If you’ve seen the classic brass band film Brassed Off, you might recognize our first tune as the march that plays during the opening credits of the movie based around a colliery brass band in Northern England under Thatcher-era policies. With brass bands serving as community pillars in places like the United Kingdom, Europe, and in the Australian continent, it may come as a surprise that “Death or Glory,” a worldwide brass band classic, was actually written in the United States! Celebrated march composer and cornettist Robert Browne Hall lived most of his life in Maine. Throughout his life, he composed an enormous portfolio of marches while serving as a cornettist and conductor of the Bangor Band. His compositions spread far outside of the small city of Bangor, Maine, however, even leading to commissions and dedicated works, including this very march.

Hall wrote this march under the title “Tenth Regiment March” in commemoration of the Tenth Regiment Band based in Albany, New York. “Tenth Regiment March,” along with numerous other marches by Hall, attained huge popularity in the U.K. Under the revised name “Death or Glory,” the march is now not only a staple in the brass band repertory – it’s a sonic marker of the musical and social legacies of brass bands around the world!

 Music Courtesy of the New York Salvation Army Band

The newest work on our program, Dr. Dorothy Gates wrote “The Beauty of Thy Peace” under commission for the Salvation Army’s New York Staff Band, which premiered the work at Old Orchard Beach in 2025. Dr. Gates is no stranger to the brass band world: born in Northern Ireland, Gates is an acclaimed trombonist and composer with a doctorate from the University of Salford. She served as Senior Music Producer for the Salvation Army’s Eastern Territory and Composer-in-Residence for the New York Staff Band for 21 years before moving to Staunton, Virginia, where she leads the Salvation Army under the rank of Auxiliary Captain. Her compositions have been commissioned and performed by some of the world’s leading organizations and performance groups, including the International Women’s Brass Conference’s Monarch Brass and the Royal Air Force.

Gates bases “The Beauty of Thy Peace” around Charles Hubert Hastings Parry’s hymn tune “Repton,” also known as “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind.” The slow tempo, rich chordal moments across the band, and original text by John Greenleaf Whittier invite audiences to embrace a moment of stillness and profound grace:

Dear Lord and Father of mankind,

forgive our foolish ways!

Reclothe us in our rightful mind;

in purer lives Thy service find,

in deeper rev'rence, praise.

While the hymn text means something different for all of us, we invite you to let Gates’s composition speak through its simultaneous richness and simplicity. In a moment of calm, we might remember to give ourselves grace amidst the trials and tribulations we all face right here, right now in this concert hall.

Featuring Jordyn Brown, Flugelhorn

CW: loss of pregnancy

While many of our band members first encountered the “Adagio” movement of Concierto de Aranjuez as a flugelhorn solo featured in Brassed Off (1996), Valencian composer Joaquín Rodrigo originally wrote the work as a classical guitar solo. Rodrigo’s compositional output spans across genres and instrumental groupings, from full orchestral works to vocal compositions to a wealth of concertos and solo works for individual instruments, with particular emphasis on guitar. Rodrigo wrote all of these works originally in braille, as he was legally blind from the age of three. 

In 1939, Rodrigo wrote Concierto de Aranjuez while on a trip to Paris with his wife. Rodrigo dedicated the work to Regino Sainz de la Maza, who premiered it on November 9th, 1940 with the Barcelona Philharmonic. The work was inspired by the gardens at the Royal Palace of Aranjuez in Madrid. For many years, the second movement, arguably the most well-known movement of the work, was shrouded in mystery over its origins, especially since it notably contrasted from the other movements in its emotional depth. Rodrigo’s wife, Turkish-Jewish pianist Victoria Kamhi de Rodrigo, later wrote in her 1992 autobiography that the second movement was dually inspired by Rodrigo’s love for Kamhi and their experiences during their honeymoon, as well as the grief they experienced over their stillborn child. Nearly thirty years after Rodrigo’s death this concerto has become his most recognizable work. 

Dr. Lucy Pankhurst is a multi-instrumentalist and lecturer in music at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England. Her work as a composer, researcher, and educator centers the particularities of composing new, exploratory works for brass bands, as she notably discusses in her doctoral thesis “Brass Bands In and Out of Context.” Further, as a tenor hornist, she brings her own experiences as a performer in brass bands to her compositional interests in expanding performance expectations and sounds within the brass band repertory.

