Trip of a life time

For most, a trip to New York City is a fun but fairly basic vacation. But for William Bing, a four-day trek to the city is about to become the trip of a lifetime.   

Along the way, Bing will be supervising 64 people on a budget of $75,000, and will wind up conducting 58 of the travelers as they perform in America’s most prestigious concert venue. But even though it’s a huge responsibility, it’s also the rich reward for his 35-year career as director of the Caltech-Occidental Concert Band, which makes its East Coast debut May 24 at Carnegie Hall.

Due to the incredibly stringent rules of the venerable institution, the band will not be allowed to record its concert either visually or aurally. But this weekend, music lovers and Caltech supporters alike can head over to the school’s Ramo Auditorium for two special shows which will feature the band’s entire Carnegie program.

“We had received notices for past years to have a band play there and I knew it was such a daunting task that I didn’t want to face it, and knew it would take a lot of work,” says Bing. “But I thought this year, why not give it a go and [band president] Lauren [Porter] is so eminently capable that I thought I’ve got someone that can help me. This year I accepted their invitation to send in a recording, and once they accept you, you raise the money from there. But they’ve gone out of their way, and we’ve received a lot of moral and financial respect since then from Caltech to make the trip possible.”

It was indeed an enormous task Bing and Caltech-Occidental Band President Lauren Porter, a Caltech senior physics major, faced. But knowing that an opportunity like this comes along once in a lifetime, and that Caltech students have an insatiable drive not only to succeed academically but also in an impressive array of side activities, they made it happen with aplomb.

Porter has led the planning for the trip since October, piling a couple hours of logistics and fundraising responsibilities on top of her extraordinary study load plus three weekly hours of group practice and even more time honing her clarinet skills on her own. While her planning duties included some obvious pursuits such as finding the right hotels and tickets for special events outside of the concert, Porter quickly learned there were many unexpected loose ends as well.

“Getting tuxedos was a big surprise,” she says with a laugh. “A lot of guys here are out on their first time away from home and don’t have tuxedos you could play Carnegie Hall in. They didn’t even know what size they are, so we were scrambling to find them, measure them, rent them and now transport them out and back. Women tend to already have their own fancy dresses.”

For Bing, the biggest duty was selecting which pieces the band would perform in such a hallowed institution. Because the Caltech-Oxy band is headlining a three-band bill, they were limited to performing for just 30 minutes — the equivalent of five pieces.

The temptation was there to treat the selections as a platform to show off the band’s technical prowess and push its members to their performing limits, but Bing ultimately took a refreshingly different approach.

“Early on I decided I was not going to choose pieces that were truly difficult. I told the students and the members of the ensemble we’re not trying to make music history, we’re making music,” recalls

Bing. “We could have easily commissioned five works of music, and I thought of commissioning, but I didn’t know if we had time and I wanted to go with things that we knew well.”
Bing wanted to choose music that he knew would work well in the hall. He also wanted chorale-style pieces in which various elements of the wind ensemble, such as the woodwind chorale and the brass chorale, could play as a unit.

The second piece is “a quiet one, almost like a Copland,” by Joe Coriale, a Los Angeles composer who has written for “The Tonight Show,” among other popular shows. Caltech assistant professor of geology Paul Asimov is filling in as guest conductor on another selection that he was allowed to select himself: a work by William Schumann which Bing believes is the “most difficult, but exciting” piece of the night.

Next, Caltech alumna Kjerstin Williams will sing two classic songs by George Gershwin, “S’Wonderful” and “Someone to Watch Over Me.” The finale is a tune that’s close to Caltech’s heart and history: the “Throop March,” which was written for the Mandolin Club of the Throop Institute — Caltech’s original name.

“It’s a mix of serious music and accessible melodies, which is not uncommon to our programs here,” says Bing. “It’s interesting to do a show there because both the Throop Institute and Carnegie Hall opened in 1891, so our birthday is common as well.”

Bing has been around for a good deal of Caltech’s history, working his way up to his current title as Director of Bands at Caltech and Artist in Residence after first arriving at the school in 1970 as a fill-in trumpet player from USC. He recalls that his Caltech experience started “because they needed a little more firepower in the trumpet section,” so he was hired to play the trumpet while also coaching the brass section. 

His time at Caltech, which has been balanced by a side gig as a trumpet professor at Cal State Northridge, revealed to him that Caltech’s band members have an incredibly deep level of commitment.

“You can’t get a degree in music here because we don’t have a music department, per se,” says Bing, a Michigan native who earned a graduate degree in trumpet performance from USC after landing his undergraduate degree in music education at the University of Michigan. “Other schools might have students play in the band because they have to, but I love the feeling that people in Caltech play because they want to.” 

Bing proudly notes that the band’s membership extends beyond its students to encompass Caltech alums and faculty as well as Pasadena community members, who all fill in whenever there is an empty chair in the band. And he’s also impressed with one thing that Porter notes: the band isn’t showing any noticeable pre-trip jitters.

“One thing I’ve noticed is because the music we’re playing isn’t the most technical, we’re trying to perfect a piece of music instead of just getting it to a good level,” says Porter. “It’s working a different skill set that way. I wouldn’t say people are nervous about it, but certainly working hard to give it their all.”
 
The Caltech-Occidental Band will perform at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at Caltech’s Ramo Auditorium, 332 S. Michigan Ave., Pasadena. The show is free.

For more information, call (626) 395-4652 or visit www.caltech.edu.