Centenary Wind Ensemble to present fall concert November 17
SHREVEPORT, LA — The Centenary Wind Ensemble, directed by Thomas Hundemer, presents its Fall 2024 concert, "Treasures from the File Cabinets," on Sunday, November 17, at 7:30 p.m. in Anderson Auditorium at Centenary's Hurley School of Music. The concert is free and open to the public.
“Treasures from the File Cabinets” features a number of gems in the college band music collection including great marches by American composers John Philip Sousa, "the March King,” and the iconoclastic Charles Ives. "Bullets and Bayonets" from 1918 is one of Sousa's many tuneful marches contrasted by Ives's "Country Band March" from 1904, a raucous and often hilarious take on 1890s New England holidays when Ives would hear different marching bands music colliding as they approached the town square. The march is replete with various quotes from folk songs such as “London Bridge,” “The Girl I Left Behind,” “The British Grenadier,” and others emerging from the texture of a lively march tune.
Louisiana native Julie Giroux's moving tribute to a friend, "One Life Beautiful," is a strikingly evocative recent work from 2009, while music from the 1985 western film "Silverado" features the horn and trumpet sections of the wind ensemble. Dutch composer Johan de Meij's "Gandalf" from his "Lord of the Rings" Symphony is an epic salute to Tolkien's fantasy classic, while Alexander Borodin's seldom heard "Symphony No. 2" is a challenging vintage Russian transcription from 1940.
The program also features works by J. S. Bach (Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring) and Edvard Grieg (Funeral March) and concludes with Gustav Holst's Second Suite in F from 1911, one of the foundational works of wind band literature. The piece is based on several folk songs, two of which are hair-raisingly combined in the final movement, "Fantasia on the Dargason.”
“There is so much great music out there that it is difficult to choose,” said director Hundemer. “Often, I rummage through our band library that my predecessors have assembled, and much wonderful and inspiring music pops out at me, some of which I know and some I've never heard before. My colleagues in the ensemble also often suggest pieces that we perform. This concert's program is a combination of suggestions and items I come across in our file cabinets, hence ‘Treasures from the File Cabinets!’”
The Centenary Wind Ensemble consists of students, faculty, alumni, and area musicians and educators.