Born in 1913 in New York City, Morton Gould studied piano and composition from an early age. He took full advantage of the wide variety of music surrounding him, and his many compositions—from symphonies to ballets to orchestral and film scores—reflect the indelible influence of folk, jazz, and popular styles. Gould’s innovative and accessible approach earned him widespread acclaim, including several GRAMMY® Awards and a Pulitzer Prize for Music. Vibrant and engaging, the Symphonette No. 2 (American) is an excellent example of Gould’s unique aesthetic. Composed in 1950, the work blends traditional symphonic form with elements of mid-20th-century popular music. While “Symphonette” indicates a piece shorter than the usual symphony, it also carries overtones of mid-century style. As Gould’s biographer Peter W. Goodman writes, “The title ‘symphonette’ was a clever attempt to Americanize and modernize the term ‘sinfonietta,’ linking it with such up-to-the-minute concepts as kitchenette and dinette.” The second movement, Pavanne, recalls the Renaissance courtly dance form, yet Gould’s music is so jazzy that it was recorded by Glenn Miller and Jimmie Lunceford, among others. In a fascinating example of music from the classical realm flowing into the world of jazz, John Coltrane even used the second theme in his 1961 recording, Impressions. As Coltrane said, “It’s a big well that we all dip out of.”

Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1954, Michael Daugherty is a GRAMMY® Award-winning composer who teaches at the University of Michigan School of Music. As the titles of his famous compositions—which include Dead Elvis (1993), Jackie O (1997), and American Gothic (2013)—suggest, Daugherty finds inspiration in popular culture. He does not take a mass-media approach to creativity, however; as The London Times describes, he is “a master icon maker” with a “maverick imagination, fearless structural sense and meticulous ear.”

The Adventures of Jesse Owens was commissioned by the National Intercollegiate Band and premiered in 2023. “Many works I’ve written have been inspired by American icons,” explained Daugherty. “Like Rosa Parks, Elvis, Ernest Hemingway, Georgia O’Keefe, Abraham Lincoln, and so forth. And I was always fascinated with Jesse Owens. When I was a young kid growing up in Iowa, I remember hearing about Jesse Owens and reading a book about him. It was just a fascinating tale.” After finding an original 1936 Olympic medal in an antique store in Lithuania, he knew he had to make the work a reality.

The Adventures of Jesse Owens consists of three movements. Daugherty writes of GOLD, the final movement,

By winning four gold medals and setting world records in the 100 meter, 200 meter, 400 meter relay, and long-jump, Jesse Owens became the most successful athlete of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. His victories made international headlines as “the fastest man in the world,” challenging the German Nazi doctrine of Aryan supremacy. Inspired by the superhuman feats of Jesse Owens at the Olympics, the brightly orchestrated final movement, marked “Presto,” moves at breakneck speed to a triumphant finish line.

Maurice Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro is the product of a critical rivalry between French harp manufacturers and their competing models: Pleyel’s double-strung harp, with a string for each note, and Érard's pedal system. French composers Debussy and Ravel were commissioned as musical “spokespeople,” each writing a piece championing their particular harp. Debussy composed the Danses sacrée et profane in 1904, showcasing Pleyel’s harp, while Ravel’s response—the Introduction and Allegro—was commissioned in 1905. Ravel dashed off the work in about a week before heading off to vacation with friends, later writing, “Eight days of solid work and three sleepless nights allowed me to finish it, for better or worse.” Composed for harp, string quartet, flute, and clarinet, the Introduction and Allegro is a miniature concerto despite its small forces, and Ravel uses the potential of the pedal harp to full advantage. One pivotal moment occurs at the end of the solo cadenza: the soloist plays the second opening melody using harmonics while also playing glissandos, which would have been impossible on Pleyel’s harp. On February 22, 1907, 16-year-old Micheline Kahn performed Ravel’s work, cementing the primacy of Érard's harp forever.

Born in Transylvania in 1923, György Ligeti spent his life trying to push boundaries. He famously said, “I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other is the past. I want to escape.” Whether or not you know Ligeti’s name, you may have heard his music if you’re a fan of director Stanley Kubrick. In the classic 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey , the choral work Lux aeterna accompanies several appearances of an alien monolith. In his final film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Kubrick used a passage from Ligeti’s piano suite Musica ricercata. Written between 1951 and 1953, Musica ricercata drew on the Renaissance ricercar, an intellectual or academic composition. As he explained in 1968, Ligeti meant this in the truest sense:

In 1951, I started to experiment with simple structures of rhythm and sound in order, in a manner of speaking, to build up a new music from nothing. My method was Cartesian to the extent that I considered all the music which I already knew and loved as not binding on me—even as invalid. I asked myself: what can I do with a single note? what can I do with its octave? what with one interval? what with two intervals? What with definite rhythmic relationships which could form the foundation of a whole based on rhythm and interval? In this way several small pieces were composed, chiefly for piano.

Ligeti arranged six movements from Musica ricercata as the Six Bagatelles (short, whimsical pieces) for wind quintet. At the work’s 1956 premiere, the Hungarian government forbade the performance of the final movement as the result of its “dense chromaticism and frenzied expression.” Yet it is the fifth bagatelle that is perhaps the most striking. Titled “Béla Bartók; In Memoriam,” the movement is Ligeti’s homage to a fellow Hungarian and composer whose music he much admired.