RMC Professor, Dr. Brian Coffill and the student musicians of the Randolph-Macon Ensemble have been awarded the 2020 Vytautas Marijosius Memorial Award for Orchestral Programming. This national juried award from The American Prize Foundation recognizes and highlights the shared creative musicianship of RMC’s cutting-edge instrumental ensemble.

The 2020 Marijosius Award was the result of an annual national competition focused specifically on the programming choices conductors make when selecting musical repertoire for their ensembles. Their website states that this prize “recognizes and rewards the best achievement in the unique field of orchestral programming, where the selection of repertoire by knowledgeable, creative and courageous music directors builds orchestras and audiences, educates young people and adults, and enriches the community.”

“While the award focuses specifically on ensemble directors, I am honored to share this with the musicians in the Randolph-Macon Ensemble,” says Coffill. “This recognition celebrates the first year of the Randolph-Macon Ensemble’s existence, our inaugural 2018-2019 season, which was a real testament to the students’ enthusiasm and musical flexibility. None of this, from the Marijosius Award to the group’s continued musical growth, would be possible without complete buy-in from the instrumental musicians at Randolph-Macon College.”

About the RMC Ensemble

The RMC Ensemble began as a non-academic student activity in the Fall 2018 semester and transitioned to become a credited academic class in the Spring of 2019, spurred by the foundational support of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Ensemble itself is technically classified as a “chamber orchestra,” but is actually made up of any interested campus musicians, including strings, brass, woodwinds, and percussionists, at times exhibiting the characteristics of an orchestra and at others a wind band.

Says Coffill, “This unorthodox instrumentation continues to provide the largest challenge to programming, but especially in the 2018-2019 academic year, when we were building an ensemble from scratch. In order to provide the most successful musical environment, our programming has needed to be as flexible as the group itself.” Coffill feels the key to its success has been to choose both mentally and musically stimulating pieces from a variety of eras and instrumentations, then presenting them in novel ways.

With its unique instrumentation, the RMC Ensemble often requires customized works for performance, many of which have been transcribed and arranged by Coffill and his students. Coffill was recently the recipient of an RMC Walter W. Craigie grant to transcribe and arrange music for performance with the group. Additionally, in an effort to create more opportunities to build student musicianship, each player is also part of one or more small, student-led chamber groups where collaboration, active leadership, and musicianship are not only encouraged but completely necessary for successful performance.

Memorable Performances

The 2020 Marijosius Award recognizes the 2018-2019 performance season of the RMC Ensemble, the group’s first year of existence. The musical repertoire varied from a flash-mob performance of Terry Riley’s In C to concerts anchored by Johann Sebastian Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer and François Gossec’s Symphony No. 1 in B-flat. As part of the Ensemble’s goal to push the boundaries of modern music making, the repertoire also featured works by both historical and modern composers, specifically highlighting a variety of female composers and composers of color. These inventive selections included Tania Leon’s Alegre and Jennifer Jolley’s The Ferry Crossing, Coffill’s transcriptions of works by Francesca Caccini, Dieterich Buxteheude, and Giovanni Gabrieli, student-led performances of music by Joseph Haydn, Georg Telemann, Philip Glass, and Mary Ellen Childs, and an original composition by composition and conducting student, Noah Saberhagen ’20.

“Together, the students and I believe that choosing quality repertoire is vital, not only to provide challenging and enjoyable experiences, but to expand our musical worldview,” says Coffill. “Much like the saying, ‘we are what we eat,’ musical groups really ‘are what they play.’”

About Brian Coffill

Prior to arriving at Randolph-Macon, Coffill was the assistant conductor of the Wind Orchestra and Wind Ensemble at the University of Maryland, where he earned his D.M.A. in conducting. In addition, he holds a M.M. in conducting from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he served as associate conductor for the university’s many concert and athletic bands.

Prior to his graduate studies, Coffill held positions teaching both bands and orchestras in public schools in Virginia and Maryland. Originally from Connecticut, his undergraduate degrees include a B.A. in music as well as a B.S. in education, both from the University of Connecticut.

Coffill also teaches courses in conducting, music theory, and music education at RMC.