By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
The Tower Brass Quintet has been a fixture on the local music scene, and never more so than at Christmas.
The ensemble started back in 1979 in the corridors of the Moore Musical Arts Center where the founding members were graduate students. French hornist Bernice Schwartz is the sole remaining member of that original graduate brass quintet. David Saygers, tuba, and Brian Bushong, trumpet, have been with the ensemble for 38 years, joined later by David’s twin brother, Dan Saygers, trombone, and then, eight years ago, by Charles Saenz, professor of trumpet at BGSU.
For years, they’d perform a Christmas concert, often at Trinity United Methodist, then at St. Mark’s Lutheran, where they joined a music performance featuring many of the church’s own musicians.
Last year, the quintet took their Christmas show to St. Michael’s of the Hills in Ottawa Hills, where the group has annually taken part in a summer Memorial Garden service.
This year performing at the church was an impossibility, either with or without an audience. But the church still wanted to sponsor the concert, so on Christmas Eve at 8 p.m., a performance by the Tower Brass, will be broadcast on WGTE-TV. The performance was recorded in the station’s studio. Excerpts will be available on the church’s website, but the full concert will only be available at the time of broadcast.
Schwartz said the challenge in doing the Christmas concerts is the music is so familiar. The musicians are always seeking out new arrangements.
The Christmas Eve concert will open with Anne McGinty’s “Fiat Lux,” suite of popular carols, opening a closing with a “Joy to the World” flourish. The Findlay native McGinty is a well-known composer of band music who was brought to the ensemble’s attention by Ryan Nowlin, a BGSU graduate and now assistant director of the U.S. Marine Band. McGinty also provided an arrangement of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.”
Nowlin is represented on the concert with his arrangement of “Carol of the Bells.”
The program will also include some old favorites, including “Emma’s Christmas,” a whimsical retelling of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” by Irene Trivas with music by David Saygers. It poses the question: What is a simple country girl to do with all those partridges, pear trees, never mind the pipers and dancing ladies?
The piece served as the title track of the Tower Brass’s second Christmas recording. The first was a vinyl record, “Snowed In,” which is no longer available. The most recent is “Snowed In… Again,” from 2008, represented on the concert by Richard Price’s arrangement of “The First Noel.”
The show will conclude David Saygers’ swinging arrangement of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” which features improvised or written solo for all hands.
That arrangement is a nod to the ensemble’s ability to handle a wide-range of material from Baroque to contemporary classical to jazz. That’s been documented in nine recordings dating back to that first Christmas album. The most recent recording is “Road Trip” from 2015.
Schwartz credited the Tower Brass’s longevity in part to advice from their mentors in the Annapolis Brass. “They were the ones that motivated us,” Schwartz said. They advised the BG brass players that “as long as you stay together, you’ll keep going.”
The interactions have changed. At first, they were diplomatic to a fault in correcting each other. Now if they hear a passage that needs work, they are blunt. Decisions are made democratically. If there’s a difference in how a passage is phrased, they’ll play it both ways, and then vote.
“We’ve been lucky because we all love each other,” she said. “We like traveling together… not that we’ve done a lot of that lately.”
The ensemble had scaled back its performance schedule because of the demands of their day jobs well before the pandemic. Four of the members are educators, and Bushong is the finance director for the City of Bowling Green.
The pandemic did take a bite out of performances tied to the ensemble’s 40th anniversary. They had a performance at the Toledo Museum of Art, and a series of engagements in southern Ohio that involved playing in schools.
Schwartz said they hope they can reschedule some of those.
They plan to keep “plugging away,” she said. That means continuing to seek out new music. They benefit from having composers send them work to perform. What they decide to add to their repertoire depends on whether they like to play it.
Their philosophy, she said is “to just be mindful of having fun besides getting the best musical product.”
