About

Conductor and music educator Andrew D. Pease is committed to bringing the wind band repertoire to life through informed and engaged performance.  In the early part of his career, he helped to put the wind band back on the map in New York City.  While music director of the Columbia University Wind Ensemble from 2002-2013, he brought wind band standards and new music to New York students and audiences.  He also began a student guest conductor program with Columbia’s Teachers College and helped to start the Columbia Festival of Winds, an annual fundraising festival for inner-city music education that brought the wind bands of the New York City area together for a day of concerts.  Concurrently, he conducted the community band Columbia Summer Winds, which inaugurated its Outdoor Composition Contest under his watch.  Most recently, he completed a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in wind conducting at Arizona State University, where his teachers included Gary Hill, Wayne Bailey, Timothy Russell, and William Reber.  While there, he conducted the Concert Band, Wind Ensemble, Wind Orchestra, Symphony Orchestra, and various chamber groups.  He is committed to bringing composers into contact with his ensembles, and as such he has led rehearsal clinics with David del Tredici, Johan de Meij, John Mackey, Michael Markowski, Eric Ewazen, Edward Green, Oliver Caplan, and Chris Lamb, among others.

Dr. Pease’s conducting career began at Dartmouth College, where he conducted the Marching Band, Chamber Orchestra, Steel Drum Band, and an honors thesis as an undergraduate.  He received Master of Arts degrees in Music Education from Columbia University’s Teachers College and in Wind Conducting from Hofstra University.  His past conducting teachers include Max Culpepper, Melinda O’Neal, Dino Anagnost, and Peter Boonshaft, as well as clinics with other leading figures in the conducting world.  In 2010 he was a Conducting Fellow at the first ever Juilliard School Conducting Workshop for Music Educators, where he studied with Jim Smith, George Stelluto, and Virginia Allen.

Dr. Pease has explored music in all its many forms, from symphony orchestras to steel drum bands to his own rock band, and he brings that knowledge and experience to students of all ages.  For 9 years he was a music teacher at Lakewood Elementary School in Congers, NY, where he taught classroom music, elementary band, strings, and chorus to grades k-5.  He has traveled with ensembles and appeared as a guest conductor in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Maryland, Texas, and Arizona. Dr. Pease is also in demand as an arranger and orchestrator. His arrangements have been cast in such diverse media as steel band, orchestra, and recorders, and have included styles ranging from Christmas carols to tango to popular movie and video game themes.

Andy Pease’s Wind Band Blog has grown immensely from its beginnings as a repertoire resource for members of the Columbia University Wind Ensemble.  It now attracts a global audience, and it has been used in classrooms of all levels around the United States.  It was recently featured in Battisti, Berz, and Gerzberger’s Sourcebook for Wind Band and Instrumental Music (Meredith Music, 2014), and its posts have been adapted for use on the website of Columbia Summer Winds. Dr. Pease’s doctoral thesis, “An Annotated Bibliography of Symphonies for Wind Band,” is a uniquely useful repertoire tool in the same vein that will soon begin to enrich the pages of this site.