Hi Mr. Frantzen! It's your student Asher! I just want to say that you are an amazing composer and I love all your tracks, especially Beyond a wild dream, Euphoria, and my favorite is SKRONK!

Beyond a Wild Dream
Quad Cities Symphony Orchestra, Mark Russell Smith, Music Director

PROGRAM NOTE
When I travel back to my childhood home in Iowa to visit family and friends, I often take a couple of days to drive and visit the towns and cities inhabiting the Mississippi River Bend.  Traveling through these communities, one sees both old and new, theaters, dance halls, and park bandstands. Stay long enough and you may begin to hear stories from local residents of a traveling opera company or theater troupe that passed through long ago.  What strikes me in all these cases is that in each town someone had the crazy, wild dream of bringing the arts to their community no matter how big or small. The Quad Cities is one such community where a hundred years ago a group of townspeople had a wild dream to create and support a full symphony orchestra. With this in mind, I began composing imagining what it was like to have attended the first performance in 1916. Twelve hundred people, gathered together at the Burtis Opera House to listen to Wagner, Schubert, Saint-Saëns and Tchaikovsky that I am sure for many was for the very first time.  In my imaginings, I soon realized I had a similar experience sixty years later, growing up in a small town, hearing a live orchestra for the first time on a school field trip. I left the performance, changed by what I heard, and began to dream. 

Beyond a Wild Dream in its development pays homage to those who dream, for those who build, for those who keep the dream alive.  



Beyond a Wild Dream for orchestra

1982 State Jazz Contest

Munchin' Cookies

In recent works, I’ve become interested in music that creates a space for contemplation. Music that creates a 
journey between two points. The subject in this work is love as a timeless force. Its continuation in our lives beyond 
the grave, throughout time and space, and amidst the personal loss, difficulties, or ruins of our lives. The title is from
the poem Love Among the Ruins by Robert Browning.

This is not a concerto in the traditional sense, but rather a work that features the viola for its color, expressivity, and 
voice within a narrative. That narrative is left to the listener. I use a transformational technique where music that 
appears in the beginning is gradually transformed into new ideas which are then transformed into even newer ideas. 
It is always evolving as a metaphor for love as a transforming force. It also borrows from a previous work titled Fields 
that I've always felt there was more to say before and after it. The phrase by the Roman poet Virgil seems to have 
become appropriate for this work - "Amor Vincit Omnia" (Love Conquers All)

The music was commissioned by a consortium of 14 colleges led by Dr. Matthew Schlomer, Director of Bands at the Interlochen Arts Academy, Interlochen, Michigan. This live performance is from Emory University, Paul Bhasin, conductor with Yinzi Kong, viola soloist. 

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Beyond a Wild Dream for orchestra

John Frantzen

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