Programming for the Modern High School Band

For many decades, aspiring music educators training to be band directors were taught to revere the canon. These “warhorses” of the repertoire were integral to the development of the wind band as a serious musical medium. They were introduced to the world by the great pioneers of the modern band movement, heroes such as Frederick Fennell, William T. Revelli and Walter Beeler.

Through their programming, recordings, guest conducting and commissions, truly great staples of the band repertoire were introduced and propagated. They included early 20th century works by renowned British composers such as Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger as well as the American marches of John Philip Sousa, Karl King and Henry Fillmore. Also central were works by mid-20th century composers primarily associated with the orchestra such as Vincent Persichetti, Paul Hindemith, Morton Gould, Howard Hanson and Aaron Copland.

And then there was a relatively new breed of composers, riding the wave of music demanded by the emergence of great college and high school bands, writing works of substantial and enduring aesthetic value. These included Karel Husa, Joseph Schwantner, Alfred Reed, and John Barnes Chance, and, more recently, David Maslanka, Frank Ticheli and Johan de Meij. Emerging band directors were taught that these highly esteemed works must be the focus of their programming. Conversations went something like this: “Can you imagine a student going through high school and never playing the Holst suites?”

In 2024, there are several problems with this edict:

1. The band movement is more than 100 years old, and the list of “must play” pieces is huge. Even if we only ever programmed works from the canon, there simply wouldn’t be enough time in a student’s four years in high school to play them all.

2. Focusing so strongly on great works from the past doesn’t leave much time to explore new works that reflect contemporary musical directions and aesthetics and may be more relevant to our lives.

3. All of the composers listed above were or are white men of European descent. We need to explore art from a wider range of human experience. Our schools’ student populations are diverse. They must be able to see themselves reflected among the creators of the works we are presenting to them as important.

Some band directors defend their choices with statements such as, “I select the highest quality music for my students without consideration for the composer’s identity.” While these judgments of quality are coming from the teacher’s education and experience, they are also from their own very limited perspective. It is a false assumption that, when we actively seek out music from populations that are under-represented in band literature, it will be of lesser quality and our students won’t gain a great deal from studying it.

Admittedly, it takes additional time and effort to find and procure the music. A great resource is the Institute for Composer Diversity, whose website has a section dedicated to wind band music with a user-friendly database (https://www.composerdiversity.com/wind-band-database). The dilemma, then, is in how to continue to honor the great works of the ever-expanding canon with ones that reflect more contemporary musical aesthetics and more diverse composers. This issue is one being addressed outside of the band world. English teachers, for instance, are having to make space in their curricular selection of literature for new and more diverse authors and poets. Teachers of all visual and performing arts are having similar conversations. So are the world’s leading professional orchestras, opera companies and theaters. Among all, it is agreed that it is not an option to simply abandon the canon. The great majority of these works have enduring value and surprising relevance in modern times.

Perhaps a solution may be an adjustment of the balance of programming. Rather than fitting in new works around a steady diet of older staples, why not reprioritize? Formulas can be helpful if we are careful not to hold too strictly to them. They can help guide us in our music selection process. A formula that may work is as follows:

• 70 percent music composed in the last 25 years.

Of these selections, about half by women, BIPOC, and/or LGBTQ+ composers.

• 30 percent older works that are widely recognized to form the canon of band literature.

This means relinquishing the notion that our students will play all of the great pieces that mean so much to us. Rather than viewing this from a deficit mindset, consider the music and composers they (and their directors) will get to discover. And think of the powerful message it sends to our students about whether band, and music more broadly, might be for them.