Mountain Roads

About Mountain Roads, the composer David Maslanka writes: "The music of Mountain Roads is a very personal statement. I feel very deeply about every bit of it. The musical plan of it follows the model of a Baroque cantata, and style and content reflect my years of study of the Bach chorales, and of Bach in general. Obviously there are no words in my "cantata" but the music revolves entirely around two chorale melodies. The title Mountain Roads comes from a dream I had while writing the piece". About his Sax Appeal David Stock writes: "The work was commissioned by the Amherst Saxophone Quartet by Summerfest, a music festival in Pittsburgh, for its 10th anniversary season. The premiere took place in July, 1990. The work is in four movements: Set Up, Blues, Sarabande, and jump. Jazz is clearly the primary influence, as befitting the genre that brought this wonderful instrument into its own". Russell Peck's Drastic Measures is the only piece on this disc that has been recorded before. About it, the composer writes: "During my brief university teaching career I came into contact with excellent saxophonists at Northern Illinois University who had a quartet and wanted a piece from me. That's how I came to write Drastic Measures in 1976. A year later I went to the School of the Arts in North Carolina where James Houlik had a great saxophone studio and a wonderful student quartet that became the New Century Saxophone Quartet. I touched up the piece for them and that became its final form."