Foundry

Consortium Premier on January 28, 2011 at the MENC North Central Division Conference/OMEA Professional Development Conference

Foundry was commissioned by a consortium of eight middle school and high school bands over the summer of 2010.  Members of the commissioning consortium were Worthington Kilbourne High School (Don Nathan), McCracken Middle School (Chip De Stefano), Piedmont High School (Andrew Anderson), Willow Wood Junior High School (James Shaw), Memorial High School (Heath Miller), Langley High School (Andrew Gekoskie), William Mason High School (Robert Bass), and Conner Middle School (James Daughters).

Foundry is a high energy work, utilizing a large percussion section which includes quite a bit of “found” instruments.  It is John Mackey’s easiest composition to date, but he took great care to make sure it stayed true to his compositional style and vision while remaining within the technical limitations of the young band.  In a blog post discussing the composition of Foundry, Mackey writes, “The biggest challenge in writing music for young bands is writing music that is easy, but doesn’t sound simplistic or dorky.  It still needs to sound like I wrote it, but it needs to sound like the piece just happened to be technically easy — as if it happened by accident.  I think it’s turning out pretty well…”