The Emporia Municipal Band wanted to give the city a priceless 150th birthday present. So it ended up getting one for a song.
This season, the band has hired University of Kansas composer James Barnes to write a piece in honor of Emporia. The city won’t hear the final result until July 5 -- but then, even the band itself won’t see the piece until mid-June.
With any other composer, that might make conductor Gary McCarty a little nervous. But not with this one.
“I love his stuff,” said McCarty, who has used Barnes’ arrangement of “Home on the Range” to end band concerts for years. “It sounds good. It’s fun to play. And you can extract so much teaching from Jim’s music.”
By the time the new piece is played, the band’s season will be well underway. Its first formal concert will be 8 p.m. Thursday, although the group will also play at 9:15 a.m. Monday for Memorial Day services at the All Veterans Memorial in Soden’s Grove.
The band’s used to taking note of history, perhaps because it has so much of its own. The current municipal band was founded in 1941 after a previous group, Grady’s Municipal Band, was called to service during World War II. One founding member, Bob Fry, still plays with the band.
But even for a group like this, the chance to help celebrate a sesquicentennial doesn’t come along every day.
“We’ve done some pieces celebrating historical milestones, so we wanted to do something special,” McCarty said. “We looked at the band’s financial state and said, ‘Gee, it’d be cool if we could get a song composed for the 150th.”
Enter Barnes. The band’s composer of choice grew up in Hobart, Okla. but had been involved with music at KU in one way or another since the fifth grade. Many of his pieces would be considered “classical-style” band music but he has his share of surprises. His “Yorkshire Ballad,” for example, has the air of an English folk song while his 1989 composition “Trail of Tears” about the deportation of five American Indian tribes to Oklahoma includes a poem spoken by the performers in Cherokee:
Let us mourn for those who have died.
Let us mourn for those who are dying.
Let us mourn for those who must endure.
“It’s a spooky piece,” McCarty said.
When McCarty and the band first commissioned Barnes, they suggested an Emporia march. Something like that had been done before in the early 20th century by circus bandmaster Karl King, who wrote a little-known piece called “Emporia Galop.” But some time after taking the job, Barnes asked if he could try something different.
“He contacted us a few weeks ago and asked ‘Does it have to be a march? There’s this overture that’s bubbling around in my head that’s demanding to be composed,’” McCarty said.
Nobody was about to say no.
The piece is tentatively titled “Beacon on the Prairie.” The image may owe something to Barnes’ travels between Lawrence and Wichita, where Emporia was a favorite place to stop on the way.
“You’d come around a curve and there would be the big water tower, which reminded him of a lighthouse,” McCarty said. “So he had a beacon in his mind for years before associating it with the composition.”
Barnes will not be present for the piece’s premiere due to a conducting engagement in Yokohama, Japan. He will, however, conduct the municipal band’s second performance of the piece on July 13 for the Kansas Bandmasters Association conference in Wichita.
McCarty’s eager to see how it all plays out.
“This is the first time I’ve ever been associated with a commission,” he said,. “So I’m excited and scared to death about it.”
The Emporia Municipal Band will perform at 8 p.m. every Thursday night from May 31 through July 26. All concerts will be played in Fremont Park including the June 14 concert for the National Teachers Hall of Fame. In the past, that performance had been given at the old Hall of Fame building on C of E Drive, but the Hall has since moved to the Emporia State University campus.
Programs for each week’s concerts may be viewed at www.emporiaband.org along with more about the band and its history.
All municipal band concerts are free.