Baylor's Concert Band Closes the Academic Year

Due to the current pandemic situation, the Baylor University Concert Band’s concert to close the 2020-2021 academic year will be presented without an in-person audience. However, viewers at home will be able to enjoy the performance by going to the School of Music website for a streaming opportunity. The premiere showing of this concert will be on Sunday, May 2, beginning at 3:00 p.m. The conductor of this ensemble of woodwinds, brass, and percussion is Baylor’s Assistant Director of Bands, Steve Dailey.
The Concert Band will open its program with Henry Fillmore’s march, Americans We, from 1928, as conducted by Hannah Morrison, a graduate student from Magnolia, Texas. Fillmore wrote this popular piece for a concert series that was taking place as part of the Cincinnati Zoo’s Pure Food and Health Show.
Next, the band will play a wind-band setting from 1999 by Korean-born composer Travis J. Cross of the Irish hymn tune Be Thou My Vision. Dr. Cross serves as Associate Professor of Music in the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA. This work will be led by Ceon Rumphs, a graduate student from Garland, Texas.
American composer Thom Ritter George wrote his First Suite in F in 1975 for the fiftieth anniversary of the United States Navy Band, and its premiere took place in the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D. C. The Concert Band will perform movements one (“Sea Chantey”), three (“Country Dance”), and four (“Rumba Rumba”).
American composer John Cage premiered the four-part Amores in 1943 with his own percussion ensemble at the Museum of Modern Art. Amores, he said, is “about my conviction that love is something that we can consider beautiful.” Baylor’s band will play the third movement (“Trio”).
Closing the program will be The Hounds of Spring, a work from 1981 by Baylor alumnus Alfred Reed. This musical picture of young love in springtime was inspired by Atlanta in Calydon, a poem from 1865 by English poet Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909).
Join the virtual audience for this concert by clicking here.