Circus March, Pops Orchestra. In the John Adams High School Orchestra, Fennell performed as the kettledrummer and served as the band's drum major. Fennell also studied conducting with Sergei Koussevitzky at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood in 1942 (with classmates Leonard Bernstein, Lukas Foss, and Walter Hendl).
On the podium, Fennell evinced a courtly yet commanding manner despite his five foot, one inch stature. He was also awarded a fellowship that allowed him to study at the Mozarteum Salzburg in 1938.
While Fennell was recuperating from hepatitis for six weeks in 1952, he devised a new symphonic band organization. Artist Biography by Jeremy Grimshaw. Fennell found a compatible and fruitful relationship at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y. As a student, he organized the first University of Rochester marching band for the football team and held indoor concerts with the band after the football season for ten years.
His studies at the Interlochen Arts Camp (then the National Music Camp) included being chosen by famed bandmaster Albert Austin Harding as the bass drummer in the National High School Band in 1931. Frederick Fennell (2 July 1914, Cleveland, Ohio – 7 December 2004, Siesta Key, Fla.) was an internationally recognized conductor, and one of the primary figures in promoting the wind ensemble as a performing group. On September 20, 1952 he held the first rehearsal for the Eastman Wind Ensemble, and he conducted the first concert at Eastman's Kilbourn Hall on February 8, 1953.
At Eastman, he completed his bachelor's and master's degrees (in 1937 and 1939). The growing number of serious compositions for wind ensemble, and the large number of institutionalized ensembles to play them, are in large part due to the efforts of His ideas first took shape in 1951, when under his baton a group of woodwind, brass, and percussion players staged a concert featuring several works from composers as wide-ranging as He also served as the resident conductor of the Miami Philharmonic from 1974 to 1975.
Eastman Office of Communications, 585-274-1050 Rochester, NY — Frederick Fennell, legendary founder of the Eastman Wind Ensemble and former faculty member at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, died today (Tuesday, December 7) at his home in Florida after a brief illness.
He was also principal guest conductor of the Interlochen Arts Academy and Dallas Wind Symphony.
Biography Frederick Fennell (2 July 1914, Cleveland, Ohio – 7 December 2004, Siesta Key, Fla.) was an internationally recognized conductor, and one of the primary figures in promoting the wind ensemble as a performing group. Though his career took him to the orchestral podiums of Cleveland, Boston, Miami, and elsewhere, it is his notoriety as a conductor of music for winds, his prolific recorded output, and his …
(He was appointed Koussevitzky’s assistant at the Center in 1948). He was known to take charge of a room with just his words, and his conducting was extremely animated. In September 1965 Dr. Fennell became conductor-in-residence at the University of Miami where he conducted the symphony orchestra and also founded a wind ensemble. During World War II Fennell served as the National Musical Advisor in the United Service Organizations.
Frederick Putnam Fennell [birth name] Genres. His conducting workshops were famous for including calisthenics and baton technique exercises in swimming pools. This band was conducted by John Philip Sousa on July 26, the program including the premiere of Sousa's Northern Pines march. He was 90 years old.
He remained highly active in the world of conducting until a few months before his death at the age of ninety at his home in Siesta Key, Florida.
The 1993 Roger E. Rickson book Ffortissimo: a Bio-Discography of Frederick Fennell: the First Forty Years, 1953 to 1993, (Ludwig Music, Inc., publisher) ISBN 1-57134-000-9 covers in detail the Fennell story, with particular attention to recordings. In Fennell's Fennell chose percussion as his primary instrument at the age of seven, as drummer in the fife-and-drum corps at the family's encampment called Camp Zeke. Attending the Mozarteum Salzburg allowed him to take several classes with Herbert Albert and visit several times with the festival’s chief conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler.
He became one of America's most-recorded conductors. He was also inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame in 2001. He was 90 years old.