To celebrate The Carolina Band’s participation in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and the university’s musicians who will be in New York, the USC Chamber Players will present a dinner concert on Nov. 27 at The Green Room 42 in Times Square. Faculty and students will perform a new work by alumnus Clay Mettens and Mozart’s Gran Partita, a serenade for 12 winds and string bass from a genre called tafelmusic (table music), which was written in the 18th century and meant to be played at parties. 

“This music is often performed as a concert piece in a concert hall. We thought it would be interesting to return it to where it was born at a party to celebrate the School of Music, so we're playing it at a club that typically hosts cabaret and jazz performances,” says Director of Bands Cormac Cannon.

The night before he will march with The Carolina Band in the Macy’s Parade, Reece Weslock, a junior music education major, from Fort Mill, South Carolina, plays basset horn for the Mozart piece and bass clarinet for Mettens’s composition, Caroliniana Harmonie, which was premiered at the Freeman Series in October.

Caroliniana Harmonie draws inspiration from Mozart but is a “much different modern piece that is more aethereal and less structured in a freeing sort of way as the harmony moves forward,” Weslock says.

Mettens says he came to know Gran Partita inside-out in Scott Weiss’s graduate wind conducting course at the School of Music. In his composition, he replaces the two basset horns with bass clarinets but says he was inspired by the way Mozart writes for the ensemble. 

“Mozart takes the reedy, brash wind timbres and combines them in the most exquisite subsets, showing great restraint in his use of the full ensemble,” Mettens says. “My piece takes this alternation between larger and smaller groups as a starting point, using those distinctions to play with repetition, memory and transformation.”

Cannon calls it an exciting blend of old and new to celebrate the School of Music. Weslock sees it as a learning opportunity. 

“By playing in a large chamber ensemble with musicians who may not have collaborated before, we are able to learn from each other. That will be helpful as we prepare us for future gigs and similar situations after graduation,” he says.

If you’re going

• USC Alumni Dinner Concert: Doors open at 6 p.m. Dinner is at 7 p.m.
• Location: The Green Room 42, YOTEL, New York Times Square 
• To purchase a ticket: Click here.