Carter Pann's Four Factories for Wind Symphony: An Analysis and Discussion

Abstract

Carter Pann is an award-winning composer of music for a variety of mediums and currently serves as Assistant Professor of Composition and Theory at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Pann's Four Factories, commissioned by the University of North Carolina at Greensboro Wind Symphony and completed in 2006, is a fifteen-minute composition written in four movements for large wind symphony that has been performed widely by leading college and university bands. Inspired by a reading of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and the music of George Antheil, the movements of Four Factories evoke images of industrial machinery through programmatic effects, use of dense orchestration, driving rhythms, glissandi, and percussion instruments such as siren, wood blocks, and brake drum or anvil.

This document explores Carter Pann's Four Factories through musical analysis enlightened by personal interviews with the composer. Basic biographical information about the composer is included along with an analysis and discussion of each movement. Interview transcripts, a selected list of Pann's works, and the composer's biography appear in appendices. Insight into Four Factories' characteristics presented in this study promotes an appreciation of Carter Pann's compositional methods, an understanding of the work, and serves as an aid to musicians in its performance