BJ Brooks

Essence of Memory

In the fall of 2021, as occurs countless times across the United States, band director Darin Johns was traveling with his marching band to a Friday night football game. Tragically, a wrong-way driver struck the Andrews Band bus, taking the lives of both Darin and the bus driver. Over the next few months, tributes to Darin came in waves, culminating in a 1,000-member parade with 30 different bands at Christmastime. The Association of Texas Small-School Bands, of which Darin and the Andrews Band were a part, commissioned me to write a piece in honor of Mr. Johns. The music reflects the waves of memory that one experiences when contemplating the deepest of thoughts. First nebulous, sometimes sharply focused, resonating motifs, highs and lows. The four-chord chaconne figure is the unifying core of the work. It grounds the various melodies as they enter and return, sometimes densely paired, sometimes transparently isolated. The themes are structured as an arch form ABCBA, but as they recur, they are added together, giving them more density, as if the memories overlap, before the calmness, first heard as an ethereal haze, recurs.