Western's Wind Ensemble welcomes new performance venue
Chance to play in Eugene at Oregon Music Educator's Conference marks band's high achievement
Erin Huggins
Issue date: 1/20/10 Section: Culture
Early last Friday morning (Jan. 15), the 45 members of Western's Wind Ensemble piled into a charter bus for the one-and-a-half hour drive down to Eugene. Their destination: the 2010 Oregon Music Educator's Conference.
The day marked a milestone for director Dr. Ike Nail since the Wind Ensemble is the second group from Western to ever perform at the OME conference and the first instrumental group to represent the school. The conference, which brings together all of the public school music teachers in the state as well as members of the all-state band and orchestra, "constitutes a very qualified, narrow audience that we particularly wanted to reach," said Nail. "To break into that area and to be recognized is a significant step."
Despite her misgivings about the pre-dawn wake-up call, senior flautist Erica Hall said it was an honor for Western's band to be asked to play.
"For me, it's special because I hope to be a music teacher one day," she said. In fact, having some of her former music teachers in the audience congratulate her on the clarity of her solos added to Hall's experience at the conference.
Sara Truelove, the principal clarinet for the ensemble, enjoyed performing in the "very professional, positive environment."
Other members of the ensemble, however, walked away from the concert mentally spinning from the whirlwind trip.
"It was hard to experience the conference because we were there, we played and then we disappeared again," said freshman Joseph Stevens.
After applying for the conference and submitting recorded material to the conference, the waiting game began. Notice of acceptance arrived around the first part of October, at which point Nail changed some of the ensemble's repertoire.
"We opened [Friday's performance] with a piece by Kevin Walczyk, our resident composer. It's a fanfare commissioned by the Oregon Symphony and reset for Wind Ensemble," Nail said. "Our second piece was a set of dances by the Irish composer Fergal Carroll. We did a set a marches by Sergei Prokofieff and finished with a clever, whimsical piece called 'Bugs' by Roger Cichy."
Nail said he selected the pieces because they required several solos and would showcase the talent in Western's band. Truelove, in her first year of graduate studies, said the Wind Ensemble numbers speak for the development of Western's band, which had maybe 18 instrumentalists when she started studying at Western five years ago. Of the 45 members, twenty-two are music majors, with several additional students pursuing music minors.
The day marked a milestone for director Dr. Ike Nail since the Wind Ensemble is the second group from Western to ever perform at the OME conference and the first instrumental group to represent the school. The conference, which brings together all of the public school music teachers in the state as well as members of the all-state band and orchestra, "constitutes a very qualified, narrow audience that we particularly wanted to reach," said Nail. "To break into that area and to be recognized is a significant step."
Despite her misgivings about the pre-dawn wake-up call, senior flautist Erica Hall said it was an honor for Western's band to be asked to play.
"For me, it's special because I hope to be a music teacher one day," she said. In fact, having some of her former music teachers in the audience congratulate her on the clarity of her solos added to Hall's experience at the conference.
Sara Truelove, the principal clarinet for the ensemble, enjoyed performing in the "very professional, positive environment."
Other members of the ensemble, however, walked away from the concert mentally spinning from the whirlwind trip.
"It was hard to experience the conference because we were there, we played and then we disappeared again," said freshman Joseph Stevens.
After applying for the conference and submitting recorded material to the conference, the waiting game began. Notice of acceptance arrived around the first part of October, at which point Nail changed some of the ensemble's repertoire.
"We opened [Friday's performance] with a piece by Kevin Walczyk, our resident composer. It's a fanfare commissioned by the Oregon Symphony and reset for Wind Ensemble," Nail said. "Our second piece was a set of dances by the Irish composer Fergal Carroll. We did a set a marches by Sergei Prokofieff and finished with a clever, whimsical piece called 'Bugs' by Roger Cichy."
Nail said he selected the pieces because they required several solos and would showcase the talent in Western's band. Truelove, in her first year of graduate studies, said the Wind Ensemble numbers speak for the development of Western's band, which had maybe 18 instrumentalists when she started studying at Western five years ago. Of the 45 members, twenty-two are music majors, with several additional students pursuing music minors.
Be the first to comment on this story