THE WIND ENSEMBLE REPERTOIRE AND ME When I was in the 7th grade, my best friend, Keith, and I used to go to his house after school every afternoon and listen to The Rite of Spring and lost of Strauss. We would turn the Hi Fi system up until the walls of his house shook and dance and scream to Mr(s) Stravinsky and Strass for hours on end. We thought this was perfectly normal behavior. Keiths mother was a piano teacher, his father played violin. My father was a choral conductor and pianist, my mother a brass pedagogue. My house was full of music and musicians all the time. Listening to music and talking about it was basically all we ever did. The music was all symphonic repertoire and when stereophonic sound came out in 1958, I was definitely in heaven. There was very little original concert band music in those days and what there was was not what I loved and became saturated with. My high school band was hidious. But I got my ensemble experience from my fathers boys choir and my mothers trumpet choir. Little did I know that by the time I reached adolescence, I had a huge musical library and hundreds of classical vinyl recordings and new the names of every famous conductor there was. I could see many of them on TV on the weekends and just assumed, as did the rest our of culture, that serious music WAS a part of the American culture. Skip a lot... I went to Michigan in 1965 and continued my diet of music and more and more music. Could not get enough. It was a tonic, an obsession that I completely gave in to. I would do things like take time every day for weeks to listen to all of the Beethoven piano sonatas. I remember fighting back tears in music lit courses when studying Puccini or the Bach Magnificat. Why, say you, are you telling us this? And I will say this to that. I grew up not knowing that there was or should be a difference among any venues of music-making. Yeah I loved the Beatles and Knights in White Satin but the depth of musical meaning and power was so deeply imbedded in my young soul without me even knowing it, that I was able to fall madly in love with music of true substance. After my Revelli/Michigan experience, I came away with a concept of wind playing that was rooted in symphonic literature. My tastes were certainly of a romantic nature. Not just chronologically, but of a more sophisticated mentality that, so I thought at the time, was as things should be. I had a strong sense of beauty, power, subtlety and the ability of music to be transformative. It was all of that to me. After my secondary school teaching experience which I loved and was completely obsessed by, I moved into academia and climbed the ladders of all that that entails. What I continued to learn and yearn for was the ability to produce the sounds and exquisite music I knew. I pushed and kicked and prospered in that setting. I fought the necessary battles of academia in order to continue my quest of pushing, pushing myself and my students so that we all, together, could dance and scream like I did with Keith and The Rite of Spring. The music of the band world has taken, in my lifetime, many twists and turns. There came a time when wind conductors realized the potential of the wind band as an entity. Not as an extension of the symphony orchestra but as its own venue of artistry. But, oh God, were we in a tough place. We were supposed to be entertaining the sporting events, marching down the street, and calling the troops to action along with trying to find and create music of our own. These kinds of bands are really, if were honest about it, the cornerstone of our medium in terms of their influence (if not expectation) on our society at large. And historically, wind instruments have been as much functional as they have been artistic. There are a couple of huge question here. Just exactly what is the artistic potential of the wind band as a medium of serious music-making, how does it insert itself into what little is left of any sophisticated music in our American society? And how do wind band conductors elbow there way into what many consider an already dying art form; the making of serious music that is truly important? Do we light up the concert halls with video screens and lasers? Its really challenging to get people to turn off their cell phones during a concert, let alone get them musically involved. In my judgement, there is absolutely no doubt that great music speaks as loudly as it ever has. Human beings respond to things that touch them in important and transformative ways. Its instinctive and honest. All they need is exposure. And what our musical culture currently lacks in horrifying proportions is the lack of that exposure. Music Education? Seriously? I dont even know what that means anymore. Last night at the CBDNA banquet at UNR the keynote speaker was a brilliant musicologist from UC-Berkley who was invited to the conference to listen to and comment upon what he heard with virtually no pre-conceived ideas about the wind ensemble or its repertoire. I was fascinated by his unbiased and truthful assessments. He had no skin in our game...just expert opinions. He came away wondering how our current wind band repertoire is going to make an important mark in our society like so many of us in it have done before. The term he used for the music he heard all day at the conference was vapid. Hmmm. So where is the dancing and screaming of the Rite of Spring for wind band? We have, starting in the early 80s and before counting Fred Fennell and the Eastman Wind Ensemble, been trying desperately to find our place...to be like the big boys in the orchestral world. For a while there, we were making some headway. We had some really good, even great music. Can we have an impact on the cultural fabric of our society that is one of growth and desperately needed depth? Does our music touch and reach out? Or do we need to run a laser light show along with it? There is a groups of composers starting with Holsinger, Gillingham, Camphouse , etc. who started, in my judgement, catering to our medium with well-crafted music that is more textural than substantive. Culturally it plays on subject matter rather than depth. Its soundtrack. There is David Maslanka, Carter Pann, Michael Colgrass and some new and important blood coming on the scene. Who do we pay attention to and why? If we want to join the tiny world in America of true artistic achievement, we need to stop going to the movie soundtrack well that has instant appeal and continue our quest for more. We need to stop being popular with our repertoire and start being serious about finding and commissioning and playing music that has character and essence and something to say. The world of music availability is now ridiculous. Lets not go with the obvious any more. Lets stop making a handful of wind band composers our staple and go back to our roots of orchestral wind playing that uses pitch, ensemble, accuracy and balance as the means to produce the musical ends, not the ends themselves. How ridiculous is it to think that if you play technically accurately, you are making music? What the hell were you doing in seventh grade?
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 06:06:02 +0000
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