Step onto the orchestral playing field as Kyle Gullings, UT Tyler associate professor of Music Theory and Composition, unveils his “Gridiron Symphony,” a piece that captures the essence of Texas high school football in a way never before seen in the concert hall. Commissioned by the East Texas Symphony Orchestra, this composition plays homage to gritty Friday nights, blending the adrenaline of the sport with the poise of symphonic music. Gullings recounts the year-long creative journey and his deep dives into local football lore, and his process for understanding the highs and lows of Texas football as a South Dakota native.
Discover the potential for “Gridiron Symphony” to captivate both dedicated classical music fans and those new to orchestral music. Gullings articulates his vision to craft a lively, sports-centric musical experience, laced with familiar tunes to draw audiences into a symphonic event that’s as thrilling as game day itself. Listen in for an insider’s look at the creative process of a composer who’s changing the game of classical music.
TRANSCRIPT
LANDESS:
Celebrating the traditions surrounding Friday night lights Texas High School Football with a piece of music for the East Texas Symphony Orchestra. I’m Mike Landess and today UT Tyler Radio Connects with Associate Music Professor Dr. Kyle Gullings, who wrote “Gridiron Symphony.” Now I’m thinking marching band, not symphony, for high school football.
GULLINGS:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s I guess it’s a little bit of both, because we’ll get to that, but there’s a little preview of some marching band music in it. But, yeah, it’s a symphonic narrative take on East Texas High School Football culture and what it means to the people around here.
LANDESS: The piece was commissioned. Who commissioned it?
GULLINGS: It was commissioned by the East Texas Symphony Orchestra. As you probably know, it’s a professional symphony orchestra that plays right here in our backyard.
LANDESS: They are terrific, yeah.
GULLINGS: I’ve been watching them since I got here in 2011 and go to many of their concerts. So I was just delighted to get the request to write a piece for them.
LANDESS:
Where did that come from? What was the genesis of that request? Do you know?
GULLINGS:
Sure, of course. I got a phone call from the music director and conductor, Richard Lee, and he called me up one day. He and I know each other, and he said, “I’ve got this strange idea for a project. Don’t hang up the phone. I’m looking for someone to write a piece of orchestral music about high school football.” And then he went on to explain, of course, the idea of the project, and I think really where it comes from is an idea that the ETSO, like so many modern American orchestras, is trying to be in new ways relevant to the community that it lives in and that it plays in, and to responsive to the things that are important to them, in addition to what happens inside the concert venue, which I think is important, of course, in the culture. And so he’s trying to expand the idea of what an orchestra is and what kind of topics it can cover.
LANDESS:
Well, Richard Lee is an amazing guy. We’ve had the opportunity to talk to him in the past, and I’ve got to say I mean, if you were to try and pick something that has a commonality among most people who live in this part of the state, for that matter, the entire state, high school football on Friday night, I mean that’s it.
GULLINGS:
Yeah, absolutely it is, and that’s something that I have come to know since being transplanted here for my position at UT Tyler, which started in 2011. I’m finishing up my 13th year teaching here, so I feel like I know the people here. I know kind of what makes this area tick. But at the same time, I’m not from here, and so it took a little bit of getting to research and to know more about what about it is important to people here and why.
LANDESS:
Well, let’s talk about that. When did you start writing this, and how did you tackle? Did you see what I did there? How did you tackle this project?
GULLINGS:
Yeah well, the beginning of the project, after I got my head around what it might be like so many of the projects I’ve done in the last several years, it’s a very specific project, written for a specific ensemble with a specific idea in mind or, in this case, specific type of sort of audience in mind. And it’s almost like a documentary, right, that I’m writing a piece that doesn’t just in very general terms, you know, get at the emotive side of high school football is important to our culture here — but that really tries to actually tell the story. And I’m a firm believer that you can’t tell the story that you don’t know, and you can’t know that story until you know the people and the places and the events that are important to making it up, right? And so I began, really after I said “yes” to the project. I spent several months not writing a single note of music and instead interviewing people. I went and talked with coaches and former players. If anyone knows anything about the East Texas high school football story, you’re probably familiar with the 1994 Tyler High School Lions, at the time the John Tyler High School Lions, and their state championship that year. I got the distinct pleasure of getting to meet and have a conversation with some of those players and to talk with some of them for a longer period of time and hear not just what happened then, right, not just what happened in their famous semi-final game, as well as their, their final, but also what it meant to them.
Listen to Mike’s interview with Gary Baxter, who played on the 1994 John Tyler state championship team.
