Welcome to the Common Time Podcast, a show designed to give music educators practical, inspiring ideas for you and your program. Each week we sit down with world class educators, composers, and conductors to talk about teaching, leadership and building programs that thrive without burning yourself out. So whether you're a band, orchestra, or choir director, our goal is simple to help you grow and stay inspired and remember why you fell in love with teaching music in the first place. This is season 4, and we're diving even deeper. More real conversations, more actionable takeaways, and more voices shaping the future of music education. Let's get into the episode. Our guest today is Eugene Corporon. Welcome, Professor Corporon.
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you today.
We're so excited that you're sharing some time with us today. Professor Corporon really needs no introduction. He is a Regents professor of music, coordinator of wind studies and conductor of the Wind Symphony at the University of North Texas. And that's just a couple of the things that he's done throughout his career. And without further ado, I'm just going to turn it to John and let's just jump into it.
Thank you, Professor. As you step into retirement after an extraordinary career, what are the moments that rise to the surface when you look back?
That's a tough one. With retirement, I've been getting a lot of congratulations — and I'm not sure it shouldn't be condolences, because this has been what my life has been about since junior high school. Thinking about 57 years of teaching, there are so many great memories. With nineteen rehearsals left here at North Texas and five more concerts before I leave Denton, you start asking: what do you remember most? And it always comes back to the students — and the people I've had the opportunity to work with and learn from. With the death of Robert Reynolds just a week ago, all of us have been rethinking that whole experience — each of us at some point along the way had something with him. One of my most vivid memories is meeting him in my junior year of high school. This year has had a special quality throughout. I have a remarkable group of students, and I've been thinking about all the different ways to make music with them — designing programs around their skills and abilities, playing things they love to play. But mostly it comes back to the students, and to the extraordinary amount of music I've gotten to work on. Working with living composers has been one of the great privileges of my life. They're so generous with their time and so willing to share their ideas and feelings. I suppose that rounds it out.
You've shaped literally generations of conductors and educators. When former students succeed, what do you hope they carry forward most from their time with you?
First, their individuality. I hope they don't try to look like me on the podium, or even think the way I do. I hope they learn spontaneity, improvisation, and how to work with people in a way that is kind and helpful. And I hope they carry away a real knowledge of repertoire — an understanding that if we don't have a repertoire, we don't have an ensemble. One phrase they hear from me right away is: you won't find the wind band's future in the orchestra's past. While we've played many transcriptions over the years, that's not where our identity lies. I picked that up from Robert Reynolds and those who came before him. You may have seen pictures getting shared recently — a great photograph of Paynter, Hunsberger, Battisti, and Reynolds together. Those are the people I tracked starting very early. What they were playing was a big part of why I paid such close attention. If all four of them were performing a certain piece I didn't know, I thought I'd better get on it. Those would be the main things.
The band program at UNT is a global model for wind band excellence. What were the earliest intentional decisions that helped create that culture?
I brought certain things from other positions — Cincinnati, Michigan State, Northern Colorado, Wisconsin — that had seemed to work. But every situation is different. When I came here, I was well aware of the fame of the 1 o'clock Lab Band. It's an absolutely amazing program. I looked at what they were doing and why it was working — they were recording, they valued that outreach, they were playing student compositions, they were building artists within the ensemble. I modeled some of what I was doing after the jazz studies program, in that spirit of outreach. We have seven concert bands here, all filled with music majors, and the range of people in those ensembles is extraordinary. Our tuba teacher is retiring this year with forty students. The euphonium teacher has thirty-five to forty. We have twenty-five to thirty oboists. There's constant growth happening within the studios and the other groups. The key to sustaining that is having great colleagues — Andrew Traxel and Amy Woody, who lead the Wind Orchestra and Wind Ensemble. We also rely heavily on our graduate students, who lead three concert groups. They're not just students; they're interns doing serious work. We have people who've had outstanding high school careers joining for advanced degrees, and I think they're doing excellent work with the younger players — nothing is being lost. It's a team effort we've had to be very deliberate in developing.
I've had the pleasure of watching you rehearse many times over the years. For me, there's always clarity, purpose, and musical depth in what I observe. Has your approach to rehearsal evolved over the five decades? What would you share with us about that?
