A handful of notable composers in history have written works for school orchestras. This includes, luckily, composers of such stature as Vivaldi, Holst, and Peter Maxwell Davies. However, the repertoire of contemporary music that can be played by a school orchestra remains thin.
I take a serious interest in cultivating repertoire written since 1945 for my students to perform, and am actively helping to expand that repertoire into the 21st century.
The orchestral program at Dalton has a longstanding connection with living composers. The school created a number of pieces in the 1950s and 60s through collaborations with important New York-based composers such as Henry Cowell, Wallingford Riegger and Robert Starer. The first work, to my knowledge, written for our school orchestra was Cowell's "Dalton Suite". This work includes parts for very young players who play recorders or string instruments (the latter using only open strings) alongside more mature and experienced students. Dalton owns the original manuscript parts.
Henry Cowell
Cowell was, in 1955, an eminence among American composers, having been appointed to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1951. His musical approach had spanned decades of experimentation, pioneering eclectic influences ranging from an austere avant-gardism to Indian musical influences. By the 1950s he had gravitated to an individualistic "American" style that reminds one of Ives and Copland, and it's in this vein that "Dalton Suite" is composed.
Perhaps the best work commissioned by the school from this early period is Robert Starer's Elegy for Strings (1965), a three-minute work of moody but shapely modal melody. It was published in its day as part of a school orchestra repertoire series from Leeds Music.
In 2013 we began commissioning works annually, beginning with Eric Nathan, who wrote "Sky's Edge" for our ensemble. The score is linked below, and the parts are available directly from the composer.
https://issuu.com/ericnathanmusic/docs/sky_s_edge_score
See below for a complete list of works commissioned for the Dalton School Orchestra.
