Flashback

for wind ensemble

Program Note – Flashback

Some of the happiest years of my young musical life were those I spent playing piano at Texas State University in John Stansberry’s wind ensemble. Two decades later, part of me still wishes I could have stayed forever.

Mr. Stansberry was quite something on the podium: energetic, motivating, communicative, full of vitality, notoriously hard to please, and, above all things, a consummate teacher. In 1996, early in my freshman year, I approached him with a band score I had then recently completed: a short, frenetic work entitled Momentum. It was among my earliest attempts at composition. To my surprise, he programmed it!

In hindsight, I would be hard pressed to think of a point more pivotal in my compositional development. It was the first piece I had written for band, my first time working with a conductor, and my first public performance of a piece for large ensemble. It was this experience, as much as any other, that led me to music composition.

Many years passed. I graduated, moved to New York, continued my studies, and eventually became a college teacher myself. Mr. Stansberry and I remained in touch until the end of his life.

When Clay Stansberry asked if I would compose a tribute to his father’s memory, one he would conduct with his own band at Legacy High School in Broomfield, Colorado, I was honored. I began, not in my usual way by sketching or improvising at the piano, but by pulling that early band score out of a dusty drawer where it had sat untouched for almost twenty years.

My original thought was to tweak, tighten, and perhaps touch up a few loose details. But soon, the process took on a life of its own. I found myself making changes to virtually every note of every bar. Shorter passages were expanded. New themes emerged. Harmonies once limited by a young composer’s not-yet-fully-developed technique were now traveling rapidly to new destinations. Just as I could never go back in time and play again in Mr. Stansberry’s band, I could not separate myself from my own compositional development in the intervening two decades.

Not a single measure remains intact from the previous version. The new work, so radically different from its predecessor, demanded a more suitable title. Yet, the initial idea from so many years previous—its overall structure, its short melody in the Lydian mode—can still be recognized in what is now quite literally a Flashback. The result is not a revision but rather a collaboration between a composer and his younger self, both of whom owe an enormous gratitude to John Stansberry.

Wayne Oquin
January 17, 2017
New York, New York