The way I used to do it was play until somebody made a mistake, stop and fix it, then move to the next mistake. It was a slow way to make progress. Bob Reynolds had called me about four weeks ago — he was writing another book, on rehearsing, and asked me to contribute some thoughts. I've also been preparing a session on rehearsing for our regional CBDNA, which we're hosting here. So I've had these ideas on my mind. I wrote a book — one chapter at a time, over twenty-two years — for the Teaching Music Through Performance in Band series. At our twentieth anniversary, our publisher at GIA offered to compile each contributor's chapters into individual books, and I named mine Explorations, Discoveries, Inventions and Designs in the Nowhere. That title still captures what rehearsals are about for me. I almost enjoy rehearsals more than concerts. I love the process of exploring a piece, discovering what's in it, having to create what I call inventions — finding some way to make something work that the composer trusted us to figure out. The phrase "designs in the nowhere" comes from Frank Zappa, who used it to describe conducting — and I think it's brilliant, because that's exactly what we're doing. But you need the technique to bring your ideas to fruition. You can have a clear sense of what you want and still lack the physical ability to change what you're hearing in real time. Something as simple as getting quieter — if I say "trombones, play softer," my students stop. All I have to do is gesture, and they respond. Spontaneity in rehearsal matters, and trusting your technique is essential. I also think of rehearsal as improvisation, because you never know exactly what's coming at you. They may play something beautifully on Tuesday, and by Thursday it's as if we never worked on it. If spring break falls in between, you have a real problem. I divide it this way: when you're talking, you're coaching; when you're moving, you're conducting. When I'm working through a score, I look for three things. First, patterns — phrases, sections, formal structure. Second, surprises — a sudden piano, an unexpected stop, a strange key change. Third, illusions — the moments where a composer creates something that, even with analysis, you can't fully explain how it affects you. Formal structure informs how I rehearse: if two passages are the same, we work on one and transfer the understanding to the other. Clarity is a central value for us, and I believe clarity comes from articulation — just as it does in an orchestra from bowing. If we're not all articulating the same way, grouping notes the same way, we're working against each other. The other dimension is sound. I have a Sony poster in the hallway that shows the opening of Beethoven's Fifth in all different colors — it says "full color sound," and that's what I'm after. I think in terms of what I call the timbral modifier: not the loudest timbre, but the one hardest to hear. Composers present us with those problems constantly. A dynamic marked forte may not work for a soft muted trumpet cutting through the texture — so you adjust the balance to let all of the colors be present. Problems in rehearsal come from multiple sources: sometimes we generate them — we haven't been clear enough, or we're still figuring it out ourselves. Sometimes they're player-generated — people haven't prepared yet, or are working on it and haven't gotten there. Sometimes the composer creates them, by not fully thinking through how a phrase will be organized from a wind articulation standpoint. And sometimes the problems are generated by the space you're in. A concert at Meyerson requires completely different preparation than a concert at Midwest, where the ceiling is low, the floor is carpeted, and you have fifty minutes to hear the sound in the ballroom. Flexibility is part of the training. Rehearsing is genuinely fun. My players teach me something in rehearsal more often than not, and I acknowledge it — "thanks for teaching me today." And a player's question is often an answer: when someone asks, "are we tonguing through to the end?" what they're really saying is, "I'm hearing three different things and you haven't made it clear yet." So I dig deep in rehearsals, but I also pace them. When I see people in the back starting to look frustrated, it's time to pull back and play something. The pacing of your rehearsal is yours to own. I record every rehearsal and listen to it at least three times before the next one — not to learn the piece, but to hear myself teach. Am I being clear? Am I the one creating the barrier? It helps me understand how the group is learning and shapes my approach for the next session. Do you use these?
All the time. We should have invested in those early on.
It's a great way to work. I used to make lists — list on one side, score on the other. When I'm listening back, I'll note "pitch, flute, English horn" and stick it on the problem in the score. There's a satisfying feeling to getting there in rehearsal, checking it, tearing it off, and throwing it on the stand. You end up with a pile of sticky notes, or not, if you didn't get to everything. Either way: I'll get to it next time. Anything that keeps you organized in your process is valuable.
In today's fast-moving educational landscape, what core values do you believe must remain non-negotiable in the ensemble teaching setting?
