The Wind Symphony and Concert Band will be performing a tribute in honor of American composer Morton Gould on Sunday, Oct. 20.
“[The Symphony and band] are great. I’ve been really pleased with the performance and the progress that all the players have been putting forth,” Concert Conductor and Music Professor Kenneth Kohlenberg said.
Morton Gould was born in 1913 in Richmond Hill, NY and died in 1996. He began his journey as a teenager, playing the piano inside movie theaters during the Great Depression, then moved up to Radio City Music Hall when it first opened. In 1935 he began creating his own works.
The Wind Symphony will be presenting a symphony Gould wrote in the 1950s and the Concert Band will be performing a short selection from the original piece, “Pavanne.”
“I would say it’s a little anti-war in that some of the music shows the horrors of the war, you know, it shows some violence,” Kohlenberg said. “On the other hand, it acts as a tribute or memorial to those who served in war. This piece would have been written during the Second World War.”
Along with that performance, the Concert Band will be performing a portion of “Pavanne.”
“That shows a lot of Morton Gould’s jazz influence,” he said. “He was a major American composer and a lot of American composers use jazz as part of their style.”
Both bands have done their best to impress and Kohlenberg said he is really pleased with their efforts.
“For the fact the Concert Band is a little larger and has a few more students than it did, that’s a positive quality,” Kohlenberg said. “And the Wind Symphony, some of them have been playing [more than] 35 years in the group, and that’s just consistently a high quality.”
The concert will take place in the Blair Hall Theater. The event is free and open to the public.
Due to the concert being held on a Sunday, parking is free.
If you can play an instrument and are interested in joining the concert band, contact
Kenneth.kohlenberg@sinclair.edu or call his office at (937)-512-2753.