Brian Coffill

The wind band and the game of baseball are both major threads in the tapestry of American life. Many leading composers and conductors, ranging from John Philip Sousa to Charles Ives to 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner John Luther Adams have been captivated by America's pastime, and still many more have expressed their love of the game through music.

Research paper presented at the College Band Directors National Association 2019 National Conference.

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The Contemporary Music Project for Creativity in Music Education (CMP) was a fourteen-year (1959-1973) initiative from the Ford Foundation and the Music Educators National Conference, where seventy-three young composers collaborated directly with public school music programs, writing original works for the school ensembles, many of which have not been performed since their creation decades ago. This dissertation revisits the works for wind band housed within the repository of the CMP Library Archives at the Special Collections in Performing Arts at the University of Maryland's Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library, and updates the 1969 CMP Library Catalog with considerations for modern ensembles.

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Full text available via the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, or by request.

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Links to download CBDNA Handout and CBDNA Presentation.

Charles Ives’ Decoration Day, a dreamy haze of almost-forgotten memories and half-remembered tunes, depicts recollections American Civil War through the eyes of a Connecticut youth at the end of the nineteenth century. The work, originally published as the second movement of Ives’ New England Holidays Symphony for orchestra, is a musical representation of the composer’s childhood memories of that eponymous holiday.