The Great Lakes Wind Symphony (GLWS) is the product of the imagination of musicians and business partners, Adam F. Brennan and Ryan Pritchard, as an outgrowth of their experiences as educators, conductors and music businessmen. While Brennan serves as the creative director and conductor of the ensemble, Pritchard serves as the business manager and principle timpanist with the group, though the two men collaborate on nearly all elements involved in the formation, oversight and operations of the GLWS. The GLWS began as a subsidiary of their music company, B&P Music Productions, LLC., and their web site www.allthingsband.com., but in 2019, the GLWS will be a 501c(3) organization with a Board of Directors. Although discussions of forming this type of professional group were years in development, the Great Lakes Wind Ensemble was formally founded in June of 2014 and held its first rehearsals in December of that same year.
Who Are We?
The Great Lakes Wind Symphony is a music ensemble staffed by forty-four professional musicians. With the instrumentation of a modern wind ensemble, members of this group come from as far away as Texas to perform. As a true wind ensemble, there is one player per part, with the exception of flutes and clarinets, where some doubling of players exists simply for balance with the brass and percussion. Though the ensemble carries a bass player, there are no strings associated with this group. Smaller than a traditional symphonic band – something that our audiences may be more familiar with from their school days participating in middle school, high school or colleges, – the GLWS has the goal of performing the finest music available to the modern American wind ensemble.
Uniquely American!
The Great Lakes Wind Symphony is a uniquely American Ensemble, with roots connected deeply to our country’s history. The mainstay of the GLWS repertoire will focus on music by American composers, though wherever great band music exists, we will share it with our audiences. As such, we fill a niche for classical music that is not being met elsewhere and does not compete with our friends in the orchestra, the choir or other, valuable local institutions. We began in 2014 -15 with a four-concert series debut season with concerts on December 27, 2014 and continuing on February 7, June 6 and August 8, 2015. Following these debut concerts, a second concert series of 8 events was announced, but personal tragedy struck when the conductor lost his wife to a brief battle with cancer. The series and the organization was placed on hold while Dr. Brennan spent time to focus on his family. Now in 2018, the Great Lakes Wind Symphony is back and our dream continues to promote American Music with this unique American Ensemble.
Why a Wind Ensemble?
The founders of GLWS chose a wind ensemble model for several reasons. First and foremost, the wind ensemble model is highly demanding of its performers: with one player per part, musicians are highly exposed and must be superb. Second, while there are many town bands and community bands across the United States, there are few professional wind bands in the U.S. Though our town and community bands can be very fine organizations (Dr. Brennan conducts just such a band in his home town of Wellsboro, PA), a professional organization brings with it an expectation of true performance excellence and can perform a very different level of professional literature. Finally, there are only a handful of professional wind bands around the United States, and we find this very perplexing, given the truly American nature of the band movement and our ties to education in our country. Therefore, we set out to not only provide this outlet to our musicians and audiences, but to also inspire and cultivate an American spirit – to focus on our musical heritage through great American composers and the music they have created.
A Brief History of the Wind Band in America
The modern band movement has its roots in the history and development of brass, wind and percussion instruments. However, unlike our friends in the choral area and orchestral area, the wind band developed, comparatively, much later. String instruments like the bass, cello, viola and violin were well established by the 1600’s and our choral music has centuries more literature. And while instrumental music was being performed during much of history, little of this type of music remains discovered, notated or in existence. But we can trace instrumental development into the Classical Era and find many examples of brass and winds in the Baroque and Classical Eras, with percussion following somewhat later in the Romantic Era. The industrial revolution, and indeed, literal revolutions in France and even America, have a profound influence on the development of the modern wind band.
In the wind-band area, we embrace people like Renaissance composer Gabrielli and his compositions for brass such as Sonata duo decimi toni as some of the earliest “band” known composers. The trail is sparse, leading us to Classical composer Wolfgang Mozart and his chamber pieces, known as Harmonie Musik, for octets of wind and brass instruments such as his two Serenades and his masterful Gran Partita for thirteen wind instruments. From Mozart, and in large part due to instrumental development and improvement to winds and percussion, there is somewhat of an explosion in use of winds, brass and percussion, expanding not only the orchestra, but the band itself as a viable medium for expression by composers.
Military music plays an important role in the growth of the band, and in general, it might be accurate to state that military band music moves from primarily functional purposes (signaling, marching, etc.) to more entertainment purposes. By the 19th Century, the orchestra is expanding it’s wind and percussion sections and the band is emerging as a performance entity of its own merit. Composers such as Felix Mendelsohnn, Hector Berlioz, Francoise Gossec, Richard Strauss, Ludwig von Beethoven, Richard Wagner, and many others contribute to the push towards broader instrumentation and are thus responsible for, in some part, the evolution and development of the wind-band.
But it is the Twentieth Century that we truly see the modern wind-band emerge. Many social factors play a role in this development, including two world wars in the first half of the century, as well as developments in social strata, like those happening in the United States with the emergence of a middle class. School music programs develop and we see the establishment of school music ensembles which continues to present time. This development of school music programs inspires great band-leaders such as John Philip Sousa, Edwin Franko Goldman and others to inspire composers to write specifically for the band. By mid-century, the band “movement” is in full motion and continues to present time, with some of the finest music for wind bands being composed within the last 75 years. Figures like conductor and educator Frederick Fennell further change the trajectory of the band movement by establishing the modern wind ensemble – a smaller wind band of the finest players whose primary role is to perform the most valuable, artistic and inspiring music for wind bands.
Relatively speaking, the modern-wind band is therefore in it’s infancy. There is no way to cover the history in this short essay, but suffice to say, the history of the wind-band is rich with important figures, monumental works and moving performances. Modern composers are very interested in wind-bands, and specifically the wind ensemble, because the color palette, especially with the vast array of percussion, piano, harp and other instruments providing a plethora of sounds and possibilities.
H. Robert Reynolds and others of his school of thought extended the Eastman model for wind ensembles, declaring that the wind ensemble should play only original wind ensemble works — no transcriptions, and no band pieces such as the Sousamarches or concert music intended for larger symphonic winds. This music should be of a serious and worthwhile nature, or the highest quality.
Contemporary composers found that wind bands offered a welcome opportunity to perform new music, in contrast to the conservative stance maintained by many symphony orchestras.
Come Hear Us!
We hope you can join us for many of our concerts! We perform in a variety of venues, so look for us near you. Tickets and information will be available on this website and, of course, at the door of all of our concerts.