These players can remember specific plays, and specific downs, how things happened and also how it made them feel right, the kind of reputation they had in the area, and even people who weren’t on the field for that game or for other countless games like it. People can remember, you know, attending in the audience and the crowd; they don’t call it the “audience.”
LANDESS: The stands.
GULLINGS: But anyhow, yeah. So, and I also met with you know, folks of the sports news media in East Texas, right, some folks who do both written journalism as well as audio broadcasting who cover the games, right, and they had their own perspective and take. The one thing they could all agree on was people in this area are just wild for the sport and they something I learned early on: High school football in Texas is a very different thing than college football or NFL, right. So I would try to — I’m a casual fan of the NFL — and so I would try to bring in analogies or similarities to professional football, and I would constantly get shut down. People say that’s an entirely different thing. You don’t really understand it when, when you know, when it’s your nephew who’s playing in the game, it’s a very different thing right now, and that was one thing I got educated on very early.
LANDESS:
There’s a key element here that we haven’t really established very well, and that is that you are a storyteller in this. You are not only writing a great piece of music, you’re writing the narration that goes with all of this. This is narrated. Tell us about the story and the narrator.
GULLINGS:
Yeah, I will. So, that’s true. So many of my pieces, and this is always been true of my work, is they tell stories, whether they have narration, or singers that have text, or whether they don’t, even if it’s a solo piano work, they almost all of my works are what we call programmatic–they tell a story of some kind and that’s–
LANDESS:
They tell a story.
GULLINGS:
Yeah exactly, and I think that’s how — not every composer is like that. Some people just like to write a string quartet that sounds like a string quartet, and that’s fine for them. But for me, most of mine have some kind of at least concept if not story, and I think that’s actually how I got the gig, right? When Richard and I were early on speaking about this, I said you know, “I’m not primarily an orchestral composer, that’s not really been where I’ve kind of made my living as a composer, but I am a storyteller.” And he said you know, “I know you’ve got a musical theater background, an opera background, and that sounds to me like someone who can tell a story with music.”
LANDESS:
So back to the narrator. Who’s it gonna be, and what are their qualifications other than being able to read?
GULLINGS:
Well, one of the early folks I talked to talk to in my documentary research, if you will, is Bill Coats. He’s the sports director over at KTBB here in town, and he’s a well-known figure in local sports-news journalism, and he also he hosts a weekday show about sports, and he also is the live in game broadcaster for the radio. If you’ve ever tuned in on a Friday night and heard someone telling you what’s happening, play-by-play, he’s your guy. And so he was one of the first people who really kind of educated me and got me up to speed on what I need to know and what kind of elements he thought should be in the show even. And we did that over lunch a few times and he was, I just found him so warm and gracious and helpful, and eventually, when it came time for me to find someone else to speak the narration part, I thought, well, who better to lend an authentic voice to this experience than someone who knows the material better than I do, and that’s Bill.
LANDESS:
When I first read that this was gonna be a symphony piece, it was gonna be, have a narrator, I’m thinking Aaron Copland and “Lincoln Portrait,” or even a (Sergei) Prokofiev “Peter and the Wolf.” Any similarity in presentation structure?
GULLINGS:
I certainly listened to both pieces in my preparations early on and listened several times, of course, to the “Lincoln Portrait.” I’m a big fan of Copland. And this does have similarity in that it is meant to be tuneful and fun to listen to, kind of piece. You can walk, walk away whistling hopefully a little bit of it. But it’s a little bit different in terms of how the narration functions. In “Lincoln Portrait” by Copland, the narration is a lot more stately, and it’s also a lot more, how shall I say dispersed throughout the work. The narrator doesn’t speak the entire time and when they do speak they tend to be fairly short, impactful statements, of course, by Lincoln, and in mine, it’s a little bit more like you’re in a game, and you’re being told what’s happening play-by-play-by-play, which has been a real challenge trying to coordinate that speaking part with the musical part. But I think we’re going to get it down. But, yeah, so the narrator. The piece is about 26 minutes long, maybe a little over 26 minutes long, so a pretty lengthy piece. And the narrator speaks almost throughout the entire thing. They take breaks here and there, of course, to hear the music without the speaking, but there’s never more than maybe 3 or 4 minutes at a time where you aren’t being caught up on what the story is that’s being told.
LANDESS:
Tell us a little more about the actual performance at the Cowan Center. Well, that’ll take place the 23rd right?
