Carnegie Mellon Wind Ensemble

The Carnegie Mellon Wind Ensemble, based at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, is among the U.S. wind groups with the longest histories. It is one of a number of top-quality student ensembles at the university, a group that also includes the Carnegie Mellon Philharmonic Orchestra, the Jazz Ensemble, and the Exploded Ensemble, the latter an interdisciplinary group. The Carnegie Mellon Wind Ensemble traces its origins to the Carnegie Tech Kiltie Band, which was founded in 1908, just eight years after the university's founding, by a group of seven players and gradually expanded to full concert band status. The Kiltie Band still exists and is so named because the players wear kilts in concert. That group performed (and still does) at Carnegie Tech and then Carnegie Mellon home football games, but it also grew into the university's most prominent performing ensemble, frequently performing at New York's Carnegie Hall. Carnegie Tech became Carnegie Mellon University after its merger with the Mellon Institute in 1967, and nine years later, the Kiltie Band's new director, Leonard Geissel, reorganized the school's wind performance program, turning the Kiltie Band into a group open to all members of the Carnegie Mellon community and reserving the new Carnegie Mellon Wind Ensemble for music majors. The group has the aim of performing music that is orchestral in scope, helping young players develop their ability to create orchestral tone colors, but also fosters chamber music techniques even in large works, as students are encouraged to listen to each other. The group is large enough that it can deploy flexible instrumentation and play a variety of wind repertories. Geissel's successors included Eduardo Alonso-Crespo, future Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart, and Denis Colwell, who led the Wind Ensemble from 1993 to 2011. During this period, the group's profile grew larger as it inaugurated a recording program, issuing works by Nancy Galbraith, Leonardo Balada, and Efrain Amaya in recordings on the Albany Music and Naxos labels and also recording soundtrack music for Smart Music Education software. The group often collaborated with the Bach Choir of Pittsburgh and the Carnegie Mellon University Concert Choirs. Since 2011, the Carnegie Mellon Wind Ensemble has been led by associate director Stephen Story, and as of 2017, by music director and trumpeter George Vosburgh, who took the post after a long career with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Vosburgh has continued the Wind Ensemble's recording program, leading the group in a recording of Richard Strauss' rarely heard wind serenade The Happy Workshop (the Sonatina No. 2 for 16 wind instruments in E flat major, o.Op. 143) in 2022.
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