Woodwinds

Twentieth-century French composer Eugene Bozza is one who often flies under the radar: he is one of countless composers of modern music whose work endures, but not in the same ways as his contemporaries, like – for instance – Samuel Barber, or John Cage, or Dmitri Shostakovich. But, he is an imaginative composer nonetheless, who came of age in Paris between the two world wars and lived for essentially the entire 20th century, experimenting with all the different inventions of his time: expressionism, and serialism, and even minimalism, and the list goes on.

While Bozza’s career isn’t necessarily one of musical innovation, his music does capture a kind of colorful impressionism that is likely from his time spent in Paris. On this edition of Arizona Encore, we’ll hear his Contrastes III, a work which explores a number of interactions between the saxophone and bassoon with a variety of sounds and styles.

It’s on a program of music for woodwinds, featuring performances by ASU Faculty members like saxophonist Christopher Creviston, flutist Elizabeth Buck, and bassoonist Albie Micklich – among others. We’ll hear pieces going as far back as the Romantic Era, like Robert Schumann’s Prophetic Bird, all the way to a work commissioned and composed just a few years ago: Stacy Garrop’s Archangels.