Stirring Up Treble

Stirring Up Treble

New rehearsal and performance spaces provide first-year director opportunities to extend band program’s range

On the last day of his kindergarten year, Dr. Thomas Dempster did something he had never done before — he sat down at a piano at school and started playing it. The school’s principal walked by him as he sat banging a wide range of notes on the keyboard. He asked Dempster if he played the piano. “I said, ‘Clearly I do,’ and went back to playing,” Dempster said.

Dr. Thomas Dempster, right, leads a rehearsal in the Morris Rehearsal Studio in the Creativity and Innovation Complex. Dempster completed his first year as a music instructor and band director at ASMSA in the spring. The opening of the CIC provided Dempster new spaces to hold classes, rehearsals and performances.

The principal called his mother to let her know. She asked him why he told the principal that he played the piano when he obviously didn’t. He said it was because he wanted to learn to play. He began taking lessons a couple of days later.

For Dempster to sit down and begin trying to play the piano was out of character for him. Until he was around age 4, he couldn’t deal well with loud sounds or music. He would place his hands over his ears and cry. A doctor told his parents he would grow out of it.

“Like a switch in kindergarten, I like sound and noise. I like what I’m doing. I could do something kinda mechanical and physical and create something that didn’t exist before,” he said.

That’s one of the guiding principles Dempster tries to instill in his students now. He just finished his first year as music instructor at ASMSA. It’s also the first year that the school has had a full-time dedicated faculty member to teach music courses.

In class and during band rehearsals, Dempster emphasizes that each performance is unique. Once that performance takes place, it will never exist again. You may attempt to replicate the experience by performing various selections again, but they will never be exactly the same. People will also see them doing something with their body that they can’t do but wish they could, he said.

Dempster was a music major at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, but not before almost taking a completely different path. He was taking music courses at the same time as math courses. He was very good at math.

“I was going down the path of not pure mathematics but more the applied mathematics track,” he said. “I was thinking, ‘I really don’t want to be an actuary. I can’t see myself in a cubicle eight hours a day running figures for an insurance company.’”

He knew he wanted to become a musician and composer. He began composing pieces in high school. His band director let him hand out one of his pieces to the band to read and to let him direct it in a rehearsal. He attended Governor’s School in North Carolina in 1997, and two faculty members who were professional composers took him aside to give him advice on how to follow his passion.

So eventually his desire to create musical pieces never heard before and be a performer won out. He earned his bachelor’s degree in performance and composition from UNC-Greensboro in 2002 and master’s and doctoral degrees in music composition from the University of Texas at Austin in 2004 and 2010 respectively.

He has taught at UNC-Greensboro and the Governor’s School of North Carolina as well as South Carolina State University and Claflin University, both in Orangeburg, S.C. At each stop, he has been responsible for developing or revitalizing the music programs at those schools.

His experience developing programs combined with working with talented students at summer sessions of North Carolina’s Governor’s School drew him to ASMSA. Developing a program from scratch is exciting, he said.

“There’s a lot of opportunity to see something grow and flourish,” Dempster said. “I think it’s exciting to have a chance to do stuff, figuring out which way to do it. It’s most exciting to have a blank slate. I’d like to create a program that I would have wanted to see in high school.”

To achieve his goals, Dempster created smaller performance ensembles that may not have existed before. There is a dedicated jazz band and several other smaller ensembles. While there was still a larger group that provided students the opportunity to play in a traditional large ensemble band and compete in contests, the smaller ensembles allowed them to be more creative and improvisational.

Dempster said he was pleased with the turnout at this first year of concerts. The audiences this year, while perhaps not full capacity, were enthusiastic, he said. While the rigorous academic requirements may make some students unable to attend every performance, those who have attended along with faculty, staff, and parents and families of students have been very positive.

“Granted, it’s a bit of a steep hill to go from a few concerts a year to seven, but musicians create and interpret culture, and in a way, part of my job at ASMSA has been to tap into that and build a new culture in music. And so, while the performance hall wasn’t always at capacity this year, I think in coming years we’ll have far fewer open chairs for latecomers,” he said.

In the future, he would like to expand the offerings, including some pieces that incorporates the choir with the wind ensemble as well as more jazz pieces and a string orchestra. “So hopefully we’ll have more events for more tastes next year,” he said.

