"Remember the Blue and the Gold"

6-19-26, Walden School Creative Musicians Retreat at Composers Forum III - Recorded at the Dublin School, Dublin New Hampshire. The Performers: Theo Ramsey, violin – Member of the Ensemble Dal Niente David Wallace, Bassoon – CRM attendee Bob Bassett, piano – CRM attendee Enjoy! Please like, share and subscribe to the channel! And of course, comments are always welcome. This piece has an unusual back story to it. In 2007, the first iteration of the piece emerged as a march for the Our Lady of Lourdes high school band led by Paul Bellino. Blue and gold are the school's colors. The standard instrumentation was for woodwinds, brass and percussion and the form was in the style of John Phillip Sousa. It was performed at the spring concert and my son John was chosen (by Mr. Bellino) to be the conductor. It was a school custom to pick a senior for that role, and let me add, that John did a very fine job conducting its first and only performance! The second iteration of this composition was presented at the Walden School Creative Musicians Retreat in 2014 as “Rip Van Winkle, Time Traveler.” The instrumentation in this piece was violin, tenor sax, cello and piano. The form used was the sonata-allegro configuration. New material was added to the original march to effect the change in form which now included a development section to go along with the exposition/recapitulation ideas of the 2007 version. The development section starts when Rip Van Winkle awakes from his 20-year slumber. This was my first use of the whole tone scale which I used very briefly to portray Rip Van Winkle’s wonderment in seeing how his world had changed in a generation. That brings us to the 3rd and current manifestation of this piece which was presented as a trio for violin, bassoon and piano. In this version, I featured the integration of the whole tone, major, minor and chromatic scales. I decided to use the original title since this recording will serve as the final rendition of the three separate and distinct pieces.