GULLINGS:
Saturday, March 23 at 7.30 p.m. at UT Tyler’s Cowan Center. That’s true.
LANDESS:
Well, please tell me that they’re going to have some video taken of this, and it’ll be available on YouTube or something, right?
GULLINGS:
You know, it is a professional orchestra, and I don’t think that’s part of the contract. It’s the kind of thing where you have to be there to see it. You have to be there to hear it.
LANDESS:
OK.
GULLINGS:
They’ll make a reference recording, but don’t expect that up on my website anytime soon. But I’m just so grateful that they’re playing that, and that we’re going to get this opportunity. But it’s kind of like live theater. You’re going to have to come see the show if you want to see the show.
LANDESS:
Well, would you say this is the biggest challenge of your musical career?
GULLINGS:
I would. I honestly, would you know, knowing at the beginning that it was going to be 20 to 25 minutes long. I’ve written several pieces longer than that. Again, with my background as an opera and musical theater composer, I’ve written five or three, if you don’t count the two I wrote when I was in high school. I don’t share that with people very often. Juvenalia.
GULLINGS:
So I have written several long form works that tell a dramatic story — but never with a full orchestra and that was again something a bit of a learning curve for me with just the sheer amount of time it takes to, once the piece is quote, unquote, written, to finish the orchestration, generate all of the parts. You know, I fairly recently finished those parts and getting them out into the mail to the players to work on and they, you know, it came to I think it was 327 pages, unique pages for the, of layout, and that’s on 9″ by 12″ paper.
LANDESS:
That’s the Bullard phone book.
GULLINGS:
It’s a whole lot, and that’s not counting the conductor’s score, which is right around 100 pages as well. So it was a lot, and you asked about, you know this. So this in a sense was I don’t know a peak of my career in so many ways, both in terms of the scale of the institution that’s having me, asking me to write it as the opportunity as well. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever had a show that was done for, at a 2,000-seat arena like the Cowan Center, so that’s another kind of milestone we’re really excited about.
LANDESS:
Well, I’m a little disappointed for those who won’t be able to attend on March 23. I mean, will they ever get another shot to do that? Are you going to take it on the road is what I want to know. You’re going to take it to Dallas or Houston or Austin or San Antonio. I mean, why not?
GULLINGS:
That’s a great question. I’m certainly open to it, and I will point out that there are, you know, there are fictional teams. There are some fictional football teams that are being portrayed in this. I didn’t want to pick any one particular school to be, you know, a winner or anything like that. But, but. So that makes it a little bit generalizable to anyone in East Texas. The narrator does very explicitly say, “East Texas high school football.” So if someone out in Amarillo wants to pick this up, maybe they, maybe we can talk at the time about making some modifications. I would sure, love for this piece to to have some life beyond this initial performance, but I’m just so pleased to be given the opportunity.
LANDESS:
I’m just spitballing here, but I’m sitting here thinking that if you took it to another city, you might be able to find another sports guy who could do it.
GULLINGS:
It’s possible. I’m not sure anyone can quite do the job that Bill’s going to do, but I’d be willing to give somebody a shot.
LANDESS:
Give it a shot. What’s next for you, Dr. Gullings? What do you have on a back burner that we may see in the near future?
GULLINGS:
Oh boy. Well, I’ve been so immersed in this project. It has been, I couldn’t even put a certain number of months on it, but well over a year that I’ve been working exclusively on this project, not writing anything else, that it’s really taken up, you know, the 100% of my creative energies. So we’ll see, we’ll see. I’ve got a couple of ideas of projects in the works, but nothing, nothing in particular that I can, you know, should announce now.
LANDESS:
Any final thoughts you’d like to share?
GULLINGS:
I just want to say thanks for taking the time to speak with me about this. I think it’ll be, hopefully a lot of fun for the people who get a chance to listen to it. The whole intention was to bring people together to help tell a story that’s familiar to people, but in a new way, and so if you consider yourself a fan of the symphony, obviously I expect you in those seats. But even if you hadn’t thought about attending a symphony concert before or you never got around to it, I think this would be a good opportunity to do that. There’s going to be a lot of other really great music on the program as well before my piece, and it’s all meant to be related to sports and also to be fun and engaging, and you’ll hear a good bit of music that you also recognize in the earlier pieces.
LANDESS:
Thanks for listening as UT Tyler Radio Connects with Associate Music Professor Dr. Kyle Gullings.
(Transcripts are automatically generated and may contain phonetic spellings and other spelling and punctuation errors. Grammar errors contained in the original recording are not typically corrected.)
