ASU Wind Bands on the Cutting Edge

This semester marks the beginning of a new era in wind bands at Arizona State, described in the article “School of Music takes on concert experiment,” posted in the main ASU website. Students will audition as normal but

After the audition, they will get to choose from the more than 20 ensembles on the schedule for this year.

Each ensemble will rehearse for three weeks, then the members will rotate into another ensemble. This process will be repeated throughout the year, giving the students a wide range of musical experience.

Such traditional ensembles as the symphonic band still will exist, says Gary Hill, director of bands, but it won’t be the same students sitting in the same chairs for an entire semester or year.

Instead, the band directors will gather students to rehearse and play the concert band repertoire as needed. Those same students then will rotate to smaller ensembles, such as wind quintets, contemporary and world-music combos, studio bands, or single-instrument groups such as an oboe choir.

It will not be the typical “bandy” band experience seen at most colleges; the reasoning is laid out in the following section.

The idea for offering a large variety of ensembles and having students choose which ones they are interested in came from many discussions among the wind-instrument faculty.

“Our students are going to make a living in many ways,” Hill says. “Our belief is that they will be required to do a lot of things rather than be specialists. That’s why we want our curriculum to be as fluid as possible.”

Part of that flexibility is having students comfortable with playing a wide range of repertoire.

Hill describes wind music as being part of a continuum, ranging from large performance ensembles such as concert bands, which are restrictive in terms of instrumentation, to small groups that are more flexible and may use improvisation, for example.

“We are trying to get farther down the flexibility spectrum,” Hill says.

The new concept of flexibility and change, with most projects being three weeks long, will be much more challenging for the students – and faculty, too, Hill says.

There will be a lot more music to learn, and the band directors will have to work speedily to bring the ensembles to performance level.

Read the entire article for more details on the wind band program at ASU.