Born in Havana Cuba in 1895 Ernesto Lecuona is arguably Cuba's greatest serious composer. He was a gifted pianist who wrote hundreds of songs and piano works before he died in 1963. Most of his music is composed in a rich authentic Cuban style. The most famous of his works is Malagueña the sixth movement of his Suite Andalucia for solo piano which was first published in 1928. Malagueña has been recorded as a popular song (with added lyrics) as a serious piano work (even by Lecuona himself in the 1950's) and also as a jazz standard (Bill Holman's arrangement for the Stan Kenton Orchestra in the early 1960's.) Over the years it has been arranged many times for variousother mediums ranging from symphony orchestra to field arrangements for drum and bugle corps.In 1976 James Barnes arranged Malagueña for the University of Kansas Marching Band. A few years later with permission from the publisher he expanded this original arrangement into a full work for symphonic band called Prelude Fantasy and Fandango on Lecuona's Malagueña. After several performances in the spring of 1978 (most notably at the MENC Convention in Colorado Springs) this work along with over 200 other Barnes manuscripts lay fallow in the KU Band Library. While packing up his office belongings when he retired from The University of Kansas in 2015 Barnes came across this long languishing Prelude Fantasy and Fandango which remained in condensed score. In the fall of 2016 he completely re-composed the opening portion of the work reduced the number of required percussion and disposed of the two harps in his 1978 version. This new setting features evocative thinly scored extended solo passages for clarinet bassoon and flute before the full wind band concludes the work with a powerful dramatic setting of the main themes of Lecuona's masterful Malagueña.

Philip Glass has produced ten symphonies so far the ones immediately preceding this one inspired by sources as diverse as Allen Ginsberg poetry Aboriginal writings and Native American song. Symphony No 8 however has noreferences to non-musical materials and takes as its subject according to Glass ‘the language of music itself’.The three-movement work does not conform to classical symphonic form with an extended twenty-minute first movement a slow passacaglia for the second movement and a short dense theme joined by a counter theme then ending with an extended cadence to complete the work in the third movement. Symphony No 8 was commissioned by the BrucknerOrchester Linz under the direction of Dennis Russell Davis.American composer Philip Glass is widely known as one of the most celebrated influential and prolific of the modern composers. He is frequently referred to as aminimalist though he prefers to call himself a composer of ‘music with repetitive structures.’ His operas among them the renowned Einstein On The Beach are performed across the globe and he has created work for small andlarge ensembles film and experimental theatre and founded his own performing group The Philip Glass Ensemble.