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RECITAL
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MUSIC NEWS
S.F. Symphony Contract Agreement
Bay Area's Classical
Music Scene
January 31-
February 13
By Janos Gereben,
Mickey Butts, and
Michelle Dulak Thomson
Reviews
and Brilliant
By Jules Langert
Berkeley Symphony
Jerry Kuderna
George Thomson
(1/28/06)
By Rebekah Ahrendt
Magnificat
(1/27/06)
By Michael Zwiebach
Berkeley Opera
Falstaff
(1/28/06)
and Downs
By Alexander Kahn
San Francisco Symphony
(1/28/06)
By Stephanie Friedman
Ailyn Pérez
Matthew Piatt
(1/29/06)
By Michelle Dulak Thomson
International Contemporary Ensemble
Timothy Weiss
(1/29/06)
By Renato Rodolfo-Sioson
Radu Lupu
(1/24/06)
By Heuwell Tircuit
"Basically British"
Joe Edelberg
John Parr
Sean Panikkar
(1/27/06)
By Janos Gereben
Mickey Butts, Executive Director/Publisher
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Time was when there was a band in every town, village, and hamlet — when, in fact, the band was the dominant provider of music in these United States. Today, bands are not in the general public’s view or consciousness. Prizewinning community, school, or college bands don’t make the newspapers or receive other media attention. Even the elaborately produced college marching band halftime shows during football games are denied the TV audience. Are we missing something?
Recalling the significant role bands played when John Philip Sousa was still alive, when the great cornet soloists reigned and were as popular as pop and rock stars today, when Edwin Franko Goldman, his son Richard, and other band maestros were at the forefront, I thought I’d look into the current situation. Given the enormous reduction in music education in public schools over the past 40 years, I imagined that the band movement had withered along with school choirs and orchestras. If so, I wondered, what is replacing the best musical education, hands-on playing? And how is America to continue producing outstanding wind players for its symphony orchestras?
A couple of phone conversations revealed there is nothing seriously amiss. Robert Calonico, director of bands at UC Berkeley, quickly identified the bands and directors of the 11 college institutions in the area and proclaimed them in good health. Off the top of his head, he was able to name 14 community bands between San Jose and Santa Rosa, along with the names of their conductors.
The oldest big-town community band in the area is San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park Band, which has been giving free Sunday concerts in Golden Gate Park continuously since September 1882. It’s currently conducted by Michael L. Wirgler. Robert Hansen was the conductor for 26 years, and a trumpeter in the group for 27 years before that. It may be the oldest band in continuous service here, but other groups are still older. The Nevada County Concert Band dates from the 1850s, when its founders came from Cornwall to Grass Valley and Nevada City to work in the mines.
While community bands have long nourished the townspeople, schools ensure that bands survive from one generation to the next. These school ensembles are doing better than I would have guessed. Calonico reported a dramatic improvement in the quality of students in the last two decades, and an increase in the number of outstanding school band programs. Steven Hendee, director of wind music at the San Francisco School of the Arts, concurred: “Groups are now playing more challenging music than they were in the 1950s, and probably sounding better. Where textures were more homophonic, now composers are providing a wider palette, with far more complicated textures. The music being written for high school bands nowadays is better composed and makes the groups sound better.”
Down the years, bands have undergone continuous change. The military and brass bands of the old days became concert bands. In the 1940s, the ideal became the symphonic band, based on the model of the 100-piece bands at the Universities of Michigan and Illinois. Leaders favored transcriptions of large orchestral works, but many major 20th century composers wrote works specifically for the concert band. Next came the wind ensemble, after the model established by Frederick Fennell at the Eastman School of Music in 1952. It is typically a smaller group, with fewer players of each of the principal instruments (clarinet, trumpet, and flute). The configuration can make it more flexible and more attuned to subtle performance than the larger ensembles.
