Wind Ensemble

Tonight’s program is a preview performance of the Wind Ensemble’s concert at the College Band Directors National Association national conference in Fort Worth, Texas on March 28, 2025. In advance of that performance, the Wind Ensemble will perform six concerts on a tour that will span the southern United States with stops in Charlotte, Atlanta, Tuscaloosa, New Orleans, Houston, and Dallas. The program, with compositions by UNCG alum Dai Wei (’15 MM) and Ida Gotkovsky, the poetry of Kim Addonizio, and the voices of Dai Wei and UNCG faculty member Lindsay Kesselman, is an acknowledgement of UNCG’s legacy of women’s education and a celebration of women’s voices more broadly.

In 1892, UNCG opened its doors as the State Normal and Industrial School with music courses as part of the original curriculum. For the first seventy-two years of its existence, the university only served women before becoming co-educational in 1964—the year after the university was renamed as the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Today, the university’s population stands at roughly 67% women. Tonight’s program serves as a reminder and reaffirmation of UNCG’s mission of educating women in North Carolina and beyond.

The program is also bound together through elements of cyclicity and repetition. In some musical cultures, repetition is used to promote and create community—to instill a sense of collectivism; in others, it may be used to express the infinite and indescribable qualities of reality. The ephemeral and fleeting nature of music necessitates cyclicity in order to promote understanding, particularly in the long-form music found in the Western classical tradition. In music, however, repetition is never simply repetition—to promote understanding, the repetition is changed, or the listener is changed by experiencing the repetition. Just as poet Kim Addonizio describes the simple experience of watching the sky “darkening, then brightening” over the course of a day, sometimes we notice changes in the musical cycles before us and other times we notice changes within ourselves. In other words, does the cycle change or do we?

Each of the three pieces on the CBDNA program feature elements of cyclicity and symmetry. Dai Wei’s Samsaric Dance is inspired by the Tibetan Buddhism conception of existence. Over the course of the piece, multiple musical elements emerge, return, interact with each other, and continuously transform before the piece eventually rests on a C♯ that symbolizes the oneness and unity of all existence. In this sense, cyclicity refers to the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth—like a wheel rolling forward and backwards towards a possible but never promised nirvana.

Christopher Cerrone’s Darkening, Then Brightening is built in an arch form but one shaped like a valley. The descent of the first three movements leads towards the return of the C♯ from Samsaric Dance now transformed into the sound of inevitable descent. While the listener and singer ascend towards the light in the final movements, the promise of redemption lies just beyond their grasp as the piece suddenly stops. The valley was just too deep.

While elements of formal cyclicity are clearly evident in both movements of Ida Gotkovsky’s Symphonie pour orchestre d’harmonie, her intermingling of octatonic, whole tone, and quartal pitch material throughout the symphony is of particular interest. This kind of symmetrical pitch organization, one also favored by her composition teacher Olivier Messiaen, creates melodic and harmonic structures free of any sense of a fundamental pitch, occurring in looping cycles without a clear beginning or end. While traditional tonal music relies on asymmetrical pitch structures to establish hierarchy, Gotkovsky’s pitch organization lends her music an almost otherworldly quality while remaining relatively consonant even within a modernist framework.

The chord that ends the piece, and thus the concert, is a quartal harmony built on C-naturals in the soprano and bass voices. The chord’s brightness and power seem far removed from the C♯ featured so prominently in the previous two pieces. The cycle has ended lower in pitch but perhaps more hopeful in tone? Darkening, then brightening… has the cycle changed, or have we?

A performance such as this is an incredible undertaking and requires a great deal of effort and resources. Thank you to the following for their support of the UNCG Wind Ensemble’s performance at CBDNA.

• John R. Locke Endowment for Excellence in Music
• Betty Johnson Cheek Fine Arts Endowment
• Dr. J. Alan Boyette, Provost, UNCG
• Dr. bruce d. mcclung, Dean, UNCG College of Visual and Performing Arts
• Dr. Charles Young, Director, UNCG School of Music
• Dr. Catherine Keen Hock, Assistant Director, UNCG School of Music
• Prof. Lindsay Kesselman, Assistant Professor of Voice and Choral Music, UNCG School of Music
• Brad McMillan, Director of Outreach Programs and Marketing Coordinator, UNCG School of Music
• Lyndsey Dean, Ensembles Manager, UNCG School of Music
• Dr. Kevin M. Geraldi, Director of Bands, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign
• Dr. John R. Locke, Director of Bands Emeritus, UNCG School of Music
• Dr. Carole Ott Coelho, Director of Choral Activities, UNCG School of Music
• Dr. Jungho Kim, Director of Orchestras, UNCG School of Music
• Neil Shepherd, Business Officer, UNCG School of Music
• Dennis Hopson, Hall Manager and Recording Engineer, UNCG School of Music
• Sharneisha Joyner, Building Manager and Instrument Inventory Specialist, UNCG School of Music
• Adella Dzitko-Carlson, Administrative Assistant and Personnel Officer, UNCG School of Music
• Dr. Nick Lewis, Admissions and Student Services Specialist, UNCG School of Music
• Stephen Duncan, Piano Technician, UNCG School of Music
• Patty Saunders, DMA Conducting Student, UNCG School of Music
• Dalton Guin, MM Conducting Student, UNCG School of Music
• Kat Smith, MM Conducting Student, UNCG School of Music

Lindsay Kesselman is a two-time GRAMMY-nominated soprano known for her warm, collaborative spirit and investment in personal, intimate communication with audiences. She regularly collaborates with orchestras, wind symphonies, chamber ensembles, opera/theater companies, and new music ensembles across the United States, often premiering, touring, and recording new works composed for her by living composers. She is a passionate advocate for contemporary music and has commissioned/premiered over one hundred works to date.   

Recent and upcoming highlights include the premiere of Darkening, then Brightening by Christopher Cerrone with the University of Illinois Wind Symphony; the wind transcription of Caroline Shaw’s Is a Rose, Energy in All Directions by Kenneth Frazelle with Sandbox Percussion at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center; the role of Anna in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Seven Deadly Sins with the Charlotte Symphony; the role of Ada Lovelace in the new opera Galaxies in Her Eyes by Mark Lanz Weiser and Amy S. Punt; Astronautica: Voices of Women in Space with Voices of Ascension; the John Corigliano 80th birthday celebration at National Sawdust (2018); a leading role in Louis Andriessen’s opera Theatre of the World with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Dutch National Opera; and an international tour of Einstein on the Beach with the Philip Glass Ensemble (2012–2015).  

Kesselman is Assistant Professor of Voice and Choral Music at the UNC Greensboro School of Music. Kesselman holds degrees in voice performance and music education from Rice University and Michigan State University. She is represented by Trudy Chan at Black Tea Music and lives in Charlotte with her husband, Kevin Noe, and son, Rowan.

The UNCG Wind Ensemble is a highly select concert band of fifty performers majoring in music at the UNCG School of Music. Performers in the current Wind Ensemble are drawn from sixteen states, Slovenia, and Hong Kong. The ensemble has enjoyed a distinguished record of performance throughout its history. In January 1992, the UNCG Wind Ensemble performed “A Tribute to John Philip Sousa” to a capacity crowd of 2,700 at the Concert Hall of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Twice, the Wind Ensemble earned critical acclaim from The Washington Post following concerts in the nation’s capital. The Wind Ensemble has performed throughout the eastern United States in recent years including the first-ever performance, in 1987, by a North Carolina collegiate ensemble in Lincoln Center, New York City. The Wind Ensemble performed that same year in West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. The Wind Ensemble has recorded nineteen commercially-available albums which have received widespread praise.