Windsong

Composer(s) / Arranger(s): Shaun Salem

Performance Time: 7:35  |  Grade: 4  |  Style: Contemporary

Windsong is the fourth addition to the Wind Saga series, a continuously growing collection of works featuring some of the composer’s favorite themes and ideas. Works in the Wind Saga collection may be performed individually as stand-alone pieces or as multiple movements of the larger collection in any order chosen by the director. “Windsong” features a‘sentimental theme’ one might associate with a love story. The work begins with a delicate solo on the bells with piano accompanying. A Clarinet soloist enters, answered by another Clarinet, and a ‘verse’ of a love song begins. The ‘sentimental theme’ is the chorus of the song, recurring later in the work and also in other works of the Saga (“Windfall” and “Windrider”). The middle section of the work presents a counter-melody that is later heard in combination with the sentimental theme in the last chorus. The intent is to create a ‘unity’ of two seemingly independent themes into one musical event leading to the climactic release of the chorus near the end of the work. In a nod to the French Poet, Victor Hugo, the composer's hope is that “Windsong” evokes in listeners and performers that which “cannot be expressed in words but upon which it is impossible to be silent.”