In some places, large ensembles are under attack — not in a paranoid way, but we're sometimes called an old model. You hear it now and then at NASM meetings: "We're going to go to all chamber music." And I think: if I don't have pieces on my stand that have chamber music in them, I'm doing a poor job of programming. We work on chamber music all the time, because a great piece won't have everybody playing all the time. We don't need to be defensive. In the early years right after World War II, bands were working hard to commission pieces — Revelli at Michigan, Paynter at Northwestern, Fred Fennell — building a repertoire by asking the best composers they could afford. Sometimes they didn't even have to pay them. The mere promise of the Michigan band playing something was enough to attract a composer. Those jobs got handed off to people who continued the work beautifully. We've made enormous progress in getting the finest composers of our day to write for us and to encourage their students to write for us. It is no longer the kiss of death to write a band piece. It used to be: write a band piece and your composition career is over. Better to write an orchestra piece that gets played once at a children's concert and shelved than to get a hundred performances of solid work for winds. That's changed. But we still have to keep selling ourselves — to colleagues, administrators, principals, deans. What we're doing here is not just providing entertainment at football games, though we do that well. We have to represent the artistic side of what we do. One way we've found to reach people is live streaming concerts. The reach is remarkable. I remember when we first set it up at Murchison Hall, our concert hall — I got a note from a parent who wrote, "I was so excited to see my daughter Betsy on stage." The problem with college students is that many of their parents live far away. They came to every high school concert; now the parents are three states away and we're playing on a Tuesday night. Reaching those families — letting them see their kids making great music — has been genuinely meaningful. It's also helpful for the students themselves: not just to hear, but to see themselves play. Are you convincing? Do you seem involved when you're performing? If you get bored watching yourself play, imagine how the audience feels. When I watch the video the next day, my students' intent and focus are observable as well as audible. And think about what live streaming does for repertoire: you do a world premiere on Thursday night. By Friday night, a hundred people could have watched it — conductors who might consider programming it. Instead of "can you send me a cassette?" it's there immediately. The technology is extraordinary. One thing I genuinely miss in college teaching is the absence of music parent groups. When I taught high school, our music parent association was larger than the PTA — a real and influential body. They helped when we needed administrative support, with fundraising, uniforms, all of it. Having that kind of support group is something I'd encourage high school directors to cultivate and protect.
Looking back on your career, you've balanced elite performance with deep mentorship. How do you define leadership in a musical setting — and how should young conductors begin developing that?
Whether you're a first-year teacher or new to a job after five years of experience, you have to earn respect. You can't demand it. You have to model the work ethic and preparation you want from your students. They can tell when you're not prepared. They can tell when you haven't made your mind up yet. I'm not saying you have to have everything decided — especially with new music — but you have to do your homework to the point that you can lead. Maybe not lead it the way it will happen at the concert, but you can be the person out front, moving through the process and helping them find their way. Preparation is a major part of that. And don't be afraid to let your belief system show. Next Tuesday I'm putting a piece on the stand that I've always wanted to program but never have — I'm looking at a photo in my office of Fennell, Reynolds, Nicholson, and myself at Ernst Krenek's house in Palm Springs commissioning Dream Sequence. It's not as extreme as Husa's Apotheosis of This Earth, but it's going to be a hard sell. It's not all melody and accessible rhythm. But they'll know from the very first rehearsal that I believe in it — or I wouldn't have put it on the stand. I'm going to have to win them over through the way I rehearse it. I almost always feel like the composer is in the room. So I try to treat the piece with the same respect I'd show the person. I'll stop and say: can you believe how well-written this piece by Michael Daugherty is? Or this piece by John Mackey? Look at all the work they put into this — Cindy McTee, Joan Tower, all of them — all the thought that went into how this was going to come together. We at least need to reach the point of doing justice to their work before we make any judgment about the quality or importance of the piece. We become the advocate — the composer's only voice. David Holsinger lived in our area for a while, and he talked about how he feels when he finishes a piece. He said: "I hand it over to you conductors and to the ensemble. What I'm putting on that stand is a piece of my soul and my heart." That's the responsibility you're taking on — to do your best to realize what they imagined, what their creative spirit brought into being. I always take that seriously. Sometimes you're out there alone — some groups come to a piece more easily than others. But you wait. Many teachers have had the experience of handing out a piece to kids who are frowning, unsure — and by the end, you can't get the parts out of their hands. "Can we play it again? That's my favorite piece." Players go through a real transition with music. Some pieces hit you right away; others you have to invest in before you find the value.
Looking ahead to the next generation of band directors and conductors, what excites you most about where the profession is going?
