TIM REYNISH WEBSITE

HOME PAGE: MAY 2006

May Day 2006, Ithaca, New York State.

Jeff Grogan, formerly director of orchestras at Ithaca College, watches Tim Reynish dressing during a concert at Baylor University, Texas.

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MAY 2006

I still find a great deal of music for band very loud and noisy, which is why I am resuscitating my one man T shirt crusade on this homepage. More important is the encouragement of composers to write music which does not pander to the obvious strength, and weakness, of band music. The late Warren Benson once wrote in a WASBE Journal:

… I wish I could hear more wind conductors and instrumental teachers using better and larger vocabularies that relate to beauty, aesthetics, to charm, to gentleness, strength and power without rancour or anger, to useful tonal vibrance, live sound, to grace of movement, to stillness, to fervour, to the depth of great age the exultation of great happiness, the feel of millennia, the sweetness and purity of lullabies, the precision of fine watches, the reach into time-space of great love and respect, the care of phrasing, the delicacy of balance, the ease of warmth, the resonance of history, the susurrus of wind in the pines and whisperings in churches, the intimacy of the solo instrument, the kind weight of togetherness and the rising spirit of creating something, bringing something to life from cold print, living music, moving music.

RESONANCE

It is hard to write objectively of a work which I have commissioned, worked on, premiered and love, but I believe that Resonance, the latest work by Chris Marshall is very special and that many of Warren’s wishes are fulfilled.

It inhabits Chris’s unique sound world, layers of motifs, rhythmic modulations, snippets of song over strange nocturnal rumblings, occasionally overlapping with full-blown themes, full of the magic of the islands of Polynesia and culminating in a set of variants on a missionary hymn-tune which dies out magically to bird song.

In the same pair of concerts at Ithaca, we were able to premiere a school band Grade 3 piece by Fergal Carroll, a seven minute treatment of a folk tune depicting the river Blackwater in Ireland, and also to re-introduce Bill Connor’s Grade 3-4 Mahlerian symphony Tails aus dem Voods Viennoise, another work of great beauty and variety.

CHRIS MARSHALL

In just a little under three months in the USA I have met dozens of fine musicians and heard scores of excellent pieces for wind ensemble and chamber winds, in concerts by professional groups of the highest quality, by University and High School groups and by chamber ensembles. These have ranged from John Cleese, Professor at Cornell University, delivering a magisterial Peter and the Wolf without a dead parrot in sight, to the conductor of the National Symphony, Leonard Slatkin, brilliantly controlling Corigliano’s exuberant 3rd Symphony, Circus Maximus, in the extraordinary new concert hall, Strathmore Arts Centre, one of the homes of the Baltimore Symphony, played with breathtaking precision and musicality by The President’s Own, the US Marine Band. The links to the composers above will give you some idea of my top recommendations of repertoire this month.

ITHACA

Only a few more days now for me to spend in Ithaca College, New York State, surely one of the finest musical schools in the world with facilities second to none, positioned in the inspiring Finger La\ke country. It was founded in 1892 as the Ithaca Conservatory of Music, and its history incorporates the founding of the Conway Military Band School in 1922 by Patrick Conway, a member of the faculty at Cornell. Information on his career can be found at the ABA collection at the University of Maryland.

There have been many pleasures in a wonderful and musically invigorating six weeks; amongst them has been the chance to meet Dana Wilson and hear much of his music again, to hear for the first time the Concerto for Percussion by Steven Stucky, commissioned by a consortium of which WASBE was a member, and to meet the music of Chris Brubeck for the first time.

NOT THE CORE REPERTOIRE

The excitement for me in the past quarter of a century has been i/n trying to seek out and sometimes commission what Michale Tippett described as the unusual, the rare, the rich, the exuberant, the heroic and the aristocratic in the wind world. These works rarely find their way into any lists of “core” repertoire, but they are there published in Austria, France, Holland, Japan, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Scandinavia, Spain, United Kingdom and elsewhere. Just as our orchestral and choral colleagues search the international repertoire for their programmes, we in the band world must learn to do likewise.

However, it is sometimes very disappointing to discover how little impact WASBE has had on music education and programming in the United States. Lists of ‘core’ repertoire are issued to future band directors and music educators which barely reflect any repertoire beyond the tried and trusted tradition al. Some time ago, Warren Benson discussed "Aesthetic Criteria for Selecting an International Repertoire", and proposed three very personal issues, commitment, exposure and risk.

Sooner or later, we have to take the responsibility in our own hands for the progress of WASBE, individually. It's not an international conscience that we're talking about. We're talking about individuals and, when we all do that, there's going to be a glow…..I don't want WASBE to turn into a dispensary where people come every two years to get lists that they can go home and file and forget about and do the same old stuff they've been doing before.

Despite his strictures on making lists, which immediately of course are out of date, I have listed in these web pages over 150 works which I think are significant but which will not find their way into core repertoire lists, and I think that my two programmes at Ithaca reflected some of Warren’s criteria for responsibility in what is nothing more or less than taste in music:

ITHACA COLLEGE SYMPHONIC BAND

Conductor: Tim Reynish

Graduate Conductor: Dominic Hartjes

Frank Campos, Solo Trumpet

Ford Hall, Tuesday, April 25, 2006, 8.15 p.m.

ITHACA WIND ENSEMBLE 27th APRIL 2006

Conductor: Timothy Reynish

Graduate Conductor: Andrew Krus