Wind Ensemble concert is Oct. 8

calendar icon30 Sep 2022    

Lincoln, Neb.—The Wind Ensemble, under the direction of Ron and Carol Cope Professor of Music and Director of Bands Carolyn Barber, will perform Saturday, Oct. 8 at 7:30 p.m. in Kimball Recital Hall.

The concert is free and open to the public. The concert will also be live webcast. Visit https://music.unl.edu/webcasts the day of the performance for the link.

Their concert is titled “Hey you kids, get off my lawn!” The Wind Ensemble will engage classic repertoire with the characteristic playful and thought-provoking flair of the Ensemble Performance Lab. 

“’Hey you kids, get off my lawn!’ is a celebration of the forms and colors so familiar to band enthusiasts now eligible for membership in AARP, yet that represent a foreign language to their college-bound grandchildren,” Barber said. “What happens when kids these days pick up Tinkertoys, Hula Hoops, Gumby, and that vaguely disturbing Fisher Price phone with oscillating eyes? Have their play patterns changed, or is there an underlying common ground on which Mr. Potato Head might sip Kombucha with Baby Yoda? We’ve stocked the toy chest with Verdi, Holst, Erickson, Grainger, Persichetti, Grundman, Anderson and Sousa.”

Barber said the title of the concert is a playful reference to the “old school” attitudes and nostalgia about a pivotal era in band history.

“The kids are the UNL Wind Ensemble, the lawn is the core of the band repertoire in the 1950s, and the identity of the grumpy homeowner may surprise you,” she said.

The program includes Guiseppe Verdi’s “Nabucco—Overture/Sinfonia;” Gustav Holst’s Suite in E-flat for Military Band; Frank Erickson’s “Air for Band;” Percy Grainger’s “Molly on the Shore;” Vincent Persichetti’s “Pageant, Op. 59;” Clare Grundman’s “American Folk Rhapsody No. 2;” Leroy Anderson’s “The Syncopated Clock;” and John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

The Wind Ensemble is the university’s premier concert band.