Mara Rago River City Brass Band plays at Heinz Hall in April. The band performs several concert series in seven venues.

By Andrew Druckenbrod
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette The River City Brass Band began not with row upon row of gleaming metallic instruments, but as a concept.

In the late '70s, conductor Robert Bernat, dismayed by the cultural recession that seemed to be following the economic one, decided to create a group to reconnect audiences to classical music. He didn't even have a specific genre in mind at first but realized it would have to be one far removed from his own training as a orchestral violist and conductor.

		River City Brass Band With: Dennis Colwell, conductor; David Cutler, piano. Where: Heinz Hall, Downtown. When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday. Tickets: $17-$42; 412- 434-7222; 1-800-292-7222.

"Bob decided that a brass band was the way to go," says Denis Colwell, RCBB's music director. "The nature of a brass instrument is not off-putting. There is a level of formality that goes along with an orchestra that doesn't [exist] with the more blue-collar association with brass. Bob thought that could be used to his end of making classical music being less threatening. It was an educational experiment, different from every other arts organization in that it was designed to fill a need."

Avant-garde composers aside, here was a true experiment in sound.

Twenty-five years, hundreds of concerts and 15 CDs later, the results are in. RCBB has weathered ups and downs, and although it is carrying a substantial deficit now, it continues to perform to enthusiastic patrons, targeting small towns and suburbs as well as the heart of the Pittsburgh Cultural District. This season it celebrates its silver anniversary, in particular with birthday bash concerts in November.

Bugle call

In November 1981, Bernat assembled a band primarily culled from Carnegie Mellon and Duquesne University faculty and students for a concert at Carnegie Music Hall. Blaring over flugelhorns, trumpets and trombones and more, the concept found success with audiences and the band itself.

"It felt like more of a rebirth of a lost art in America," says Bernard Black, RCBB's principal solo cornetist. The brass-band tradition is British in origin, and it still thrives there.

"At one point this country had them, but they all but disappeared," he says. "[Bernat] was revitalizing the whole art form and bringing it to more people. Even from the beginning the kind of people who came to our concerts were not the ones that went to the symphony. They were more geared to a pops format. We played classical music, but in transcriptions."

The RCBB fan base is enviable. "These people love it," says Black. "They have been going for years. You show up, and there are 1,000 people there. For a long time a lot of us initially thought there was a shelf life for the brass band -- the audience is older, 60 and older. But we still have a good audience. People are coming and supporting us."

These days, RCBB performs several concert series in seven venues: Carson Middle School, McCandless; Palace Theatre, Greensburg; Pasquerilla Arts Center, Johnstown; Upper St. Clair Theater; Gateway High School, Monroeville; Baldwin High School; and Heinz Hall, Downtown. The latter serves as RCBB's new home base after having left Carnegie Music Hall a few years ago.

The series are augmented by more than 60 touring performances a season.

"We tour as often as we play here," says Colwell. "The response outside of the local area has always been good."

American brass

Colwell, 49, joined the group as a cornet player in 1985, but began considering conducting. In 1991, Bernat asked him to be an assistant conductor. At the time, Colwell was just happy to be on board, learning this new craft at a higher level. But when Bernat died in 1994, Colwell was thrust into the role he now has, officially voted in as music director in 1995.

It was an intellectual fit as well as a natural one for the former brass player. "I became fascinated by" Bernat's experimenting, he said. "I became extremely concerned that the audience for classical music was aging and dwindling. We had to look at what the audience is and find ways to connect that to classical music."

Colwell took Bernat's ideas even further. While the founder had "Americanized" the instrumentation of RCBB from its British brass band roots (using an E-flat trumpet instead of an E-flat coronet, French horns instead of tenor horns and employing larger bore trombones and tubas), Colwell worked to Americanize the repertoire.

"There is an extremely wide variety of tunes on stage, anything from opera arias to movie tunes to folk music," he says. "It was unusual at the time to put pieces that were so disparate on a program. I decided to do more American music and highlight the group as an American ensemble."

Colwell also worked to make the concert experience more accessible, talking casually to patrons from the stage and contextualizing the music. "Classical music is written by people who are very interesting, and there are juicy stories that we might as well share."

Down to brass tacks

Financially, RCBB has had a rocky past few years. The group's budget is $1.5 million this year, yet it is carrying a deficit of roughly half a million dollars. It's part of what led to the elimination of the position of executive director in January.

A rough process leading to the current, first collective bargaining agreement with its musicians also took its toll. But the 10 percent pay cut that the musicians agreed to this year is a central part of the commitment to fiscal discipline that board chairman Edward Nicholson feels has the band on the right track.

"Over the next five years, our objective is to have a period where we are not borrowing," he says.

"We have every reason to expect that River City Brass Band will be in much better shape a year from now than what we were last year," adds Colwell. He is particularly excited about the higher profile of performing in Heinz Hall, taking over the Point State Park July 4 performance from the Pittsburgh Symphony and the quality of the seven new players hired this summer.

Most of RCBB's members have other major sources of income. But like Black, who teaches full time at CAPA, the Pittsburgh Creative & Performing Arts High School, they value the situation that the brass band offers. In particular, "the opportunity to play as a soloist," he says. "Unless you are a professional soloist, you don't get to do that."

With so many arts organizations on pins and needles financially, 25 years is quite an achievement.

"There are not that many brass bands in the country, and that alone makes the 25 years we have been around all the more amazing," says Colwell.

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Correction/Clarification: (Published Sept. 19, 2006) This story as originally published on Sept. 17, 2006 gave an incorrect date and founder for the founding of the Carnegie Mellon Wind Ensemble. It was founded in the late 1970s by Dr. John Mitchell.