American composer Kevin Puts (b. 1972) won the Pulitzer Prize in music in 2012 for his first opera, Silent Night. He has since won a Grammy for his triple concerto, Contact, and he has been named Musical America’s 2024 Composer of the Year. He has also continued writing operas: The Hours, written with librettist Greg Pierce, had its debut staging at the Metropolitan Opera in 2022 to packed houses. While Puts has a few works for band, including some orchestral works that have been transcribed with his blessing, he has been most prolific writing for orchestra, including four symphonies and more than a dozen concertos. Puts studied at Eastman and Yale with a glittering array of teachers that included Joseph Schwantner and William Bolcom, among many others. He teaches at the Peabody Institute, and has recently resumed duties as director of the Composer’s Institute at the Minnesota Orchestra. For more on Kevin Puts and his music, visit his website, Wikipedia, the Peabody Institute, Ricordi, the Juilliard School, the Wind Repertory Project, the St. Louis Symphony, and the Minnesota Orchestra.
Puts wrote Charm in 2012 for the Scarsdale Middle School Band as part of the BandQuest series. He recounts its origin in his program notes:
The idea for Charm came to me immediately after I first met the Scarsdale (N.Y.) Middle School Band and its talented director, Nicholas Lieto. The school is only a fifteen-minute drive from my house, and on the trip home, I imagined a sort of mystical harmonic palette with triangles ringing over a pentatonic melody as if a spell had been cast. I realized when I got to my piano and began playing it that it would have to be written in the irregular (and difficult) meter of 7/8.
I decided to call it Charm because the music conjures up magic, good-luck charms, and such, and I was also thinking of the other meaning of the word, that intangible quality possessed by certain people places that truly can cast a spell.
Charm was commissioned by BandQuest® for the Scarsdale Middle School Band, Nicholas Lieto, conductor. It was premiered at Scarsdale Middle School on May 9, 2012. While my inexperience with this genre lead me to compose a more difficult piece than I had intended, the students in Scarsdale rose to the challenge brilliantly.
Here is a performance with the score:
Here is another performance by a British band:
Kevin Puts provides some additional insights into the piece in these short videos:
For more on Charm, visit the Wind Repertory Project, the American Composer’s Forum, J. W. Pepper (ignore the AI-generated description), and Hal Leonard.