MARSHALL, MN — The SMSU/Community Concert Band will present “Songs of Soil & Sky” on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in the Fine Arts Theatre at Southwest Minnesota State University. The concert is free and open to the public.
Director of Bands Dr. John Ginocchio said the theme came together as he built the program.
“When I put our concerts together, particularly for the concert band, I try to put together a theme that connects all the music if at all possible,” Ginocchio said. “Very often I start with one or two pieces of music that I know I would really like to do that would work well for the group, that would really help us continue to improve and grow. And I had a couple pieces and both of them were related to the earth in some form or another. And so I then looked around at other music that would sort of fit with that.”
Ginocchio said he turned to artificial intelligence to help name the concert.
“I used AI for the first time when I was naming the concerts,” he said. “I just went to Microsoft Copilot and said, ‘Hey, I need the name of a program with music that’s related to this.’ And it spit out like 10 different concert names that all were better than what I was thinking in my head. ‘Songs of Soil and Sky’ was the top of the list.”
He said the music “celebrates the power and the beauty of the earth in its many forms,” adding that much of the program is highly descriptive.
“It’s always helpful for our audience and even for our ensemble to have that idea in mind as they’re hearing all this music,” Ginocchio said. “A lot of the music that we’re going to be playing is very descriptive this time around.”
The featured work on the program is Vesuvius by Frank Ticheli, inspired by Mount Vesuvius.
“It’s very driving, it’s very ominous, very powerful,” Ginocchio said.
Audience members may also recognize Make Our Garden Grow by Leonard Bernstein, the finale from Candide.
“For people who enjoy Leonard Bernstein, we’re doing an arrangement of ‘Make Our Garden Grow,’ which is the finale number of his opera Candide — a really well-known tune,” he said. “It’s got some really interesting melodic motion to it, which is fairly normal for Bernstein.”
The band will also perform Country Gardens by Percy Grainger and Rhapsody on Doraji Taryeong by Janet Song Kim, along with Whirlwind by Jodie Blackshaw and Ash by Jennifer Jolley, which was inspired by Jolley’s childhood memories of ash falling during California wildfires.
The ensemble includes SMSU students, community members and area high school students. Ginocchio said the group was created to model lifelong music-making.
“Music is something that I personally believe is something that we should enjoy our entire lives as performers,” he said. “You might be a wrestler on the wrestling team, but you’re not going to be a 75-year-old wrestler. But you can be that 80-year-old clarinet player in your community band.”
Ginocchio said keeping the concert free aligns with the university’s mission.
“A lot of what we’re doing at the university is supported by taxpayer dollars,” he said. “Seems to me they’ve already paid their price of admission. We don’t want to put up barriers that would prevent people from coming and enjoying these performances.”