“One student’s father came up to me after the third band concert of the year and said, ‘I’ve been to a lot of band concerts, high school and college, and this was the best one I’ve ever heard.’ I can deal with a few empty seats now and again if something like that, spoken with great sincerity, reverberates down my ear canals. That said, we don’t have a whole lot of empty seats!” Dempster said.

At the same time, his students have gained an appreciation for a wider variety of works than they may have previously had.

“If nothing else, my students, particularly in wind ensemble, have learned two things — that there is life outside of very generic, stock-in-trade medleys and contest music, and that a musician — hobbyist, pro, or in between — is accountable to both oneself and a community. Several of our wind ensemble concerts included works that pushed the envelope a little bit,” he said.

He said what his students performed was on part with what you may expect a college ensemble to perform. “On a few hours of rehearsal a week, the students really rose to the occasion, put their heart, soul and fingers in the music and got a lot out of it,” he said.

••••

Dempster performed with his students at the first chamber group concert. His instrument of choice is bassoon. He began playing it in high school after finding one of the instruments in a case while helping his director clean up the band’s storage space.

When Dempster walked into his first band rehearsal as a young student, the junior high band director placed him with the percussion group because the only instrument he knew how to play was the piano. After some discussions between his parents and the director, Dempster began learning to play clarinet.

The next year in ninth grade, he discovered a “weird white case” in the storage closet. He asked what it was for and was told it held a bassoon. No one was playing it, so the director told Dempster to take it. He went on to earn all-district and all-state honors playing the bassoon.

“I stopped participating in cross country and wrestling. It was all bassoon all the time,” he said.

It has been his instrument of choice since then, he said. He decided to major in performance and composition at UNC-Greensboro in bassoon as well as trumpet. He would find ensembles and other groups to play in while in college.

He took a break from performing while working on his graduate degrees, but began again once he moved to South Carolina.

Once there, he began performing with various symphonies and other groups. Double-reed players—such as bassoon performers—were in short supply in that area of the country, he said.

Dempster reflects on his high school career. He decided to attend the North Carolina School of Science

and Mathematics beginning in his junior year, but he left his musical instruments at home. There was the thought he would be too busy with studies to perform much if at all.

He said he could understand why some ASMSA students may have similar thoughts. “I think the expectation is that if you come here to do physics or geometry or whatever, you won’t be able to be part of an ensemble. That is not true,” he said.

“One of my challenges is that I need to find students academically eligible for ASMSA but who also happen to meet my needs for ensembles. Right now we’re about 95 percent covered. It’s one of the interesting balancing acts I’ll have to do to ensure that I can have the right number of players each year,” he said.

He said the school administration has been supportive, including purchasing $70,000 of new instruments for the expanded program. The Morris Rehearsal Studio and the Oaklawn Foundation Community Center were included in the Creativity and Innovation Complex, which opened in late January. The Morris Rehearsal Studio has provided a more open rehearsal space. The Oaklawn Foundation Community Center has provided a much-needed community performance space.

Dempster said he also plans to add courses such as a history of blues/rock course as well as world music and jazz appreciation among others. He plans to offer a stable of three or four courses each semester, including music theory and music composition. He is also helping with the popular Folk Music and Acoustics class.

He described the music program as a toddler. Just as a child grows and changes, he foresees the same to happen with the program.

“It exists, and people are beginning to see that it exists,

and, like any toddler, I’m trying to make as much noise as possible (from the vantage point of a 40-yearold) to show Arkansas that we are here and we are ready to grow and morph and become something amazing,” Dempster said.

While a toddler may grow however it is genetically predisposed, Dempster has some choices to make in how to grow the music program, although it does include some bigger, unseen hurdles.

“Like a toddler, I see my goals and where I want the music program to be — and I reach for them and jump and whine and caterwaul, knowing I can’t quite get there — at least not yet. As this toddler of a music program grows, we’ll likely run into some growing pains. I’m bracing for these challenges, but I’m also planning assiduously for them,” he said.

He is excited about a large cohort of incoming students this upcoming year who want to maximize their opportunities to study and perform music, but it’s scary at the same time. He wants to able to provide the experience each student desires, even when he’s exhausted his own abilities or time to do so.

But that’s something to worry about in the future. For now, Dempster is ready to help the toddler gain its balance and grow stronger.

“In the meantime, I’ll continue to recruit, continue to provide cool research and creative options to my students, continue to add courses and partner with the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith, and continue to put on seven or eight concerts a year and reach out to the community to show Arkansas our value and what it is that sets us apart and how we can take a strong young musician and make them ever more amazing,” he said.