There’s a moment in Princess Leia’s theme from Star Wars that most listeners feel without ever quite understanding why. The melody drifts, searches, and never quite settles. Because it’s not supposed to, Vanderbilt Wind Symphony conductor Thomas Verrier will tell you. Leia’s home planet is destroyed. She was adopted. She belongs nowhere. So John Williams wrote her a theme that never lands on the tonic note. It never arrives.
“If you’re playing that theme,” Verrier explains, “you can’t ever have a feeling of arrival.”
That kind of insight, transforming a beloved film score into a music history lesson, is exactly what Verrier has brought to Vanderbilt Blair School of Music for years. And on Thursday, April 9 he’ll bring it one final time, at least for now. This concert, A Celebration of Youth, will be his last before taking a medical leave in the fall to pursue occupational and speech therapies.
The program is anything but a quiet farewell. Verrier has built it around a concept he describes as “youthful rebellion.” The evening opens with Mendelssohn’s Overture for Winds, followed by Percy Grainger’s Children’s March, led by guest conductor Douglas Morin. Don’t let the title fool you. Verrier notes that Grainger himself was “a very rebellious character,” and the score is full of interruptions and unexpected turns that match that spirit.
Two students take center stage in the program’s heart. Madalyn Bloomberg, winner of the ensemble’s Concerto Competition, performs Scott McAlister’s “Black Dog,” a clarinet solo inspired in part by the 1971 Led Zeppelin hit of the same name. “It’s kind of rock-and-roll based,” Verrier says. “She sounds great.”
Then comes a world premiere of sorts: a new work by composition student Matthew Drasnin, who won the Wind Symphony’s Call for Scores competition. In an unusual twist, an audience member will be invited onstage to help determine how the piece unfolds in real time. “It’s going to be very interesting,” Verrier says with a smile.
Rounding out the program is Hymn for the Innocent by Julie Giroux, a moment of beauty and stillness amid the rebellion, before the concert closes with John Williams’ iconic music from Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope.
Verrier is quick to push back on any impulse to treat the Williams piece as a crowd-pleasing afterthought. He describes the score as “exquisitely constructed,” packed with leitmotifs, themes tied not just to characters but to emotional situations, drawing on Holst, Elgar, and Wagner, among others. “It’s kind of a music history lesson in and of itself,” he says. More practically, he sees it as essential preparation for students entering professional orchestras, where film music is an increasingly standard part of the repertoire.
“Anybody who’s coming out of here and going to play in a major orchestra needs to understand how to do this,” he says. “It’s going to be part of their life.”
That commitment to student preparation is a thread running through A Celebration of Youth, and perhaps through Verrier’s tenure itself. This is a program built to show what his students can do: compose, compete, perform, and surprise.
⭐ The Vanderbilt Wind Symphony’s presentation of A Celebration of Youth is Thursday, April 9, 7:30 p.m. in Ingram Hall. Blair School of Music is located at 2400 Blakemore Avenue.
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