James Holleman and the Hillsdale College orchestra premiered Andrew Maxfield’s new Symphony.
Courtesy | Hanna Thompson
The Hillsdale College Symphony Orchestra rehearsed through a city-wide power outage to perform the world premiere of “Every Leap Is Faith” on Feb. 25.
“Every composer wants each piece to have a long life ahead of it,” Composer Andrew Maxfield said. “And I think the performance is great. I think the piece is good, and I’m excited for it to find its way forward.”
After meeting Professor of Music James Holleman at a conference in 2018, Maxfield first visited campus in October 2022 for a Choral Evensong service, which he was commissioned to write. He then worked with Holleman on a grant application through the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University to compose the symphony.
“I had early ideas for it at the beginning of 2022,” Maxfield said of the symphony piece. “And I had the first movement sketched out by summertime and then I wrote the second and third movement in late 2022, finishing the whole thing by Dec. 31. In fact, I wrote part of the second movement at Hillsdale in October when I was visiting for evensong.”
Holleman said this semester’s performance was two weeks earlier than usual, giving students less time to prepare their parts.
“I had all the scores and all the parts the first day of January when we came back to school so that we could start the rehearsal process. It was a very short rehearsal process for us,” Holleman said. “So that was a fast turnaround and it’s exciting.”
Maxfield’s work is reflective of ideas he hopes to teach his two children, who are 8 and 10 years old. The three movements, titled “Seek,” “Winnow,” and “Leap,” are rooted in seeking truth, acquiring patience, and needing faith.
“Beyond my religious conviction and feelings, I think of faith as a principle of action: we wouldn’t act at all if we didn’t believe in the possibility of outcomes,” Maxfield wrote in his composer’s note. “This idea eventually coalesced into the title of the work, which I hope is both encompassing and encouraging: ‘Every Leap Is Faith.’”
After Maxfield’s symphony, the orchestra performed Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2., “Romantic.”
“This was Maxfield’s first symphony. Typically a symphony is a four movement work – this was a three movement work,” Holleman said. “And the Hanson we did is a three movement symphony. So it was kind of unique that we put the two together.”
Holleman said he could tell students were excited because they prepared well for rehearsal and remained diligent despite last week’s power outage.
“They stuck to it. They were troopers. They were on campus and they didn’t have classes, so they came in and rehearsed,” Holleman said.
Backup generators in the chapel provided the orchestra with light, but not heat, during rehearsal on Wednesday. Holleman talked to college officials and waited for power to return instead of canceling the orchestra.
“I talked to maintenance, I talked to the deans, I talked to a lot of people,” Holleman said. “We had our Wednesday rehearsal, and during the rehearsal, we lost power. But the generators kicked on in the chapel. So we finished our full rehearsal on Wednesday.”
Freshman Izabella Sand, who played the harp for the piece, said she enjoyed watching all the parts of the symphony come together and compliment each other.
“It was such an amazing experience to play a piece of music never before played, and to have a part in presenting Maxfield’s hard work to the public for the first time,” Sand said. “It is a big responsibility and honor to premiere someone’s original composition, and I think it’s a testament to the hard work of all the performers and Professor Holleman that we could come together to make it work so well.”
