This spring, the School of Music and Dance hired Dennis Llinás to be the university’s new director of bands. The former head of LSU’s Sudler Trophy-winning Golden Band from Tigerland, Llinás oversees all bands at the UO and conducts the wind ensemble. This fall he also conducted the Oregon Marching Band during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner before each football game in Autzen Stadium.
Get settled in your seats, and we’ll dim the house lights, raise the curtain, and introduce you to Dennis Llinás…
Where were you before the University of Oregon?
I grew up in South Florida, in Miami. I went to undergrad at Florida International University down there, and taught high school band for three years down in Miami. After that I decided to move to Austin, Texas, and I taught high school band for a year. Then I got into the grad school program at the University of Texas. I was there four years getting a masters and doctorate, and when I graduated I got hired at Louisiana State University, which was a great first college teaching job, I got real lucky.
I taught at LSU for seven years, and ran the marching band—the Tiger Band—there for the last three years. I was the associate director of bands, so I ran the marching band, conducted the second concert band, and taught conducting to undergraduates and a few graduates who were doing a minor area in conducting.
What attracted you to this current position?
Oregon has a reputation, especially the Oregon School of Music. Everywhere that I've been, I've heard, “Yeah, Oregon's a good school.” But I could never find a recording or anything of Oregon—I know they're good, but I've never heard them. But there's all this potential. I look at the faculty, and these are top-notch faculty who are at the top of their game, performing everywhere professionally, and they're great people. The students are fantastic, but we're not getting the word out to everybody.
I came to interview for the job just to see it from the ground level to see what the potential was. I met the dean, Sabrina Madison-Cannon, who is fantastic. She's a visionary and she wants to just set the world on fire, you know, try new things and provide the best opportunities for the students. I have some really big ideas for things I want to do that are completely different than anybody else is doing. And in talking to her, I was like, "This is a person who will get behind what I want to do, and will support and find ways to make it happen."
Seeing that there was a void that I could that I could fill and give our bands here an identity was really exciting to me. Knowing the talent level that was here with the teachers and the students, and then the dean. That was really what brought me here.
What is your role at the University of Oregon?
I have administrative oversight of all the bands, even though I don't teach them all, because we have a great marching band director. I conduct the top wind ensemble, recruit and teach graduate students in conducting, and teach undergraduate conducting
What do you teach at the UO?
I conduct the wind ensemble, I teach lessons to my graduate students, a seminar where we talk about anything with music and things that are going to happen in a career or in the future, and I teach a wind literature course, which is basically the history of wind ensemble music back to early brass music in St. Mark’s Cathedral all the way to present. That’s a two- or three-term course. I also teach conducting to undergraduates as well, for anyone who wants to be a teacher or learn to conduct.
What is your vision for the position?
Everything is centered around students, so you want to make sure that they are going to get the best experience in every one of the bands that exists here. That's the core nucleus of it all. But one of my big visions is a masterclass kind of series, a video series that will be free for band directors everywhere, that will be shared through social media and websites where anybody can access it without paying subscriptions. The students are going to lead the majority of these videos on to how to be excellent on all of these pieces of music, and it's something that a band director, if they get that video, they can show it to their students and their band will get better.
I'm a big believer in that outreach. How do we support all the directors that are sending students here and help them make their programs better? That's one of the big visionary ideas that I have. I could put together recordings, but that's what every other university does. There are fantastic universities that do that, and I don’t want to get into the business of just competing with them on the recording. But this is a void that I think is missing, and an educational goal that I have is to really support the directors. And so I think this is a good opportunity to try that.
How do you go about recruiting students?
It's several years of work. First, I meet directors, go to their schools, watch them do their thing, and show that I support what they're doing and that they're valuable. Then in February and March they’re getting ready for assessments; they have these concert band and jazz band assessments. They play, and bring in extra ears and extra opinions. That term will be me rehearsing a lot of those bands. And the students say, "Oh, we enjoyed this experience, what else do you have to offer?"
