Spring Band Festival Coming to Tilles

The Tilles Center for Performing Arts and the music department will host the 14th Annual Band Festival from April 10-13. The event will combine the LIU Post Wind Symphony with nominated high school students. Dr. James McRoy, director of wind studies, and Mark Camphouse, the composer-in-residence for 2018, will conduct the performance.

There were 250 high school applicants from 42 schools in the New York metropolitan area, and McRoy and his staff selected 124 of these musicians to perform. The LIU Post Wind Symphony will perform alongside the wind ensembles from Bay Shore High School and East Meadow High School.

Camphouse is an external composer brought to work with the variety of students. The students’ repertoire includes two of his original works and two other pieces. Camphouse is a professor of music and the wind symphony director at George Mason University. He also teaches courses in composition and conducting.

This is his McRoy’s 20th year at Post, and having started this event in 2003, he is very excited for the growing magnitude of the festival. “It has grown every single year,” McRoy said. The event now involves over 300 musicians, “It’s intense work,” he said. McRoy also mentioned the importance this event holds for university recruitment since the students that participate are encouraged to consider the university for a higher education.

Brian Marcus, a junior music education major, will take part in this festival for the third time. He plays trumpet in the wind Ensemble, wind symphony, jazz ensemble, and the orchestra and is excited for his upcoming performance in the Band Festival. “There is nothing I look forward to more as a wind player than working for a week with and getting to know the composer of enormous works of art,” he said.

The festival is a great opportunity for participants, according to Marcus. Members of the ensemble get to meet new faces and work with outside composers, and the experience is inspiring for many of the young musicians. “Not often do players in orchestra and band get to work with the one who actually composed the piece they’re playing,” Marcus said, “They get nothing but the real deal, as a piece can be interpreted and played in so many different ways.”