Pankhurst wrote Ghosts of Industry as a test piece for the North American Brass Band Association’s First Section Championship in 2024. As Pankhurst discusses her vision in her own program notes, Ghosts of Industry explores the lasting impacts of the Industrial Revolution on the town of Widnes in Cheshire, England. She writes,

“Growing up in an industrial town, there was so much working history hidden in plain sight that it became part of the landscape. Buildings and structures that we pass every day become almost invisible. That is, until they actually do disappear – THEN, their absence becomes deafening.

These dramatic and permanent changes to the local landscape have been on my mind a lot over the last few years. There are so many vestigial remains, or ‘ghosts’ of its industrial past, but there are also elements that have been erased to all but memory. From my interest and research into local history, added to my own personal experiences, I often feel that I am surrounded by ghosts of how things once were – ones that I find more familiar than the actual landscape.

This work is my way of processing the changes and documenting them – paying respect to the heritage of the area and coming to terms with the permanency of the changes.”

Norwegian cornettist, musicologist, and composer Ingebjørg Vilhelmsen has become one of the most sought-after musical minds in Europe. Vilhelmsen career has largely centered around the brass band industry, from her role as principal cornet with Olsofjord Brass to her master’s research on test piece compositions. As a composer, her work has been featured by the Olso Philharmonic and Bergen Philharmonic (among other orchestras), as well as at the European Brass Band Championships and the National Swedish Brass Band Championships. A movement from her Journey Through Norwegian National Treasures Suite for Brass Band, “Hardt Le,” is based on a painting of the same name by Norwegian artist Christian Krohg. Vilhelmsen writes the following:

“Hardt le is a painting by Christian Krohg, one of the great Norwegian painters of the realist movement. He was a champion of justice and freedom of expression. Krohg painted members of the working class in the Kristiania of the 1800s with empathy and a desire for change. This particular painting shows a fisherman on his ship, in the midst of a raging storm.This piece for brass band depicts the painting and the story behind it, focusing on the unpredictable forces of nature, and the ocean's raw power.”

Featuring Dylan Hart, French Horn

Composer Philip Sparke is one of the most well-known living composers for wind and brass bands alike. Born in London, Sparke studied composition, as well as trumpet and piano, at the Royal College of Music. While attending RCM, Sparke started a brass band and wrote numerous compositions for the group, as well as the school’s wind orchestra. Following graduation, Sparke’s career took off, earning him commissions from the Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra, U.S. Air Force Band, and the BBC. Today, he has a vast output of compositions and arrangements across genres and performing levels from beginning bands to works recording by some of the top ensembles in the world.

Sparke’s compositions continue to dive deeply into the brass band performance setting: in fact, Sparke’s works have served as test pieces for two dozen iterations of the National Brass Band Championships of Great Britain. His solo Capricorno for E-flat tenor horn has become a staple  of the brass band repertory. Commissioned by tenor horn soloist and Cory Band member, Owen Farr, Sparke’s writing showcases the horn’s virtuosic breadth, from a cadenza at the start all the way to a soaring moto perpetuo (perpetual motion) section at the piece’s conclusion.

Fun fact: Sparke derived the work’s title, Capricorno, from the words caprice (a fast and short piece of music) and corno (the Italian word for “horn”). Philip Sparke also happens to be a Capricorn!

Our final piece is a brass band staple and is sure to lend an ear worm (or two) as you leave our concert hall! Written by one of the most prolific composers of the brass band industry, Peter Graham’s music has served as test pieces for competitions like the National Brass Band Championships of Great Britain, the Australian National Championships, and the North American Brass Band Association Championships (among others). Currently, Graham serves as Professor of Composition at the University of Salford, where he instructs classes on wind and brass band arranging. 

Graham writes Gaelforce in three through-composed, yet distinctive movements based on classic Celtic tunes: “The Rocky Road to Dublin,” “Minstrel Boy,” and “Tossing the Feathers.” If you’ve seen Ryan Coogler’s critically-acclaimed and record-shattering film Sinners (2025), you’ll recognize the first tune as the featured number for a vampire circle dance (and, if you haven’t seen Sinners, this ensemble begs you to take care of this immediately)! Lyrically, “The Rocky Road to Dublin” follows poetry by D.K. Gavan, who tells the story of an Irish man traveling to Liverpool, England. Along the way, he makes a pit stop in Dublin, only to be robbed of his possessions. The slower second tune also follows classic Irish poetry: Thomas Moore’s lyrics and song tell the troubling tale of a minstrel killed in battle, with his harp and songs never to be passed along, as they “shall never sound in slavery.” The final tune reignites the jig energy from the first tune, this time in the form of a traditional Irish reel.