian Bach, 1685-1750)
Country Dance (originally in D Major), WoO 15, no. 1 (Ludwig van Beethoven 1770-1827) – Originally a piano composition in D Major, we will be playing it as a woodwind trio in Eb Major tonight.
With prolific composers and books which collect and arrange transcriptions, sometimes the catalog numbers are not provided and Google just fails you. We’ll close out tonight with some lovely tunes from two Austrians named Franz, who each wrote hundreds of pieces like these:
- Menuetto and Trio (Franz Joseph Haydn, 1732-1809)
- Menuet (Franz Schubert 1797-1828)
- Andante from Trio in G (Franz Joseph Haydn, 1732-1809)
- Finale from Trio in C (Franz Joseph Haydn, 1732-1809)