Frank Ticheli

Ask any of my students and you will quickly find out that Frank Ticheli is my very favorite composer for concert band.  I love his music and have done his pieces with my students in Manchester, Lima, Newport, and now Bow.  So when I heard that Frank Ticheli was going to be the guest composer/conductor at the New England Band Director Institute in Plymouth, NH last weekend, I knew I couldn't pass up the chance to go, even if it was the week I was at Wanakee to direct Footnotes.  Luckily Wanakee is only 20 minutes from Plymouth and I have my afternoons free, so last Friday I headed up for a 2.5 hour session of Frank Ticheli conducting the music of Frank Ticheli.  All the band directors who were attending the workshop made up the band and he conducted us through a dozen of his works for concert band.  It was incredible, to say the least!!  I came away from the session inspired and excited to be a band director and so thankful that I had the opportunity to see him in action.

There is a Deutsche Grammophone video from the 1980s of Leonard Bernstein conducting the entire score of West Side Story with opera singers singing all the parts.  It is amazing to hear and see and in one clip, Kiri Te Kanawa, who sings Maria, talks about how being a part of this project is like getting to work with Mozart - she was able to learn about the music directly from the source and it was so neat to have Leonard Bernstein talk about the music and be able to get exactly what he wanted for it out of the musicians.  I felt that same feeling in this session with Frank Ticheli.  It was an honor and a unique opportunity to be able to play HIS music with HIM conducting, telling us stories of how and why he composed it and putting his energy and emotion into conducting it.  I feel so lucky...