There are a couple of things — one doesn't excite me, and most everything else does. The one caution: be careful with social media and with adopting a persona of expertise before you've done the work. The work is what qualifies you. Sometimes people get to the camera too soon and start lecturing on musical topics without having built any credibility. Social media can be genuinely helpful for getting your name out — but you have to be careful about how you come across. Composers and conductors alike: some people spend an awful lot of time talking about what they do, and we're waiting for the work. At the public school level, be careful that marching band isn't the only reason you went into teaching. Corps-style bands are tremendously artistic and doing extraordinary work — the field has moved toward Broadway-level production, staging, musical performance, everything elevated. That's a great thing. But don't ignore the concert side of your work. At some point in the year, you have to turn from doing brilliant work on the field to doing equally brilliant work with your concert groups. It will only make your marching band better, and vice versa. Balance is my biggest suggestion. I only taught public school for two years, and when I did, I was the orchestra conductor, the band conductor, the jazz ensemble leader, the chamber music person, the drumline coordinator — one person doing all of it. We wrote the shows, did the charts, all of it. No one had figured out where the field was going yet. For young college teachers: your first job will probably involve many different things. The specialization I have now came after years of honing. My first college job included the percussion ensemble, percussion methods, two concert bands, jazz ensemble, woodwind chamber music, and twenty clarinet students — every semester, while working on my master's degree in the evenings. Universities without large faculties will ask you to cover many areas. Anything you can do in your preparation to broaden your abilities will serve you. And don't forget your artistic self. Don't forget how it feels to play your instrument. You're going to ask other people to play well — it matters that you can too. You have a very short time in college to build your musicianship. Four years, maybe five. If you don't continue on your instrument, that's not a lot of time to build the foundation you'll rely on for the next fifty-seven years. Take advantage of the musicians around you, the teachers you have access to. Go to concerts — hear the orchestra, the jazz ensemble, the choir. Anything that puts you in contact with the variety of ways music gets made will benefit you later.
If you could offer one guiding principle to educators just entering the field — something that sustains both excellence and humanity — what would it be?
First and foremost: remember that the people you're working with are human beings. When they're in the room with you and not sounding the way you want, they're offering you their heart and their soul — openly. You can damage that if you're not careful. Fear, anger, sarcasm — those things don't draw the best work out of people. Tim Gallwey, the author of The Inner Game of Tennis, had a line that broke into my brain when I was working with Barry Green on the Inner Game of Music project. He said he had piano lessons as a kid and dropped out early, and it always made him think: the teaching of music should be more musical. The other thing that has stayed with me comes from something Jamie Aebersold said in a lecture. He said: "You've heard the saying — you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. A teacher's job is to lead them to the water and make them thirsty." I believe people teach themselves, but with great guidance. Who taught you to ride a bike? You did. Somebody ran alongside you, held you up, and at some point let go — and you balanced it. Our role as teachers is to be there as a guide and a facilitator, to think the best of the people we work with. I assume people want to get better. If you're not passionate about your discipline, find one you are passionate about — because there's a lot of work involved in doing anything well. Stay teachable. Keep learning. Go to conferences, take notes, seek help from colleagues who seem to have great programs. If there's an incredible junior high band in your district, go watch that teacher work once a week. If you're near a great university program, go to a rehearsal now and then. Reynolds told me this story — when he first arrived at Cal State Long Beach, Jeff Reynolds, who later spent thirty-five years as a bass trombonist in the LA Philharmonic, came to him and said, "We think you ought to go take lessons." And Bob said he could have gotten mad — but Jeff was right. He asked: "Who should I take lessons from?" Jeff said: "Zubin Mehta is conducting the LA Philharmonic. Go take lessons from him." So Bob wrote to Mehta, and got a letter back from a secretary saying: "Maestro Mehta does not give lessons, but if you'd like to come to rehearsals, we can arrange that." And so Reynolds, every Friday for the rest of his time at Long Beach, drove to LA and sat in on Los Angeles Philharmonic rehearsals. He brought the scores of whatever they were working on. He sat in the back, he observed, and he learned. That story says everything. If I'm at a conference and I see that the Indiana Wind Ensemble is playing, I want to know where they're rehearsing. I want to be in the room for the dress rehearsal. I remember finding Eastman's rehearsal schedule at a conference in San Diego and sitting in on two rehearsals — just eating it up. Allstate bands: don't miss the first rehearsal. That's where they become an ensemble. Watching someone like Mallory Thompson or Michael Haithcock take a hundred and twenty players who've never played together and turn them into an ensemble in thirty minutes — often on music they've never seen — is one of the most instructive things you can witness. And conducting workshops and collegiums are being done so well right now. The wind band profession does a far better job of teaching conducting than the orchestral world. The people who teach at these workshops are open and willing to give everything away. There's no secret. Find one near you.
