The Eastman Wind Ensemble

In 1951 Frederick Fennell led a pioneering concert at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, featuring wind, brass, and percussion students. The program mixed canonical figures such as Willaert, Lasso, Mozart, Beethoven, and Stravinsky with lesser-known names including seventeenth-century composers Samuel Scheidt and Johann Pezel as well as twentieth-century American Carl Ruggles. The selections themselves leaned toward rarity: a double-brass-choir motet by Lasso, a Beethoven trombone quartet, and Stravinsky’s Symphonies for wind instruments. Seeking an ensemble capable of meeting the longstanding social and musical roles of a band while forging distinctive sonorities and encouraging new compositions, Fennell and the students founded the Eastman Wind Ensemble. Over the following years Fennell and the group exerted decisive influence on the emerging genre, one rooted in historical precedent yet distinctly American in character.

The ensemble’s extensive recordings during the Fennell era proved central to its leadership in serious wind music. As Raoul Camus noted in the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, “Fennell’s pioneering series of 24 recordings for Mercury brought about a reconsideration of the wind medium and established performance and literature models for the more than 20,000 wind ensembles that were subsequently established in American schools.” The discs featured major works by Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schoenberg, Vincent Persichetti, and Krysztof Penderecki while also reviving overlooked earlier repertoire; one release, for instance, contained only pieces by Giovanni Gabrieli. National radio broadcasts and repeated domestic and foreign tours further elevated the ensemble’s profile.

Fennell relinquished leadership of the Eastman Wind Ensemble in 1962 to Clyde Roller, an Eastman alumnus previously at the helm of the Amarillo Symphony. Two years later another Eastman graduate, Donald Hunsberger, who had apprenticed under Fennell, assumed the podium and sustained the ensemble’s formative impact on the symphonic winds field. Between 1967 and 1970 the group partnered with MCA Music and Decca Records to premiere new compositions, prompting MCA to issue scores and parts while Decca released corresponding recordings.

Throughout the closing decades of the twentieth century the Eastman Wind Ensemble remained a worldwide template for university wind organizations, undertaking extensive tours across Europe and Asia and continuing to champion and document significant works by composers such as Christopher Rouse, Joseph Schwantner, and Wynton Marsalis.