In His Fantasy, Windy City Lives Up to Its Name

“I have this fantasy,” said Frederick Fennell, the father of the modern symphonic wind ensemble.

“Every year I go to a music fair in Chicago to see all the new instruments. In my fantasy, I’ve attended the fair on a Friday and after hearing a concert by the Chicago Symphony, I’m walking up Michigan Avenue toward the Hilton Hotel, where I always stay.

“A man comes toward me out of the snow wearing an old coat with the collar turned up, looking like he doesn’t have a dime to his name. He asks me, ‘Are you Frederick Fennell?’

“I say, ‘Yes, I am,’ and he reaches in his coat pocket and pulls out a check for $60 million. He says, ‘With this check, you can start the Chicago Wind Ensemble. But there are some strings attached. You have to perform in those wonderful old auditoriums on the same nights and times as the Chicago Symphony, and you have to get the best musicians and play the best music you can find. If you don’t follow these rules, the money will disappear.’

“So he gives me the check and disappears into the night. My first thought is that I’ve got to find the eight smartest lawyers in Chicago to keep the Chicago Symphony from getting this money because I know they’ll be on me like a swarm of ants.”

So goes the fantasy vision of the 72-year-old Fennell, who since 1984 has held the post of “regular conductor” with the Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra, the world’s only full-time professional wind band.

“It’s going to be the same situation in Los Angeles (for the California Wind Orchestra),” Fennell said, “because they’ll ultimately be competing for funds with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and all the other groups.”

While Fennell believes that “it is really very sad” that there are not more professional wind ensembles, he added, “I’ve never rallied around this and made it a cause.”

“We’ve earned our bad reputation,” he said in a recent phone interview from his Sierra Key, Fla., home. “The wind band was born of the military, nurtured by the military, for military purposes, and as a result was of serious musical interest to no one.”

Since the advent of modern wind instruments in the mid-19th Century, Fennell said, “if you list all the composers we’ve missed, you see we’re losing Bartok, Ravel, Debussy, Dvorak, Respighi. . . . They made the decision not to write for wind orchestra, and no amount of commission money would make them change their minds. If they had a great musical idea, they wouldn’t give it to a band--it would go to the orchestra or another string quartet.”

As a result, Fennell said, the repertory for wind band, compared to that for orchestra, is “impoverished.”

“Of course it is less substantial. There are some wonderful band pieces, but rarely have we gotten a composer’s best work in pieces they wrote for band.”

Fennell’s effort to legitimize the symphonic band by creating the Eastman Wind Ensemble, he said, “was a natural outgrowth for me of 20 years’ previous experience. I couldn’t do what I wanted to do, which was make serious music in a sit-down concert situation, with all that extra baggage of the (larger ensembles heard at) circuses and parades.

“What was done was done for the music, not for the benefit of the band or any other reason,” he said. “I’m not serving any other ‘ism’ than music-ism. I’m not organizing any associations, and I’ve avoided people who want me to do that. We don’t need another alphabetically lettered protective society.”

Fennell has recorded extensively with the Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra, having finished 15 albums since he first entered the studio with the group in 1982. The collaborations have included new performances of many of the same pieces the Eastman band recorded for Mercury Records in the ‘50s, as well as more recent compositions.

But Fennell suggested that even more important than commercial recordings for promoting interest in band music would be more performance opportunities for the millions of people who played instruments in school.

“The single greatest failure of American music education is the lack of having created a situation in society so that people who no longer go to school can have some kind of musical society where they can function,” Fennell said. “We have a few community bands and orchestras, but for most people, once they leave high school or college, the instrument goes up on a shelf.

“What’s the point of going to high school and polishing every 16th note until it burnishes like never before if it doesn’t go beyond that? In Japan, adult bands are on the way now. But we don’t have it functioning or working in a big way and that is our biggest failing. It’s an issue that both professionals and educators need to address, but which I don’t think is being addressed now.”