I find that it’s always nice to attend a CU Winds performance. I think most people who were in high school band look back on it fondly, so it’s become a nostalgic experience I indulge in once in a while.

Notably, the music department had arranged for a guest composer, David Maslanka, to write an original piece for the CU Winds in memory of a past music professor at Cornell. Mr. Maslanka had apparently been at Cornell for several days leading up to the concert, holding workshops with CU Winds in order to provide feedback on their interpretation of his compositions, as well as to attend the performance. Between two songs, Mr. Maslanka was invited up to the stage to speak.

He struck me as an odd guy. According to Wikipedia, he’s 73 years old, which surprised me right now; I thought he looked to be in his 60’s. Once he was on the stage, he kept his eyes on the ground and spoke quietly about his collaboration with the CU Winds. He then started going into some details behind his thought process and his inspiration for composing lately. He presented the idea that the world is chaos and music is peace, although this is a very rough TL;DR. I think this is almost definitely a cliche, but considering that Mr. Maslanka is pretty old, maybe all the time he’s spent thinking has revealed to him that this cliche actually is the truth. I enjoyed the image he described afterwards, of music being water flowing from the Earth. I think this kind of visualization, especially when it’s provided by the composer of the piece being performed, is nice to have in mind when performing music. Back when I used to (try to) play piano, I found it helped me be more expressive when I read what the composer was thinking or what they were inspired by when they wrote the piece I was playing. It must have been an invaluable experience for everyone in CU Winds to have Mr. Maslanka come work with them.