In a musical conclusion to the spring semester, the Musical Arts Center will host a combined concert for the university’s concert bands. The show will consist of performances from four ensembles: the All-Campus Band, Concert Band, Symphonic Band and Wind Ensemble at 8 p.m. April 22.
IU’s Wind Ensemble is the most advanced group of the four. Donald McKinney, who is serving his first year as the university’s director of bands, will conduct the Wind Ensemble at the spring concert.
This concert will differ from the combined fall concert because it features former director of bands Stephen Pratt as a guest conductor, who was a member of the faculty from 1984 to 2018. McKinney said that the band department chose to bring back Pratt as a guest conductor due to his long association with the university, and that his involvement will be a unique factor of the show.
McKinney also specifically curated the concert setlist for the Wind Ensemble, which will perform the final set of the evening. He said he wanted to close the show with a memorable piece, so he chose Jennifer Higdon’s “Blue Cathedral,” which he said is an emotionally evocative piece.
“It’s just a beautiful piece of music that evokes and commemorates somebody’s passing and moving through time and space in that sense of celebration of one’s life,” he said. “So I guess that’s why I chose that music. It just felt like a good way to end the semester.”
McKinney said “Blue Cathedral” is his favorite piece in the entire concert setlist.
The Wind Ensemble will also play Ferdinand David’s “Trombone Concertino in E-Flat Major, Op. 4,” which features a prominent student solo by senior trombone performance major Patrick Anderson. His performance of the piece won IU’s Brass Concerto Competition last fall.
Anderson said the concerto is a rite of passage for many trombonists, and he has been working with the piece for the past five or six years.
“This is kind of one of the pieces for the trombone that everybody plays for, you know, high school and throughout their career,” he said. “It’s almost every big audition, and so it’s kind of a standard for our instrument.”
Additionally, the show will feature two guest conductors, Jacob Kessler and Nick Hinman, who are both IU graduate students. They will take turns directing the All-Campus Band, which will play during the first portion of the concert.
Hinman, who is a first-year doctoral conducting student, also directed the All-Campus Band during last semester’s fall band showcase. He said he wanted to incorporate a host of diverse sounds within the ensemble’s portion of the show; the opening piece, Clifton Williams’ “Symphonic Dance no. 3,‘Fiesta,’” exemplifies that intention.
“This particular one has sort of a Spanish flavor, if you will, with kind of the Spanish influence that there is in San Antonio specifically, where there are street bands and that kind of stuff happening,” he said. “So students enjoy playing that one quite a bit.”
Hinman also said this concert will be relatively lengthy because it will display the performances of the entire band department all in one night.
“I think what it does is present the most comprehensive picture of everything that the Department of Bands has been doing this semester,” Hinman said. “I think that hopefully it shows that there’s a place for everybody in the Department of Bands, regardless of if they are Jacobs students or not.”
The concert will be free to attend and will be available to watch live on LIVE@jacobs.
