Sunday, Aug. 6 at 4 p.m. — RUTLAND — Grace Congregational Church will offer a concert on Sunday at 4 p.m. in the sanctuary. The event, Clash of Gold and Silver, will include Grace Church’s music minister, Alastair Stout, and Vermont musicians Bill Keck (tuba) and Ron Wold (French horn). The program will include contemporary dancer Zoe Warren, and the world premiere of a new arrangement of an original composition by local composer Daniel Luther Graves.
Daniel Luther Graves is a life-long resident of Rutland. He taught music in public schools for 34 years, including 26 years as choral director at Rutland Middle School and Rutland High School. The title of his composition, “I’m So Glad You’re Here,” reflects on the return to his musical process months after the numbing September 11 attacks, and gratitude for the love of friends who also ventured out.
“Faraway Nearby,” written by Lon W. Chaffin, is an exploration in music of the art of Georgia O’Keefe. Since the early 20th Century, the art of O’Keefe has inspired, challenged and delighted us. Today, her connection to the Southwest is simply understood. The desert’s hills, sky, flowers and bones became a comfortable vocabulary with which she communicated. This music draws its creative breath from O’Keefe’s work. Each of the three movements (I. Bones, Blue and White, II. Hills, Red and Gray and III. Music, Pink and Blue) explores a subject common to her paintings. Each subject presents a dichotomy of color.
Zoe Warren, a senior at George Washington University, will interpret the music of “Memories of Things Both Lost and Found” and a couple of other pieces through dance. Written by Barbara York, “Memories of Things Both Lost and Found” is a commentary piece on the transient nature of all things. Youth, fame and fortune,success, passion, romance, all are fleeting and insubstantial – illusion in a sense. The memories rise and fall from the mists of consciousness, fragmentary, unfinished until nothing remains but a pulsating movement through light.
About the musicians
Bill Keck was born in Joliet, Illinois in 1943. He graduated from the Eastman School of Music with a degree in music education and a performance certificate on tuba. After working for four years with the Joliet band program he was a founding member of the Fine Arts Brass Quintet at the University of Southern Mississippi. He then freelanced in New York City and followed that with a tour with the rock band Emerson,Lake, and Palmer. Bill then joined the newly formed Mexico City Philharmonic as principal tubaist. He currently performs with the Inora Brass,Constitution Brass, and Royal Town Brass quintets.
Ron Wold is an itinerant musician, traveling from place to place with his horn and playing in musical performances of all kinds. For many years his base of operations was Boston, but he now lives in central Vermont, which has increased the mileage on his tired car, but has also expanded his opportunities to grow blueberries, play with tractors, and talk to poultry. He can be heard in many musical groups, including: the Middlebury Opera Orchestra, the Glens Falls Symphony (regularly), the Vermont Symphony (frequently), and innumerable other groups (constantly).His hobbies include metalworking and old diesel machinery, and when the pandemic stopped all the concerts, he took up maple sugaring to help maintain his sanity – tapping 350 trees and splitting a ridiculous amount of wood by hand. Whether his sanity survived is an open question, but now he has lots of maple syrup.
Grace Church Minister of Music Alastair Stout grew up in the Shetland Islands, which are located 200 miles north of the Scottish mainland in the wild North Atlantic. Shetland has been a source of inspiration for Sout’s composing for some 40 years. His latest piece, “Skylark Variations,” commissioned by New Jersey organist James D. Hicks, is a tone poem about the small but dramatic bird that lives in the Shetland heather. Most of his music, including a preview of “Skylark Variations” performed on the Grace Church organ, can be heard at stoutworks.net. James D. Hicks will record “Skylark Variations” in Bodø Cathedral, located above the Arctic Circle in Norway, for his “Nordic Journeys” CD Series in August 2024.
For more information, visit
Facebook.com/GraceChurchVT or call 802-775-4301.
