Chapman University Wind Symphony: Celebrating the California Dream Space

This year’s theme, “Golden Dreams,” celebrates California’s role as a unique cultural crossroads, bringing together our state’s indigenous populations with immigrants from all directions to create a rich and diverse human landscape. “Golden Dreams” will explore those who were here, those who came, and how their interactions changed the world.

The concert program features Los Angeles composer Frank Ticheli’s Wild Nights!, Australian émigré composer Percy Grainger’s monumental Lincolnshire Posy, Alfred Reed’s El Camino Real: A Latin Fantasy, the powerful Lincoln Portrait by Aaron Copland, and a brand new piece, California, by David Maslanka.

Maslanka writes:

California has always been a place of big dreams. The music of California celebrates the California dream space. There is tremendous beauty here – the forests, deserts, mountains and valleys, the ocean – and also the strength within the people and in the earth to meet the times that are upon us. Music lets us dream, and in that dream is the possibility of a new world, one in which humans live in harmony, within themselves, with all other people, with all other species, with the planet. Is this dream impossible? Are circumstances too complex? Will human nature never change? My answer to these questions is no. The dream starts somewhere. Let our music making be one such place.