Dr. Simon Shiao, faculty coordinator
MOZART: Flute Quartet No. 1 in D Major, K. 285
I. Allegro [YouTube Performance]
II. Adagio [YouTube Performance]
- Antonio Herbert, flute
Julia Sedloff, violin
Tyler Russom, viola
Lisa Coyne, cello
II. Allegro [YouTube Performance]
- Chih Cheng, Violin
- Yukino Miyake, piano
GRANADOS: Zarabanda [YouTube Performance (saxophones)]
PIAZZOLLA: Tango No. 3 (Adiós Nonino) [YouTube Performance]
BRUBECK: Blue Rondo a la Turk [YouTube Performance]
- Daniel Dickinson
James Hall
Brandon Mosley
Sean Taylor (bass clarinet)
I. Allegro [YouTube Performance]
- Julia Sedloff, violin
- Chelsea Chacon, piano
I. Allegro [YouTube Performance]
II.Intermezzo: Allegro [YouTube Performance]
- Chih Cheng, violin
Jessye Thacker, viola
Hannah Hoffman, cello
Yukino Miyake, piano
SELECTED RELATED LIBRARY RESOURCES
The University of North Florida is home to one of the most recognized performance-based music programs in the country. With an emphasis on American Music and comprised of dedicated faculty members who are recognized artist/practitioners in their fields, UNF’s Music Flagship Program offers a stimulating and personal atmosphere in which students can study and grow. The UNF Music Flagship Program is a limited access program offering Bachelor of Music (B.M.) degrees in Performance with concentrations in Voice, Piano, Piano Pedagogy, Woodwinds, Brass, Percussion, Strings, Music Technology and Production, a B.M. in Jazz Studies, a Bachelor of Music Education degree and Master of Music Degrees in Conducting, Voice, Piano, Woodwinds, Brass, Percussion and Jazz Studies. Since its beginnings in 1972, the department's limited access status has allowed for a more personal rapport between teacher and student while upholding the highest standards of musical excellence. The countless awards and endorsements that the Department has received and continues to receive is testament to the caliber of the UNF Music Flagship Program as one of the very best anywhere. UNF's Music Flagship Program is a fully accredited member of the National Association of Schools of Music (NASM). - BIO 780.92 MOZART 2013 Mozart / Paul Johnson.
- BIO 780.92 BEETHOVEN 2013 Beethoven : the man revealed / John Suchet.
- BIO 780.92 BRAHMS 2001 Brahms / Malcolm MacDonald.
- 785 KELLER 2011 Chamber music : a listener's guide / James M. Keller.
- 785 C555cha 1992 Chamber music : notes for players / by James Christensen.
- 788.62193 CAPPELLI 2007 The clarinet / Frank Cappelli.
- CD VIOLIN P451 V795 EMI 1999 Violin sonatas [sound recording] / Beethoven, Franck.
- M461 .M939 S35 1979 Three quartets for flute, violin, viola, cello / W.A. Mozart [SCORE]
Dr. Simon Shiao is a versatile performer who has appeared at Carnegie Hall as a recitalist and with both string quartet and orchestra. He has performed in concerts around the world and has been heard in broadcasts of CNN's Science and Technology and Public Radio's Live on WGBH. Dr. Shiao was soloist and co-concertmaster with Miami’s New World Symphony, and currently performs with the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra and the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra in Wyoming. At UNF he teaches violin and viola and is Director of Orchestral Studies, and also chairs the solo competition for the Florida Chapter of the American String Teachers Association. He holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the Manhattan School of Music and Masters and Doctoral degrees from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Mozart Quartet Coach
Adjunct Professor of Violin Melissa Barrett has been the Associate Concert Master of the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra since 1990 and has performed numerous solos with the orchestra. Prior to her tenure with J-Sym, Melissa was an instructor at Sam Houston State University and performed with the Houston Grand Opera Orchestra. She also was a member of the Savannah Symphony Orchestra and has participated in numerous summer music festivals, including Aspen, Boulder, Lake George Opera, Sandpoint, Banff and Sarasota. Melissa holds degrees from Michigan State University and the Eastman School of Music. In addition to her students at UNF, she teaches at the First Coast Community Music School and maintains a private studio of middle and high school students.
Clarinet Quartet Coach
Committed to the advancement of the next generation of clarinetists, Sunshine Simmons receives accolades as a performer throughout the country. Comfortable with the entire range of instruments in the clarinet family, she holds positions with the Oregon Ballet Theatre, the New Mexico Philharmonic, the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra and Chicago Philharmonic. In addition to participation in numerous national and international music festivals, she has performed with symphony orchestras throughout the Midwest, and with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Santa Fe Opera and Chicago Opera Theater. Dr. Simmons holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Carnegie Mellon University, and both Master of Music and Doctor of Music degrees from Northwestern University.
Sonatas Coaches
Dr. Erin Bennett is Associate Professor of Piano and Pedagogy at the University of North Florida, where she teaches applied and class piano, piano accompanying, and coordinates the new degree program in Piano Pedagogy. During her summers she teaches at Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan, and has maintained private piano studios in Florida, Ohio, and Texas. She previously served as Interim Coordinator of Secondary Piano and Piano Pedagogy at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and as adjunct instructor at Rice University. Dr. Bennett has performed as soloist and chamber musician throughout the U.S. and Europe, including frequent performances with her trio, Serafini. She received degrees in piano performance from Rice University and the University of Florida, and pursued dual cognates in music history and piano pedagogy at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.