For every type of group, from concert band to wind ensemble, repertory is a central issue, as directors strive to establish a literature that respects and enhances the distinctiveness of their medium. They have long aspired to achieve for the band a stature commensurate with that of the orchestra. A prominent Bay Area composer who has written many works for band is Roger Nixon, professor emeritus at San Francisco State University. One of his works, Music of Appreciation, is characteristically handsome, sonorous, and finely orchestrated, producing a smooth, rich band sound. It is included on the excellent United States Coast Guard Band’s recent CD, Liberty for All, which was directed by Commander Lewis J. Buckley (USCG-93007, distributed by the Coast Guard’s educational/pubic affairs program). Another of Nixon's works is Psalm (1979), on the CD Band Songs, played by the Rutgers University Wind Ensemble with William Berz conducting (Mark Masters 6000 MCD, Mark Masters). It has a generous, flowing quality, a gentle spirit, and fine melodic continuity. Hendee cited a number of other Bay Area composers who have been writing for band, including Martin Rokeach, Frank LaRocca, and Edwin Dugger.
For me to get a handle on the situation, nothing would do but to visit a select or representative school band and hear how things were going. Calonico nominated several top programs: James Logan High School in Union City, Lynbrook High School in San Jose, and both Saratoga High School and Las Lomas High School in Walnut Creek. I visited Las Lomas High, the closest and most accessible to me, where 245 of the school’s 1,677 students play in the three bands. Norman Dea, in his 23rd year as Las Lomas' band director, leads this exemplary program. He invited me to a rehearsal of his top group, the Wind Ensemble, and it was a rewarding experience.
Norman Dea conducting
From the moment they began to set up until the end of the rehearsal, the Las Lomas High School Wind Ensemble musicians were wholly focused, serious, and attentive, dedicated to the music and to their soft-spoken, gracious conductor. It was as if nothing was more important in their lives, which will be true for some of them. This rehearsal was as good as it gets, at any level. It might have been a pre-professional conservatory group. It had a fully balanced complement of 52 players, including double reeds and even a contrabass clarinet.
The playing itself, beginning with a careful tune-up exercise, was admirable in intonation, phrasing, balance, and musicality. The pieces were a sonorous, hymnlike Lux Arumque, a transcription of a choral piece by Eric Whitacre; the third movement of Apollo Unleashed, USC faculty member Frank Ticheli’s band symphony, which is rhythmically interesting and tricky but no problem for this group; and a transcription of “Allerseelen,” one of Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs. It was all to the great credit of conductor Dea, and for me an affirmation that fine bands can thrive where there is the will, the talent, and the support.
The support is, of course, crucial. Las Lomas High is in an affluent suburb, and many of Dea’s students study their instruments privately. Dea reported that, excluding his salary, only 30 percent of the band program’s expenses — instruments, equipment, music, repairs, fees for coaches on particular instruments — comes from the school district. The source for the rest is the Walnut Creek Educational Foundation K–12. It aims to raise $1 million this year, half of which will go to Las Lomas High School.
The program is not albatrossed with an expensive, musically distracting marching band component. The three high schools in the Acalanes School District have eliminated marching band. Dea and his colleagues do, however, have jazz bands (large stage bands or smaller ensembles). During the rehearsal, when asked, for my benefit, about repertory preferences, Dea’s students expressed little or no interest in rock, nor even in Sousa marches. They like the more challenging, intricate music written for band, Dea says.
So it’s an exceptional situation in both the quality and the reasons for its success. Students attending urban schools, particularly in the inner city, don’t have this opportunity, this level of parental and community support. Their bands are getting along, although not many as happily set up as this one. Interestingly, however, even at schools as fortunate as Las Lomas, the vocal and orchestral programs range from nonexistent to fair, rarely good, and only very rarely anything better than that. It’s not fair and it reflects on music education today, but that’s a whole other story. We should be thankful for the successes that are out there, and thankful that the great tradition of the American band is thriving.
(Robert P. Commanday, founding editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at UC Berkeley.)
©2006 Robert P. Commanday, all rights reserved
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Michelle Dulak Thomson, Editor
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Both Mickey Butts and Michelle Dulak Thomson read all e-mails sent to editor@sfcv.org. Mickey oversees the overall quality of the site, assigns and edits features, and manages overall operations and all business-related issues; Michelle assigns and edits all reviews, assigns and edits features, selects photos, and edits the main page. (Richard copyedits articles and oversees production.) To reach either Mickey or Michelle individually, click on our names in the list above. (To reach SFCV founder and emeritus editor Robert Commanday, send e-mail only to bob@sfcv.org.) Items relevant to the Music News column should also be directed to Janos Gereben at janosg@gmail.com.
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