That extra thing that we want to offer will be something that we're going to start next year, which is going to be an honor band, where we're going to host this event that will be on campus for about a weekend. Students from anywhere in the Northwest can come and they'll spend a Thursday night, Friday, and Saturday here on campus. They'll get to play music together, meet new friends, work with the directors, work with the applied faculty; just an immersive experience into our School of Music for a short weekend.
The next step, which will be in about another two years after that, is starting a summer camp, where students can spend five days here, and sleep in the dorms and eat the food at the university and get private lessons with the teachers. It's establishing relationships and give them a short hint of what we do here. Eventually they just spent so much time here that the logical progression is just to go to school here.
What is your impression of the alumni band, and the way assistant director of bands Eric Wiltshire puts together a band during the weeks before students return to fill out the Oregon Marching Band?
That was the most impressive thing, and it was the first thing I noticed. I got here and we had a game on the Saturday, and I’m thinking in my head, "School doesn’t start for another month." Eric’s really clever, and he schedules the alumni game—every school has an alumni game, where they bring back the alumni band—early in the season.
Anybody who’s in town who has been in the band can come back to play during that football game. Anyone who was here who was a current student formed a pickup band, and they were reinforced by the alumni band. Because of that, we had people in the stands who knew what the routines were, who knew the tunes, knew the horn flashes, and so they sounded decent. He was able to put together a pregame and a halftime, with only a two-and-a-half-hour rehearsal that morning. That’s all they had. He managed to get all that taught, and get something that looked and sounded really great.
What was the first instrument you learned to play?
I started playing the piano when I was seven years old. I had a good time doing it, but I hated to practice, like any kid at seven. I have this thing where I can hear any piece of music, and know instantly where all the notes are. It’s kind of like a little gift. I said to myself, "Okay, I hate practicing piano and don’t want to be a concert pianist, but I want to do something in music with this gift."
I got to high school and got into the marching band. I really enjoyed playing percussion and the community nature of the band, and thought, "Okay, this is fun." My junior year, we got a new director who was excellent. He was a military guy, and he came in and turned this weak program into something really special. He left the biggest impact on me, and it was after he came in that I knew what I wanted to do: I wanted to be like him. What he did for us, the feelings he made me feel, the passion for the band, that’s what I wanted to do for other students. That was my junior year of high school, and I knew then exactly what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
How do you select pieces for a halftime show or a concert performance?
When I used to do that [at LSU], I’d think about how you cater towards every generation in the audience. It’s not just a Journey show, because there are people in the audience who might not like Journey, so the entire experience is not fun for them. I really thought about, what is a tune that someone who is 70 years old recognizes, a tune that someone is 40 years old recognizes, and something that is on the radio? If you do a British Invasion show, you could get the Beatles, and also something that’s on the radio right now, and cater to different audiences that way. We call that a ‘show concept.’
That show concept is something that’s really big in marching band, that I took into concert band. My next concert will be inspired by Bach. Bach is a really influential composer but he never wrote for a band, because back in the Baroque period that just wasn’t a thing. But he did influence a lot of people. One of his popular forms is prelude and fugue, and Gershwin, someone who had no idea who Bach was in the 20s, wrote this piano prelude where the second prelude was really jazzy and really neat. We’re doing a Bach fugue after and tagging them together, and influences from Bach into new styles of music.
That’s how I go into planning that: I have this open ended idea that’s really neat, but how do I plug things in that will give everybody something they like, so they’ll hear something jazzy, something Baroque, something by a current composer with an electric guitar, something that takes some of Bach with contemporary techniques.
What are you currently listening to?
A little bit of everything! The current playlist that I’m listening to has a wide mix, but I love music from the 60s. One of my playlists has only that, but this latest one has “Supersonic Rocket Ship” by the Kinks, “Take a Chance on Me” by ABBA, “Red, Red, Wine” by UB40, Radiohead, Bjork—anything that catches my attention. I do love classical music—I’m kind of a nerd that way, that never really escapes me. I also listen to podcasts quite a bit; some of it to get smarter, and some of it just for fun, like Car Talk. You really can’t go wrong listening to Car Talk.
- Photos courtesy Tom Emerson