Composer David Maslanka
David Maslanka (1943-2017)
Photo: Sue Rissberger Photography
The premiere program of Northshore Concert Band’s 2025/26 Season, Enduring Voices, features the Finale from David Maslanka’s Symphony No. 2.
The Band has a long and significant history with composer David Maslanka, stemming from NCB founder John P. Paynter commissioning the five-movement work A Child's Garden of Dreams. The piece, composed in 1981 and dedicated to Paynter and his wife, Marietta, premiered in 1982. In a tribute to this legacy, NCB performed its final movement on April 23, 2017, to mark the 35th anniversary of its premiere. The ensemble has continued to perform Maslanka's music over the decades, including a performance of California during the 2016/17 Season and Traveler during the 2022/23 Season. This connection will extend into the 70th season, with the Finale from Maslanka's Symphony No. 2, on November 2, 2025.
Mr. Maslanka offered up this description of A Child's Garden of Dreams:
Paynter had asked me to write a piece that was the wind equivalent of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra. This was a daunting challenge but I said “Sure!” The five movements of A Child’s Garden of Dreams are based on dreams of a young girl who, unknown to her, was at the end of her life. The dreams were presented and discussed by the psychologist, Carl Jung, in his book, Man and His Symbols. The dreams are about transition and transformation, a prefiguring of her passing. Jung found it both disturbing and fascinating that such dreams could come through a child. I have long been fascinated by ideas of transformation, in this life, and beyond, and my music is an attempt to capture the central energy of each of the dreams. Sometimes there is graphic illustration as in the third dream where animals grow to an enormous size and devour the girl, and sometimes there is a subtle parallel flow of music and philosophical thought, as in the second dream: “A drunken woman falls into the water and comes out renewed and sober.” What is evoked by both the dreams and the music is a much larger view of life and death than we normally have.
David Maslanka and Mallory Thompson, California world premiere, 2016
Maslanka’s work California premiered by the California All-State Wind Symphony in 2016 and was conducted by Northshore Concert Band’s Conductor and Artistic Director Mallory Thompson.
He described this work:
California was written for the the 2016 California All-State Band, and the premiere performance was conducted in San Jose by Mallory Thompson. Music education in California had seen a revival after years of funding cuts, and there was a renewed statewide sense of possibility in public school music teachers. I was asked to write a piece that might reflect some of that new-found energy and purpose. My thinking went deeper to touch some fundamental element of the strength of the California land and its people. The music is quietly and beautifully expressive at the outset, and rises to moments of great intensity before settling once more to a quiet close.
David Maslanka’s creative process was rooted in meditation and his dialogue with the unconscious. Reflecting on the Second Symphony, he remarked:
Symphony No. 2 showed up because the time was right in me to release a lot of old emotional burdens. I followed my instincts every step of the way and wrote what felt right ... It’s one of these pieces in which the door to the unconscious got blown open and all this stuff came out.
One year before his death, David Maslanka wrote an updated program note for his Symphony No. 2:
Nearly 30 years have passed since the premiere of Symphony No. 2, the first of my seven symphonies for wind ensemble. In that time, I have come to recognize that issues of transformation are at the heart of my work, initially my personal issues of loss, grief, and rage, then knowing that my own change is the start for some element of outward movement, for change in the world. This is a long, slow process, but it is the requirement of our time. The crux of Symphony No. 2 is the river metaphor of the second movement crossing over to the other side ... death, yes, but also movement away from ego/self and toward compassion. Everyone knows that we are living in a seriously dangerous time. For me, Symphony No. 2 was my first awareness in artistic terms that this is the case. Nearly sixty years ago, African writer Chinua Achebe wrote the renowned novel Things Fall Apart. Chronicling the destruction of one life, he hit upon what we must do to regain our balance: return to our deepest inner sources for sustenance and direction; return to the tradition of the art community, people selected and set apart to dream for the community as a whole. If art is worth anything, it is this: it brings us back to dream time and the inner voice. It lets the heart speak, giving us answers that we cannot reach in any other way. This is why we make music.
Enduring Voices
Sunday, November 2, 2025, 3:00 p.m.
Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, Evanston, Illinois
PROGRAM
Dmitri Shostakovich (arr. Reynolds) Prelude in E-flat Minor
Adolphus Hailstork American Guernica
Henry Dorn Never Forgetting, NCB Commission
Camille Saint-Saëns (trans. Frackenpohl) Pas redoublé
David Maslanka Finale from Symphony No. 2