Urban Pastorale (2022)

Orchestra – ca. 29 min.

[2fl.2ob+eh.2cl(2=Ebcl)+bcl.1asax.1barsax(=tsax).2bn+cbn. / 3tpt(1=fgh).4hn.2tbn+btbn.1euph.1tba. / 4perc+timp. / hrp.pno. / str.]

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Program Note

Premiere performance of Don Freund’s orchestral extravaganza Urban Pastorale, with Thomas Wilkins leading the IU Symphony Orchestra (March 6, 2022, IU Musical Arts Center) Urban Pastorale mixes the bucolic, hearty, open-air warmth of rustic music in the country with the edgy unpredictable energy of the inner city. It borrows its five-movement structure from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra.

The work begins with a 10-minute scherzo (“Turning Events”)—breaths of a bird-call tune and a throbbing quarter-note undercurrent float along a string of variegated escapades. The second movement (“Hot Boogie”) is essentially a stream of hard driving sixteenth notes, punctuated by intrusions of 3/8 accents. The third movement (“Easy Going (mostly)”) spreads a breezy euphonium tune around the orchestra, pausing for a little burleska and a tender ballad. The fourth movement (“Whistle Tune / Midnight Musing”) is an earworm threatening to eat the entire city when it suddenly yields to a nocturnal torch song. Little flickers of violence featuring this movement’s junkyard percussion section set the stage for the finale: “Heavy Hits”—an achingly joyful head-banging hard rock anthem which, after leading to a glorious reprise of the third movement’s ballad, takes us out with the buoyant shattering stylized violence of tutti orchestra blasts.

Urban Pastorale was commissioned by the Trustees of Indiana University and the Jacobs School of Music in celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the IU Department of Music (2011) and the one-hundredth of the founding of the IU School of Music (2021).