A free concert featuring a former Hartwick College music professor will be performed at 3 p.m. Sunday in the First United Methodist Church in Oneonta.
The Catskill Valley Wind Ensemble is presenting a concert featuring Brian S. Wilson. Now chairman of the music department at Sonoma State University, Wilson was director of instrumental music at Hartwick College from 1992 to 2001 and conducted Catskill Valley's first concert in April 2002.
Wilson will conduct six of his own works including the elegy "Orange Was Her Color," composed in 2001 in memory of Unatego Central School student Sheri Mowers, who was 16 when she was killed in a car accident on May 7, 2001.
Cheryl Nages, band director at Unatego Junior/Senior High, and the band members had the work commissioned in memory of Sheri. Wilson premiered the elegy with the Unatego High School Band in 2002 and has since performed it in guest-conductor appearances with bands here and abroad.
Nages said Thursday that the band students wanted to do something to honor Sheri's memory. They applied for an Upper Catskill Community Council of the Arts grant to hold an artist-in-residency program, Nages said.
Nages said Wilson worked with the students, who provided background information about Sheri so he could craft the piece.
The title "Orange was Her Color" came from orange being her favorite color, and the band wore orange ribbons during a competition in her honor.
Nages said Wilson's composition is a contemporary 20th-century work that is a testament to Sheri and represents the phases of grieving and the loss to her friends and family.
"The work is very moving," Nages said.
Sheri's family has been invited to the concert, and Nages said she plans to attend.
Nages said Sheri's sisters, Alex and AnnMarie Mowers, are each in the Unatego High School band and play trumpet, just as their sister did.
Wilson's other works include his fanfare "Adamas," commissioned by the Mekubetzet Band to celebrate Israel's 60th anniversary as a nation. Under his direction, it was premiered at the University of Tel Aviv's Mehta School of Music last summer.
"Danse Hellenica" and the first movement of his "Agamemnon" Symphony for Band were inspired by Wilson's experiences as music director of the University of Detroit's Classical Theatre Study Abroad Program in Greece. His arrangements of Percy Grainger's "British Waterside" and "Lord Maxwell's Goodnight" grow out of his book on "Orchestrational Archetypes in Percy Grainger's Wind Band Music."
Under the direction of Scott Rabeler, the ensemble will also present concert-band classics of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The concert is open to the public and will be followed by a reception. It is funded with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.
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Patricia Breakey can be reached at 746-2894 or at stardelhi@stny.rr.com.
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