Omar Thomas (b. 1984) began life in Brooklyn as the son of Guyanese parents. After completing an undergraduate music education degree at James Madison University, he set off for Boston and the New England Conservatory, where he earned a Master of Music degree in jazz composition. While completing this program, at age 23, he was appointed to the faculty of the Berklee College of Music to teach harmony. He now teaches at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. He studied with Ken Schaphorst, Frank Carlberg, and Maria Schneider. His music of all sorts (original jazz charts, arrangements, and classical pieces) has been winning awards for years, including the first ever William Revelli Composition Prize to be awarded to an African-American composer (for 2018’s Come Sunday). He is a relatively recent arrival to the wind band world: his first piece in the genre was 2016’s Of Our New Day Begun. But he has continued to write path-breaking pieces for bands (5 of them at this writing), and has joined up with other young wind band composers in the Blue Dot Collective to promote and publish his award-winning music. Read more about him at his website, the University of Texas, Berklee College of Music, and the Wind Repertory Project.

Thomas is hardly the first composer to create a wind band version of Shenandoah: he joins the company of Frank Ticheli, Robert Sheldon, Donald Grantham, and Pierre LaPlante, to name a few. But his approach to the famous folk tune, arranged (he insists) in 2019, may be the most original. In his own words (from his website):

Shenandoah is one of the most well-known and beloved Americana folk songs. Originally a river song detailing the lives and journeys of fur traders canoeing down the Missouri River, the symbolism of this culturally-significant melody has been expanded to include its geographic namesake – an area of the eastern United States that encompasses West Virginia and a good portion of the western part of Virginia – and various parks, rivers, counties, and academic institutions found within.

Back in May of 2018, after hearing a really lovely duo arrangement of Shenandoah while adjudicating a music competition in Minneapolis, I asked myself, after hearing so many versions of this iconic and historic song, how would I set it differently? I thought about it and thought about it and thought about it, and before I realized it, I had composed and assembled just about all of this arrangement in my head by assigning bass notes to the melody and filling in the harmony in my head afterwards. I would intermittently check myself on the piano to make sure what I was imagining worked, and ended up changing almost nothing at all from what I’d heard in my mind’s ear.

This arrangement recalls the beauty of Shenandoah Valley, not bathed in golden sunlight, but blanketed by low-hanging clouds and experiencing intermittent periods of heavy rainfall (created with a combination of percussion textures, generated both on instruments and from the body). There are a few musical moments where the sun attempts to pierce through the clouds, but ultimately the rains win out. This arrangement of Shenandoah is at times mysterious, somewhat ominous, constantly introspective, and deeply soulful.

Visit his website to learn more about him, this piece, and the consortium of ensembles and people, led by the University of Maryland, that commissioned this piece from him.

Here it is in live performance:

Want to see what the Shenandoah Valley is like? Check out this tourism page. Also, to learn more about the song that is this piece’s source material, read about it at Wikipedia. To whet your appetite, here’s just one sung version: