The University of Arkansas music performance season kicks into gear Monday night with the start of the Music Monday series. The first concert features the brass septet Zen Brass. This is the first of what will be more than 200 concerts and recitals featuring students, faculty and guest artists throughout the academic year.
This season opener includes a faculty member, Richard Rulli. He's an associate professor who teaches trumpet and brass chamber music. Rulli is a founding member of Zen Brass. This week, he came to the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio to help get us ready for Monday's concert. Fellow Zen Brass member David Swanson joined us from his home in Nice, France. The music we'll hear during the next few minutes all comes from the new Zen Brass CD, "Voices of Land and Spirits."
Decades before Zen Brass, Richard Rulli and David Swanson played together in the Air Force Band of the Golden West at March Air Force Base in Riverside, California.
Rulli: I think we just immediately saw eye to eye about our values in music and what we liked. And we immediately started playing in an Air Force brass quintet together, and that was a pretty busy group. It was a pretty big part of what we did there.
Swanson: It certainly got very busy.
Rulli: Yeah, it got very busy because we got pretty good and made it into something.
Swanson: Made it.
Rulli: Yeah, we made it into something. And the personnel in that group, well, a few chairs changed over the years. How long did we play? We played in a quintet together for what, five, six years?
Swanson: Probably five years.
Rulli: Yeah, yeah, for a long time. And when you're doing, literally between the band and the quintet, literally hundreds of performances a year and the concert band, you get to know people pretty well and you figure out what your values are.
And that was in the heyday of groups like the Canadian Brass and especially the Empire Brass, which Dave and I both really loved, the Empire Brass sound, and went to concerts of them. And I remember one in particular on the Queen Mary in Long Beach.
Swanson: Queen Mary. I was thinking that one too.
Rulli: Yeah, that was a great concert. So we just shared a lot because he's from the East Coast, I'm from the West. We really didn't have any familiar background other than music.
That was the fall of 1987. Their friendship and shared love of chamber music continued when David heard London-based Septura, a brass ensemble. The idea of Zen Brass really began to percolate.
Swanson: The septet is just a different sound, a different fullness to it. And hearing a group like Septura, which was already highly polished, even though they were fairly new off the bat, it was very inspiring. And so I wanted to try that. And I talked to Rich about it and he said, well, let's do it.
Rulli: Yeah. And that's really what happened. I mean, when Dave and Cindy both retired from the Air Force band system, they ended up in Lawrence, Kansas. So after all of these years when we sort of went our separate ways, but came together geographically, we were relatively close.
And right away we talked about, well, let's form a quintet and do something. But I got a full time job and he was working on pipe organs in Lawrence, Kansas. And that just, but then we both got turned on to Septura and the instrumentation.
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Rulli: It's a very unique uniform sound from top to bottom that is just, it rings and resonates.
Zen Brass is very much obviously brass, but dedicated to expanding what we might think a brass band play.
Swanson: When I first developed the repertoire, because it kind of fell to me to do that. And the repertoire for brass septet of this particular instrumentation doesn't really exist. So I started finding pieces. I consume a lot of music. I listened to a lot of music. I searched for things from different time periods, different locations, different types of composers.
And I just consume a lot of music and I try to find what just hits me as something I would like to play, or something that might work for a brass group, or something that I can immediately hear, this would work great for this group. And as a whole bunch of things for me, it's not one particular thing that I'm looking for. It's just a mesh of different things that come together.
Rulli: Yeah. We're playing vocal music that he's adapted for brass. He's a masterful arranger and orchestrator. We're playing string music. The "Nocturnal Scherzo" by Manuel Ponce is his string piece that's just crazy wild on strings. And we're doing it.
Dave's being modest. He's very good at hearing the potential of non brass music for brasses and that, that is sort of where we're a little bit different than even Septura. Their forte is taking orchestral pieces and making them into a brass septet.
We're doing this more with different things often outside of the normal brass. But as brass players, that's pretty cool for us because we get to play music that otherwise, I mean, vocal things. The, what is the one that, Mary? Oh, the "O Salutaris Hostia."
Yeah, that's a vocal piece with, originally it's for two solo pianos, or solo sopranos, not pianos. And Mary and I have this duet that is just beautiful to hear and play. So people are going to hear things that they don't usually hear played on brass.
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With seven talented musicians and a spirit of expanding perceptions of what a brass septet can perform, what should we expect to hear Monday night?
Swanson: Well, you're going to hear a very eclectic program. We've got some, if we take it in a historical context, we run everything from the Renaissance to contemporary composers. We've got, it's a two half program, so there'll be an intermission. But we start off with lively stuff and we end up with lively stuff. We've got some, like I say, Renaissance. We've got romance, with the romantic Gabriel Fauré.
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Now, what about the name Zen Brass? Was there an epiphany that led the seven musicians to land on that name? Well, not really. David and Richard say none of the early suggestions could find consensus. Richard says some members remember him coming up with the name. He really doesn't. But they all agree they like it.
Rulli: It made a lot of sense. I put it in front of everybody and everybody said, yeah, let's go with that. It makes a lot of sense. The name implies a certain thought process, a certain way to go about making music, and what type of music you want to present. And it just made a lot of sense.
Zen Brass will perform Monday night in Stella Boyle Smith Concert Hall on the University of Arkansas campus. The music begins at 7:30. There is no admission charge.
Our conversation took place Tuesday afternoon. Well, afternoon for Richard Rulli and me. It was 11 o'clock at night for David Swanson at his home in Nice, France. Richard Rulli is an associate professor at the University of Arkansas and teaches trumpet, brass chamber music and conducts the trumpet ensemble. He's also a founding member of Zen Brass. The new Zen Brass CD is "Voices of Land and Spirits." This is Ozarks at Large.
Rulli: One of the things that I love about what Dave has done is, one of the pieces that he and I both enjoyed playing in the Air Force band all the time when we played was the "American Overture" by Joseph Willcox Jenkins, and we're opening the concert with his arrangement of that. So there's a little bit of touch from our history, at least there.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
