Battle Erie

Seraph Brass is a dynamic brass quintet drawing from a roster of America’s top female brass players. Committed to engaging audiences with captivating programming, Seraph Brass presents a diverse body of repertoire that includes original transcriptions, newly commissioned works, and well-known classics.

Sprawling epic which follows the Prescotts, an emigrant family through four generations, from the Erie Canal in the 1830's to their settled home in the West a half a century later. On the way they encounter river pirates, and escape with the help of fur trapper Linus Rawlings, who subsequently marries one of their daughters, Eve. The parents are drowned on a foundering raft, and the other daughter Lilith becomes a riverboat singer and catches the eye of a genteel adventurer Cleve Van Valen. They cross the plains together in a wagon train and make and lose a fortune in California; meanwhile Linus has turned farmer and, comes the Civil War, joins the Union Army and is killed at the Battle of Shiloh. One of his sons Zeb also joins the army and stays after the war as a cavalry officer and is sent to Colorado to help guard the pioneering railroad against the Indians, whose land they are crossing. By this time Lilith is the elderly lady of the family, having survived long enough to see the …

Young Nate Lawton is caught between the rigors of the fledgling United States Navy's discipline and the demands of his ambitious Captain. Nate seems doomed to pay the price of his newly appointed rank of Acting First Lieutenant on the USS Hancock, a brig fresh from the shipyard. He becomes the captain's scapegoat, and the target of the crew's hatred. He must choose between his patriotic duty, and the implicit responsibility of his office…