What a week. I'ts been a whirlwind series of concerts, networking and fantastic food here in San Jose, CA for the 2015 WASBE (World Association of Symphonic Bands and Ensembles) conference. For those of you who were able to attend, I hope you were able to take away from this conference new ideas and approaches to teaching and creating instrumental music in the wind band medium.
If you were not there, one of the highlights of the conference has always been the morning reading sessions. For 6 days with 6 different ensembles we presented a live reading of 5 new and/or little known works for wind band. One of the hardest aspects of putting together a session like this at a world conference is trying to find literature across such a broad field of styles, taste, and difficulty levels. Not every piece was going to be to everyone's liking, but the discussions that followed are the reason why we do this. The purpose of WASBE is to encourage a discourse across cultures on all aspects of music.
That being said, I was very happy overall with the selections presented at these sessions and the performances of them. A special thanks to Bill Johnson and Cynthia Johnston-Turner for their invaluable help and input with putting these sessions together. I could never have done this without your guidance.
So now, here are all the handouts from all 6 sessions that you can browse and print out. One handout has information about each piece, the other has QR codes that you can scan with your smart device to hear each selection. If you ever plan on visiting us at an exhibit or in the store, you'll want to have a QR reader app loaded on your tablet or cell phone so you can listen to many of the newer works we have on hand as you follow the score.
Now it's off to Texas for the Southwest Exhibition (formerly TBA), followed by the Arkansas Bandmasters in Little Rock. We'll have much of our staff in Texas next week, so email requests (and even calls) will continue to take a little extra time to respond to and fill. I know I'm a week behind on emails, I'm very sorry about that. Haven't had much time to even breathe here at WASBE, but I will get to all of you who have written.
And as always, please send me ideas for articles and areas of interest you'd like me to research and talk about. I'll try to keep the information flowing. Now onward to San Antonio!
Thank you again for your continued support. I couldn't do the research I love without it.
