Wind Bands

Each year, numerous college wind bands from around the country descend upon a different city for performances, workshops, exhibits, and more. In recent years, this has included Fort Worth, TX, and Athens, GA.

In 2019, this happened in Tempe, where ASU hosted this big national conference.

It’s the College Band Directors National Association, a grassroots organization that describes itself as serving a wide variety of constituents, “from the conservatory wind ensemble to the athletic band to the small college band and everything in between.

On this edition of Arizona Encore, we’ll drop into a handful of these concerts, with highlights from the 2019 CBDNA Conference at the Tempe Center for the Arts. This includes a world premiere performance of Paul Dooley’s work “Manifestos.” Cast in three movements – Aero-Poem, Futurist Flowers, and Star Dancer + Her School of Dance – it’s music that finds inspiration in the early twentieth-century avant-garde movement known as Futurism.

Also on the program is O’Neal Douglas’s work “Harriet,” and for the composer, Harriet Tubman had always been a hero: someone that he had wanted to compose a work about, but the opportunity to do so hadn’t quite come along. In fact, he said he waited for years before the opportunity presented itself, but it finally came in the form of a commission from Dr. Thomas McCauley.

Born Araminta Ross in 1822, Harriet Ross Tubman led a life of courage and selflessness that extended beyond normal limits. In his program notes for this piece, Douglas points out how Tubman used music, specifically spirituals, when arriving at plantations as a sort of code to pass along instructions to fugitive slaves for travel northward. One such song was “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” which was able to musically convey a map of how to reach Canada. Another favorite song of Tubman’s was “Go Down Moses,” which was used to signal her arrival in an area and that a trip northward was being planned. This song in particular, with its haunting nature and familiarity, forms the thematic, melodic, and harmonic basis for Douglas’s piece “Harriet.”