Dr. Nick Curry is the Associate Professor of Cello at the University of North Florida and serves as the Music Department's coordinator of scholarships and admissions. Additionally, he is the string area coordinator and a founding member of Trio Florida. From 2004-2007 he was professor of cello at the University of South Dakota. Dr. Curry received his Bachelor of Music from Vanderbilt, and was a teaching assistant at Northwestern University while earning his Master's and Doctoral degrees. Nick has played concerts in Taiwan, Turkey, Africa, Spain, Italy, Slovenia, France, Austria and throughout the United States. As a sought-after clinician and adjudicator he has presented in national conferences, and he also plans special projects for the state chapter of the American String Teachers Association. In April of 2006, Nick performed on “The King” Amati cello (ca. 1538—the oldest known cello) during a broadcast of Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion on National Public Radio.
PROGRAM NOTES by Edward Lein, Music Librarian
JAXCAT entries for MOZART
JAXCAT entries for FRANCK
JAXCAT entries for GRANADOS
JAXCAT entries for BRUBECK
JAXCAT entries for BEETHOVEN
JAXCAT entries for BRAHMS
JAXCAT entries for CHAMBER MUSIC (Subject)
Austrian-born Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), unquestionably one of the greatest composers in history, began his career touring Europe as a 6-year-old piano prodigy and absorbed and mastered all the contemporary musical trends he was exposed to along the way. Mozart completed his Flute Quartet No. 1 in D Major, K. 285 on Christmas Day 1777. As were Mozart’s second and third flute quartets, it was commissioned by a Ferdinand De Jean, a wealthy amateur flutist Mozart had met through Johann Baptist Wendling, flutist in the Mannheim court orchestra. Sandwiched between the first-movement’s sonata form and the Rondeau finale is an aria (in B Minor) for flute with pizzicato strings, which conjures images of a troubadour serenading with guitar.JAXCAT entries for FRANCK
JAXCAT entries for GRANADOS
JAXCAT entries for BRUBECK
JAXCAT entries for BEETHOVEN
JAXCAT entries for BRAHMS
JAXCAT entries for CHAMBER MUSIC (Subject)
César Franck (1822-1890) was a Belgian-born composer, organist and teacher who became a central figure of late French Romanticism. Franck’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Major shows the influence of Wagner’s chromaticism and Liszt’s use of recurring and transformed thematic material, but Franck melded these into a style all his own. While it was composed as a wedding gift for the Belgian violin virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe in 1886, the Sonata is equally a virtuoso showpiece for the piano, as the stormy second-movement Allegro clearly demonstrates. It is considered by many critics to be not only the finest French violin sonata, but perhaps the finest violin sonata, period.
Enrique Granados (1867-1916) was born in the Catalonia region of Spain, and his music is so characteristically "Spanish" that he is regarded as one of his homeland's most representative composers. Granados was one of the greatest concert pianists of his time so it is not surprising that piano music dominates his compositional output, including perhaps his most famous work, Goyescas (1902-11), a suite inspired by the paintings of Francisco Goya. Arranged for four clarinets by Dutch horn player Sjoerd Van der Veen (b. 1970), the Zarabanda (also known as Fandango) is the third of Granados's Danzas españolas, op. 37, composed in 1890 for piano solo.
Ástor Piazzolla (1921-1992) pretty much single-handedly reinvented the Argentine national dance, the tango, transforming it into a new style aptly called nuevo tango (new tango). Born in Argentina, he spent most of his childhood in New York City, where his father taught him to play the bandoneón, a type of concertina common to most tango ensembles. When Piazzolla returned to Argentina in 1937 he played bandoneón with some of the leading bands in Buenos Aires. He also studied composition, first with Alberto Ginastera and later with legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Boulanger found Piazzolla's music well-crafted but too derivative of other composers, so after hearing some of the music he wrote for his cabaret band she convinced him to toss out his other works and concentrate on what was uniquely his own. It is estimated that Piazzolla composed over 3,000 pieces and recorded about 500 of them himself. Tango No. 3 is an arrangement by French clarinetist Florent Héau (b. 1968) of Adiós Nonino, a song Piazzolla wrote in 1959 in memory of his father who recently had died.
Recognized by the Library of Congress as “a living legend,” jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck (1920-2012) received his first training as a classical musician but solidified his truest calling during World War II after volunteering to play piano for a Red Cross show. He was such a hit that he was ordered to stay off the battlefield and form a band! In 1952 he formed the Dave Brubeck Quartet, and in 1954 became the second jazz artist to appear on the cover of TIME (after Louis Armstrong's 1949 cover). Unusual for a jazz piece, Brubeck's Blue Rondo à la Turk is in 9/8 time; it was included in the 1959 release Time Out, the first jazz album to sell more than a million copies. This transcription is by French clarinetist and photographer Gilles Swierc (b. 1964).
The works of the transcendent German-born composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) have come to represent the culmination of the Classical era, and during his "late" period (ca. 1815-1827) he forged the way beyond the Classical tradition into the Romantic, despite the gradual and eventually total degeneration of his hearing. Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 5, op. 24 dates from 1801, placing it in the composer’s “early” period, but contemporary critics were already noticing some of his innovations even if they didn’t always understand them. Among Beethoven’s 10 violin sonatas, the fifth is second in popularity only to his “Kreutzer” Sonata (No. 9).
The great German composer Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) began sketching his Piano Quartet in G Minor, op. 25 in 1856, but didn't complete it until 1861. In 1937, Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg made an arrangement of the quartet’s four movements for full orchestra, which in 1966 the New York City Ballet used for a dance piece appropriately titled Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet. Although Brahms's first-movement Allegro includes typical sonata-form techniques, the composer does shake things up a little. The exposition isn't repeated (as was typical with Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven), but Brahms begins his development section by repeating the opening bars in the home key—a little trick to surprise listeners when the movement seemingly veers off course (and a technique he would later use in his Fourth Symphony). The second-movement Intermezzo stands in for the more "usual" scherzo, and like most scherzo movements is structured as a song form (ABA).
