Metropolitan Wind Symphony: Commission: Dzubay: Shake, Rattle & Roll

Shake, Rattle & Roll

Premiere Date	March 12, 2005
Conductor at Premiere	Lawrence Isaacson, MWS Music Director
Location	Sorenson Center for the Arts, Babson College Wellesley Hills, MA
Duration	14:00
Composer's Program Notes	Around the holidays each year while I was growing up, my father would get out some old boxes of music saved from his time playing tenor saxophone in an Army dance band in Colorado. Our gang made for a rather motley ensemble, with an assortment of instruments that didn't quite make up a full dance band, but we had fun. One of the charts dad had an arrangement of was the Big Joe Turner hit, "Shake, Rattle and Roll" - written by Charles Calhoun. I decided to use this title while composing the first movement, which has a lot of "shaking" in it, but apart from the shared title this composition for wind ensemble has little in common with that classic tune. Well, there is a hint of the tune's characteristic rhythm in the first movement, which also has a bit of a jazz feel to it, but that's about it. Those three powerful words just struck me as being a good outline for a three movement composition, so I ran with the idea.