Brass band series starts Sunday

Concert May 11 features BCHS band

By Jennifer Brummett
Staff Writer

The Advocate Brass Band spring concert series begins 2 p.m. Sunday and continues the next two Sundays.

The concert May 11 will feature the Boyle County High School Band. Tim Blevins, the band's director, said the concert would be a little taste of what's coming up at The Great American Brass Band Festival in June.

The joint concert stemmed from a brainstorming session by the high school band about its annual spring concert. A student suggested playing at Weisiger Park, and another student proposed playing with Advocate Brass Band. Blevins and Advocate Brass Band co-founder and director George Foreman agreed.

``I think will be really neat,'' Blevins said. ``The kids are writing introductions for all the songs.''

Blevins said the high school band will play both traditional brass band and contemporary band music. The concert will explore the evolution of bands, such as the introduction of percussion and enhancement of the woodwind section.

``I think it will be a little bit of old, which is great, and a little bit of new, which is great,'' Blevins noted.

One of the traditional marches the BCHS band will play is titled ``Emblem of Unity.'' A quintet will play a Bach composition. Another piece to be performed was written around 1913 and is an arrangement of ``Danny Boy,'' which actually is called ``Irish Tune From County Derry,'' by Percy Granger.

Foreman said the two bands would likely perform a piece or two together.

New CD in the works

The Advocate Brass Band is currently putting the finishing touches on its third compact disc, titled ``The Dallas Morning News: Forgotten American Newspaper Marches.'' Foreman said there was an ``outside possibility'' the CD could be released by festival time in mid-June.

``(The CD) is recorded. We still have to do the final touch up on the editing. The cover has been designed and we're trying to get the notes written.''

The CD is compose of what Foreman called ``genuinely obscure pieces.''

``And some are more obscure than others,'' he added with a laugh.

Some of the 18 pieces on the recording were never even published, Foreman said.

``These are all, I think, from the 1890s. I think the latest one is from 1910. I'd say they probably have not been heard since the 1890s.''

The pieces all have interesting histories but there's one work in particular that stands out, Foreman said.

``J.B. Marshall started a band in Topeka, Kansas, in the 1880s that was called Marshall's Band. It is still in existence. I knew (of him) because of a master's thesis written in, I think, 1978 about Marshall's Band.

``He had written marches for two newspapers in Topeka, The Topeka Journal and The Topeka Daily Capitol. I managed to get in touch with them and get copies of band arrangements of these pieces. The had never been published but they had (the pieces) in manuscript.

Research at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., led Foreman to another work.

``I found the copyright of another piece, The Acheson Globe. But it had nobody's name on it.''

So Foreman called back to Kansas and found out the Marshall's Band library had ``always had it catalogued as march by an unknown composer.''

``It was a march by Marshall that was in the library of Marshall's Band and they didn't even know about it,'' he said.

The Advocate Brass Band concerts all will be 2 p.m. in Weisiger Park. The rain site is Newlin Hall. The concerts are free.

Copyright  The Advocate-Messenger
This article first appeared in theMay 1, 1997, edition of The Advocate-Messenger

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