Musicians from across campus band together in Virginia Tech's Wind Ensemble

The Virginia Tech Wind Ensemble is a consort of woodwind, brass, and percussion instruments. It's made up of about half to 60% of music majors, and the other 40 or so percent consists of engineers, hard sciences, and majors from across the campus. It's really cool to have lots of different people in one room. I think it's a really great opportunity to get to know people of different majors and to hear what's going on on their side of campus. And it's really cool to have everybody's experiences, different music experiences come together. And we all get to make one big pretty piece of music together. Sitting in a room next to somebody that maybe is a future engineer and you're a musician or vice versa. You don't know what kind of collaborations or opportunities that's going to open up or relationships for the future. I think that's an enormous strength of this particular place. We're all there for the same goal, and that is to make music with the upmost level of artistry that we can produce. Being able to play all these fantastic pieces, to play them at such a level that is almost considered professional is great. We have really strong faculty. They come from really strong backgrounds, they have a lot of really good ideas and they're really pushing the band forward. They want us to get better every single time. A lot of our students come to school and want to experience different aspects of campus life, and I think art is a really important part of that experience. If they can allot some time to come into an atmosphere where everyone can be together and they can work on a singular focus and make a little bit of music and make a little bit of art together, that makes every part of their life better, both in school and then when they graduate and leave. That might open up opportunities that previously did not exist to them. One thing I love about this band is that when we all come in, all we have to think about for that hour and fifteen minutes is just make music, make good music, so everything else can just fall away.