Christmas Football U.S.A., for symphonic band, originated as a joke—a fake title I gave to a nonexistent piece of music, having been asked (in a college course titled “Career in Composition”) to caption the info for a work I might enclose in a (hypothetical) application portfolio of some kind. Almost a decade later, I decided to turn Christmas Football U.S.A. into a real piece, not because I was ready to sell out, but because I thought it would be fun to create a (mostly sarcastic) collage out of various musical styles suggested by the title, while also commenting on the sometimes volatile relationship between commercial success and the vaunted “career in composition.” Christmas Football U.S.A. was written in 2018 and premiered in Bloomington, Indiana by the Indiana University Symphonic Band with conductor Eric M. Smedley.
Recording: Indiana University Symphonic Band; Eric M. Smedley, conductor (Bloomington, Indiana, 2018)
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