Cast and Retold

For Wind Ensemble

Program Note

Cast and Retold is a strange love letter to my musical education. I grew up in Arlington, Virginia, playing the classic wind ensemble literature of the mid-20th century. Composers like Alfred Reed and Clifton Williams defined the sound of my early concert years. As a percussionist, I remember peeking over the marimba from the back of the room to study the brass parts on my fellow students’ stands.

That curiosity about music eventually led me to the Walden School Young Musicians Program, which was the source of my first real education in composition. It was also my first encounter with the music of the Renaissance. Dr. Sarah Riskind, Walden’s choral director at the time, would often program Renaissance repertoire, secular as well as sacred. Renaissance counterpoint’s emphasis on voice leading makes the music a good model for young composers to study, and the melodic nature of each line means that the parts are rarely boring. I felt like I was suddenly uncovering a whole world of music that had been hidden away from me under piles upon piles of Bach transcriptions.

It was common at Walden for some of the older students to perform secular madrigals, especially humorous ones, as part of the closing choral concert. Each movement of Cast and Retold is based on a similar secular song, ranging from the deeply earnest to the downright nonsensical.

So yes, this is a love letter, but more than that, it’s a chance for me to share the music that makes me laugh, the music I sang with Dr. Riskind on the hill by Dublin Lake.

Here’s to five hundred more years.

The title Cast and Retold borrows a line from the text of composer Caroline Mallonee’s Light Through Windows:

Light through windows Light through stained-glass windows Tales cast and retold in shades of scarlet

Mallonee is the director of the Walden School Creative Musicians Retreat and served as faculty at the Young Musicians Program for a number of years.

The four movements are as follows:

  1. Lirum Bililirum (Rossino Mantovano, ca. 1510)
  2. La Tricotea (attributed to Franco Alonso, ca. 1465)
  3. T’Amo Mia Vita (Vittoria Aleotti, 1574-1646; Text by G. B. Guarini, 1538-1612)
  4. Otro Tal Misacantano (Anonymous, ca. 15th c.)


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