Professor, we appreciate everything you've shared. Now we ask all our guests a couple of standing questions. First: do you have a soapbox topic? Music, life, golf — anything.
I'll confess — I have no hobbies. Everybody is asking what I'm going to do when I retire: Do you golf? Paddleball? Fishing? It's yet to be determined. So one thing I'd say is: find something else to do besides music in your life. Develop some hobbies, or you may find yourself having to figure that out later, under less ideal circumstances. Give yourself time to be away from it — even if it's just your favorite TV series, or a dog. I have several dogs. They take my time when I'm home, and that's genuinely valuable. As for a soapbox — there's nothing that truly angers me about our profession, because I have such deep respect for people who decide to teach. I've watched teachers spend their own money — a hundred dollars a week — to have the supplies they need to teach kindergarten. Music teachers putting their own money on the line to buy a piece so they have something to play. I hope that at some point our society begins to value teachers as fully professional people, every bit as important as your doctor, dentist, or anyone else whose work requires that level of commitment — financially, emotionally, and intellectually. We need to keep building the reputation of teachers as true professionals.
Is there a book — or a few — that have inspired you in your journey? Pick one or two.
I'm looking at about two hundred books in here. A few I'd recommend without hesitation: James Jordan's The Musician's Soul — an incredible book about working with people in a positive and meaningful way. He's a choral conductor, but the principles extend everywhere. I'd also recommend Bruno Walter's Of Music and Music-Making — another person who was a deeply genuine human being with the groups he worked with. For someone who wants to strengthen their listening, Aaron Copland's What to Listen for in Music is excellent — it came from his Harvard lectures, written for lay listeners, laying out clearly how to hear melody, harmony, rhythm, texture. A real model for multi-level listening. One more: a book called The Silent Pulse by George Leonard, which deals with connection through rhythm and pulse. It's even been shown that when people make music together, their heartbeats begin to sync. There's a natural connection through pulsation that is genuinely important. Working with Evelyn Glennie over the years reinforced all of this for me, because she is profoundly deaf and counts on feeling the vibrations of music rather than hearing it in the way we hear. When she played with us before a TMEA convention, she invited children from the local deaf school to the concert and had them sit in the front row with their hands on the stage. She performed barefoot so she could feel the vibrations through the floor. She asked only that I be able to see her and she be able to see me at the marimba. We never had a problem with synchronization — not once. She even conducted me at points. It brought home everything Leonard writes about: feeling the vibrations of music alongside hearing it, making that connection to pulse. Remarkable.
We can't thank you enough for your time today. Now the most important question of all: what is your favorite time signature?
This has changed over time. The older I get, the more I appreciate 4/4. I told Michael Daugherty last year that after turning seventy I was making a rule: no more mixed meter. Done. 4/4 or 3/4, that's it. And of course he handed me a score full of nothing but mixed meter. But if I'm honest about my favorite — it's the circle with a line through it. Free time. Lincolnshire Posy — Lord Melbourne. You can never be wrong; you just play it the way you feel it.
We here at Common Time obviously think 4/4 is a great answer. Professor, it has been a genuine privilege sitting here and hearing your perspective across all of these topics. We are truly grateful. We want to honor you for everything you've given — to all of us listening, and to all the students and performers who are, in some sense, your students even if they never sat in your classroom.
I'll share one last thought, because I've been hearing a lot of "thank you" lately. Taking credit for the work of past ensembles feels like having someone compliment you on a new car. You didn't build it — you just had the good fortune to be in a position to invest in it. One person doesn't make this happen. It's the collective spirit. That's part of what we do, and part of why we love it. I'm going to miss being around young people every single day — people who are building their careers, still on the way up. You draw energy from that. When you think you're tired and you look out at your group and realize they're not tired at all — you find yourself thinking: let's go. Their spirit has supported me all these years. It really is a collective profession. And I think we're fortunate to spend our working lives with young musicians who are still positive and still striving. Facilitating that in any way you can is a wonderful way to spend your life's energy. I really appreciate you having me on. To anyone listening — I hope you're having a great year and finding interesting music to play.
And that's a wrap on today's episode. Thanks for spending part of your day with us on the Common Time Podcast. If today's conversation gave you something to think about or something to try with your students, we'd love for you to share this episode with a colleague. And you can also follow us on social media for episode clips, behind the scenes content, and updates to our upcoming guests. And if you haven't already, please be sure to subscribe so that you never miss an episode. Until next time, keep making music and keep making a difference.