The Autumn Wind (2016)

For the final conducting course at Willamette University with Doctor Long, the director of all things choir related at the school, you were given the incredible opportunity to teach a piece of your choice to our top choir and conduct them in a performance at one of the choir’s concerts. Nick Newman, a good friend of mine at the school, who is currently pursuing a Masters in choral conducting at San Diego State University, decided that for his work of choice he would ask me to write a new piece for them.

Nick is from the bay area and is a die hard fan of the Oakland Raiders (who have now up and left for Las Vegas and Nick is heartbroken, but will probably still fly out there to follow them anyways). He’s also a cheeky smartass, as the background on this piece will reveal, and this is a claim he would never dispute.

I have a hard time just choosing random texts to be set, and I asked him what his favorite poem was. His response, of course, was “The Autumn Wind,” which is the theme for the Raiders that they speak before all of their games and every fan knows by heart:

The Autumn Wind is a pirate
Blustering in from sea,
With a rollicking song, he sweeps along,
Swaggering boisterously.
His face is weather beaten.
He wears a hooded sash,
With a silver hat about his head,
And a bristling black mustache.

He growls as he storms the country,
A villain big and bold.
And the trees all shake and quiver and quake,
As he robs them of their gold.

The Autumn Wind is a raider,
Pillaging just for fun.
He’ll knock you ’round and upside down,
And laugh when he’s conquered and won.

A text I would never choose, but I will admit, it was an absolute blast setting to music.

The main melodic idea is a chant that I would imagine pirates hoisting sails to as they scoured the sea seeking their next victim. It starts in the basses, which repeatedly plunge down in these intimidating octaves, which the tenors later pick up in ascending fifths.

There are two key motivic textures that I employed in writing this piece to imitate the sound of the sea and weather that surround the poem. One is the vocal glissando, or slide, that onomatopoetizes howling wind, first introduced in the sopranos. The other is collective, aleatoric whispering. The choir intensely hisses seemingly random numbers, which are the jersey numbers of some of the most famous Raiders (Nick had to let me know which ones they were).

I also added a bass drum part (played by none other than Doctor Long in the provided recording). I find the timbral combination of voices and drums to be visceral, natural, almost primordially violent.

This performance is from Spring of 2016 at Willamette University, performed by the Willamette Chamber Choir and conducted by Nick Newman.