Boston University Wind Ensemble “Reimagined”

Boston University Wind Ensemble begins its 2025-2026 season with new director Joshua Roach at Tsai Performance Center. The program features works in which composers “reimagine” established ideas and structures. This event is free an open to the public.

In 2000, Rob Smith composed Dance Mix for an ensemble that combines musical elements and instrumentation of the jazz combo, Latin percussion, and rock-band horn section. UMass Amherst professor Linsday Bronnenkandt drew her inspiration for Tarot after analyzing the connection between Gustav Holst’s The Planets and Indian rāga. In her multimovement work, the Bronnenkandt employs these rāga elements, draws upon Holst’s musical interpretations of gods from Classical mythology, and recasts new material that represents three characters she selected from the tarot card deck. In 1881, a young Richard Strauss composed a work established in tradition in both form and instrumentation—sonata and harmoniemusik respectively—and expanded upon them by adding flutes and more horns to the ensemble and composing in the harmonic and melodic “voice” that pervades his ensuing large-scale works. In David Maslanka’s Traveler , the composer incorporates Bach’s choral “Nicht so traurig, nicht so sehr” (“Not so sad, not so much”) into his celebration of a retiring colleague’s career. The performance will conclude with a rendition of Percy Grainger’s The Gum-Suckers , a piano piece that the composer later reworked for wind ensemble.

Repertoire:

• Smith, Dance Mix (2000)

• Bronnenkandt, Tarot (2021)

• Strauss, Serenade in E-flat Major, Op. 7 (1881)

• Maslanka, Traveler (2003)

• Grainger, “The Gum-Sucker’s March” from In a Nutshell (1914/1942)