Baby Face Nelson and the Femme Fatale
by Joseph Thalken
Temple University Wind Symphony
Patricia Cornett, conductor
Joseph Thalken, piano
Baby Face Nelson and the Femme Fatale will be available for streaming and download on all major platforms on October 3, 2025.
Baby Face Nelson and the Femme Fatale began life in the late 1980s as an idea for a slightly tongue-in-cheek ballet which would pay homage to the classic film noir movies of the 1940s and 50s, with their gangsters, private detectives in trench coats, hard-boiled newspaper reporters, and beautiful women on the wrong side of the law. I was living in Germany at the time and made a demo recording (with a mix of real and synthesized instruments) in the hopes of finding a choreographer who would be interested in working on it. After several unsuccessful tries, I put it in a drawer and nearly forgot about it until years later, when I mentioned it to the conductor Ryan T. Nelson when we were working on the musical Was at Northwestern University’s American Musical Theatre Project. He suggested that I score it for symphonic band and promised to try to get it performed. As I began to work on it again, I became very excited about writing for so many players and found myself revising a lot of the music in the process.
Structurally, the piece is built upon a five-note motive, B-A-B-C-G#, which permeates nearly every measure in one guise or another (transposed, inverted, retrograde, etc.) and an ascending secondary motive (A-C-D#-E) also plays an important part. Incidentally, it is not a literal portrait of the real Baby Face Nelson (1908-1934), who was a notorious Chicago gangster and the subject in multiple films, but rather an affectionate tribute to the film genre that such bigger-than-life
characters like Baby Face Nelson inspired.
--Joseph Thalken