The United States Marine Band – billed as the country's oldest continuously active professional musical organization – is on tour around New England, including stops this week in Springfield, Worcester and Boston.
On Saturday, the band visits Amherst for a free concert at the UMass Fine Arts Center. It's a homecoming of sorts for the UMass grad who conducts the Marine Band, Colonel Jason Fettig.
Col. Jason Fettig: I've come back to campus a few times. In 2017, we returned to my alma mater with the Marine band. I was director of the band. This was three years after I became director and I had the wonderful opportunity to conduct the Marine band at UMass at the same hall and the same stage that I performed so many times as a student.
But prior to that, I was fortunate to come back to campus as both a clarinet player playing a solo with the Wind ensemble, and also I came back as a guest conductor of the wind ensemble many years ago. So there have been so many opportunities for me to return to campus and really in many ways to pay back everything that I received during my time at the university.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: Thinking back, is there a song that any day of the week, wherever you may be conducting the Marine Band, is there a song that instantly reminds you of UMass?
There is. You know, there is a wonderful classic piece of band music by the legendary American-Australian composer Percy Granger … called “Lincolnshire Posy.” And my first experience really digging into this piece was at UMass with the former director of bands, Malcolm Rowell. And I remember being so incredibly moved by working on that music.
And little did I know at that point, I would have the chance later on in my life when I became a conductor to actually program and conduct that piece myself. And I've done so, so many times in the last 25 years since I graduated from UMass. And every time I come back to that piece of music, I think about my teachers at UMass, my amazing experience at the university, and how it shaped me to be who I am today and to have the opportunities I've had.
Now that you've led "The President's Own" United States Marine Band for, what, eight years now?
Eight years. My eighth year, yes.
What piece of music can you conduct over and over again without it feeling like it's a job or getting boring? Or does that piece even exist?
Oh, of course. That's a great question. And there are a lot of pieces that we play over and over again that I never get tired of.
But two of them you will hear on this concert, and they are they are staples of our American patriotic repertoire. The first is the national anthem. I never tire of sharing the national anthem with audiences across the country and throughout the world. It is a very simple piece of music, but it is very, very important and it carries great emotional weight every single time we perform it. It's interesting – it opens the concert and yet people will cheer as loudly for the national anthem as for any other piece that we play during the concert.
And the other one is, of course, “The Stars and Stripes Forever” by John Philip Sousa, who was my predecessor. He was the director of the band from 1880 to 1892. Big shoes to fill. But I've conducted “Stars and Stripes” probably thousands of times at this point, and I never get tired of performing it, and I certainly never get tired of sharing it with people who are so excited to hear “The President's Own” play that iconic march.
I noticed that they call your baton the John Philip Sousa Baton. Is that an honorary name? That's not actually a baton he used, right?
No. So the John Philip Sousa Baton is a ceremonial baton. It's not actually used to perform. I've never conducted with the Sousa baton. In fact, I only have allowed to touch it occasionally because it is an artifact. It was a gift that was given to Sousa in 1892 when he left the Marine Band to embark on his civilian career. And the time that we bring it out, it's in a bulletproof glass case in our historic archives.
I bet it is.
And we pull it out only to – sometimes I'll hold it when we do official photographs. And when we transition leadership of the Marine Band, we literally pass the Sousa Baton to each other. So when I became director in 2014, my predecessor handed me the Sousa Baton and my job was to make sure I didn't drop it before our archivist could put it back in its case.
And it's just an amazing tradition and you feel the weight of responsibility and really the opportunity to lead this great American institution when you touch that Sousa Baton. But if you tried to conduct with it, you'd have a lot of trouble because it's very heavy. It's very large, and it was never intended to be a performance baton. I use a different baton for those concerts.
Yeah, that's what I assumed. How many musicians are you bringing to the UMass campus this week?
So we have about 65 musicians, which is a standard size concert band. We have over 130 musicians in the organization total, but we rarely perform with all of them together. We are designed to execute over 1,200 commitments a year. And so, while we're out here on the road sharing concerts with people across the Northeast, we have an entire another … contingent of band members and our orchestra, which is still in Washington, able to perform at the White House, perform all of the Marine Corps ceremonies that are so central to our mission. And that means we're available 365 days a year in multiple configurations across the entire spectrum of our mission.
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