The Frost School of Music has honored former director of bands Rob Carnochan, whose unexpected passing in September of 2024 shocked and saddened students and colleagues at the Frost School and across the country, with a tribute he would have loved—new music for wind band.
“Rob was not only a band director,” said Craig McKenzie, associate director of bands and director of athletic bands, who became close to Carnochan while getting his doctorate in conducting at the Frost School and also studied with him as an undergraduate drum major at the University of Colorado. “He was a musician, a conductor, an artist who loved all kinds of music. He made sure the Frost Wind Ensemble played music outside the box.”
Two compositions commissioned by the Frost School in Carnochan’s memory have their premieres here this month. On April 11, the Frost Wind Ensemble gave the first performance of “All You Who Sleep Tonight,” composed by Donald Grantham, a friend and colleague of Carnochan’s from the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). And this Sunday, the Frost Symphonic Winds will premiere “Robbed Time” by Andrew Boss, one of Carnochan’s countless former students.
“I was one of the many composers fortunate enough to have worked with [Carnochan] and to have benefited from his deep musicality and musical insights,” Grantham, a multi-award-winning composer and professor at UT Austin’s Butler School of Music, said in a program note. “His passing is an enormous loss not only to family and friends, but also to students of music, to the band world, and to the community of music educators and composers. I was touched and honored to be asked to compose a commemorative work for Rob.”
Carnochan, who was 61 when he died, joined the Frost School in 2015. He was also chair of instrumental performance, music director and conductor of the Frost Wind Ensemble, and had begun overseeing the Frost Band of the Hour. A lifelong music educator, he was devoted to teaching and elevating his art form. “You could say teaching is in my DNA,” he wrote shortly before his passing. “As a teacher, I have three priorities: 1) students, 2) students, and 3) students! Helping them find their voice and way through life, regardless of their path, has been and remains my mission.”
Before joining the Frost School, he spent 13 years as a professor and director of the Longhorn Band at The University of Texas at Austin. He held similar positions at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Northeastern Oklahoma State University, and Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas. His long career at these large institutions meant that he influenced thousands of students, educators, and musicians, with a warmth and care that made him widely beloved. He was passionate about adding to the wind band canon, and commissioned numerous works throughout his career, including those by such famous composers as Andy Akiho, Mason Bates, Valerie Coleman, John Corigliano, and Gunther Schuller. He created 26 commissions and residencies at the Frost School.
McKenzie said that he, retiring dean Shelton G. “Shelly” Berg, Carnochan’s predecessor Gary Green, and Carmine Parente, a University of Miami and Frost Band of the Hour alumnus and supporter, who funded the Grantham work, came together to create a commission honoring Carnochan. They chose Grantham from a list of prospects on the advice of Carnochan’s widow, Karen Salerowicz. The two artists had worked together at UT Austin, where Carnochan once conducted the premiere of a Grantham chamber music piece at a College Band Directors National Association conference. Because Carnochan loved working with vocalists, Grantham arranged to include two-time GRAMMY award-winning soprano Hila Plittman.
Director of bands Michael Hancock put together a program that acknowledged Carnochan in other ways. It included Steven Stucky’s expanded modern transcription of Purcell’s 1694 “Funeral Music for Queen Mary,” another commemoration of the loss of a beloved leader, which was led by graduate student Kevin Joseph, part of Carnochan’s last cohort of conducting students. The ensemble also played Aaron Copland’s “Ensemble,” a work Carnochan loved that was the subject of his doctoral dissertation. Salerowicz, the couple’s daughter, Alexandra Carnochan, and numerous friends and colleagues of Carnochan attended.
Grantham’s composition was a powerfully moving experience for them. Hancock called “Sleep Tonight” a "deeply stirring and emotionally resonant work—one that offers genuine comfort in the wake of loss. Through luminous harmonic shifts, searching instrumental lines, and the haunting emergence of the soprano voice, the piece traces a journey from grief toward reassurance.”
“It was the kind of piece that helps you grieve and go through all the feelings that come with losing someone,” said McKenzie.
The second commission, for this Sunday’s Frost Symphonic Winds concert, was funded by a consortium of schools in South Florida and across the country, including Miami Arts Studio 6-12 at Zelda Glazer, Stony Brook University, and Boston College. It is a simpler piece than “Sleep Tonight,” and meant to be accessible to secondary school ensembles.
Their participation was a tribute to Carnochan’s far-reaching influence, said McKenzie, who will conduct. “Rob touched a lot of lives and connected with a lot of people at a lot of institutions,” he said. “A lot of people wanted to contribute something to a piece they could also perform themselves and feel they had a part in creating.”
The title “Robbed Time” is a literal translation of the Italian musical term rubato and a reflection on the loss of the man everyone called Rob. Grantham took the name of “All You Who Sleep Tonight” from a poem by Vikram Seth, which closed his piece.
All you who sleep tonight
Far from the ones you love,
No hand to left or right,
And emptiness above—
Know that you aren’t alone.
The whole world shares your tears,
Some for two nights or one,
And some for all their years.
