 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Keil
Date: 2000-01-21 21:28
Do you think that Wind Ensembles will get the recognition that Symphony Orchestras get? i mean will we be on this board talking about how awesome the principle clarinetist of the Boston Wind Ensemble was?
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Author: Kim
Date: 2000-01-21 23:40
Some Wind Ensembles are already extremely famous. One of these such ensembles are the Dallas Wind Symphony. I love their music and their conductor is world renowned. I don't know any of the musicians names, but sometimes the wind ensembles have professional musicians(Charles Niedich, etc) come play with them.
Wind Ensembles are well-known for playing great orchestral transcriptions. For the fall semester, the wind ensemble I'm in did an arrangement of Carmina Burana with our school's choir.
Sometimes it's not who's in the band, but how they play it. We played and sung this piece with power. Any other orchestra could have done exactly what we did.
I don't think that any ensemble should be judged on the "principal" player, but as a whole. After all, what's in the wind ensemble, or the orchestra. It's not just the principal clarinet player that's playing the part. Sure there are solos, but any works solos aren't the whole of the piece. We can talk about one clarinet player, or we can talk about how great that symphony orchestra sounded at that concert. I'd rather judge on that than one player.
For example, the symphonic band in my school has had narrators, and let me tell you, the music was far better than the narrator! (Not because the narration was boring)
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Author: David Goss
Date: 2000-01-22 12:31
I would love to see Wind Ensembles take the level of major orchestras. What I find interesting is a good portion of middle, high school, and college music programs feed on bands and Wind Ensembles, but in the public only orchestras get the attention.
I only hope that as Wind Ensembles become more popular true Wind Ensemble literature is played and not orchestral transcripts. There is a HUGE body of literature written specifically for Wind Ensemble that is wonderful to play. I am not saying that orchestral transcriptions are bad, but it's better to play the real thing. eg. Imagine hearing the Mozart Clarinet concerto played by on violin. Sure it would work, but it wasn't written with the violin in mind.
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Author: Don Berger
Date: 2000-01-22 17:29
How about that SUPERB ensemble headed by David Schifrin {NY or Wash?] that appeared on PBS not long back!! Don
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Author: Katherine Pincock
Date: 2000-01-23 12:12
We had an interesting discussion about this sort of issue in my twentieth century music history class, actually, so here's that side of the story: wind ensembles etc. were traditionally training groups used to prepare people for playing in various military bands, which around the early part of the century were the most common performing group in North America. The reason there are often so many transcriptions of orchestra music out there is because not every city would have an orchestra, but almost every one would have a military band. When the military bands started going out of style, wind ensembles were kept in schools as training ensembles.
A lot of 20th c. music is determined by economics. As my teacher phrased it, if an ensemble type exists as an economic unit, works will be composed for it because you know they'll be performed many times. The orchestra and the string quartet have both become this sort of economic unit. The band/wind ensemble is an economic unit on its own, but a teaching unit, so the music written for it is composed with a totally different intention: it's often entertaining to play, and builds up to an obvious fast and loud climax for popular appeal.
However, I can easily see the wind ensemble becoming a separate, professional unit again. There are already groups here in Canada like the Pacific Winds (a group made of professionals who play high level music.) As it gets harder and harder to support a full orchestra (and the traditional wind ensemble contains far fewer players,) I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the wind ensemble take over. I think that would be great, because some of the music already out there for wind ensemble is absolutely brilliant, and deserves to be heard far more often.
So there you go, my take on this. Who'd have thought 20th c. history would pay off in this conversation? ;-)
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Author: Jerry K.
Date: 2000-01-23 12:31
The Eastman Wind Ensemble under the direction of Frederick Fenell was well known back in the '50s and '60s. They made a number of recordings on the Mercury label and many have now been reissued on CD. One rip-roaring CD is call "Screamers," so-called because the pieces are blisteringly fast circus marches. I highly recommend anything by this group.
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Author: Karen
Date: 2000-01-24 13:32
It's funny that you should be talking about Wind Ensembles. I just finished a concert weekend with the Massachusetts Wind Orchestra at UMASS in Amherst, MA. It is directed by Malcolm W. Rowell, and is made up of professional and professional-level musicians. We play very challenging wind literature, and this group absolutely plays its heart out every concert, because Bill Rowell is an excellent director, and demands 200% from us. Jeff Harrison of MA professionally records our concerts, but those are only available for the members and audience for a limited time after each concert. Our recordings are played on NPR radio, and we are compiling a CD that I hope is available soon to the public.
-Karen Cohan
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Author: Sad4You
Date: 2000-01-27 05:49
[snipped by the Webmaster]
<br>A very immature and insulting followup to Kim has been deleted. We don't need this kind of thing here.
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Author: Dee
Date: 2000-01-27 12:14
Good for you Mark. I saw it just before you snipped it and it made no sense whatsoever in light of the thread (besides being inappropriate and insulting).
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Author: Keil
Date: 2000-01-28 15:09
Here in Virginia Beach we now have the Virginia Beach Wind Symphony which i absolutely adore because it gives me, as a high school musician, an oppurtunity to hear the pieces,which are played in school, live. I absolutly love wind ensemble literature like Tame the Perilous Skies, Armenian Dances, Hero's Lost and Fallen to name a few. All of these works inspire me daily and i wish that the general public would be able to experience this larger than life experience. To think that with only brass, woodwind, and percussion, we can get such a dynamic musical experience.
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