School of Music releases two student recorded albums
Texas A&M University-Kingsville School of Music recently released two albums within the last year, becoming one of the few schools to record and release albums in the country.
The School of Music’s Jazz Combo released an album titled “Dendrology,” a name coming from a piece composed by Joseph Hernandez who played piano in the album.
“Dendrology” was an album mostly composed and fully recorded by students.
“It’s important because it gives them a solid record of what they did here… It’s preserved for all of time… that shows exactly in a very high quality way, what they worked on and the album is almost entirely student composition,” Director of Jazz Studies and Assistant Professor of Saxophone Dr. Thomas Zinninger said.
The “Dendrology” album recording has a few yet-to-be released songs following the ology theme.
“It’s rare to produce an album I think of that high quality especially for undergrad students studying jazz at an institution of higher learning like this. I think some of that rivals professional level quality playing,” Zinninger said.
The idea comes from the state of the art recording studio built within the School of Music’s new building that opened in 2020.
“Out of the Blue,” a trumpet ensemble recorded album released in November.
“Back when I was their age you always wanted to get recordings of live performances because the live performance was the best, it had the best energy, it had the best performance, even though it might not be totally clean, it was the one we kind of wanted to emulate,” Associate Professor of Trumpet and Jazz Dr. Kyle Millsap said.
After receiving the song compositions, Millsap wanted to be the first premiere recording for the compositions before the songs were released to others.
“Now because of how much recording has come out over that time the live performance is criticized against a recorded perfected recorded product. By getting themselves to the level of being able to perform in the recording studio with a microphone in your face, different kinds of nerves musicians refer to as tape nerves… you get yourself to that level and then the live performance in some ways becomes easier,” Millsap said.
Millsap said there’s only one other university in the country that has recorded a student ensemble like this, which helps build notoriety for the music program.
“It feels awesome to have our music out there for everyone to hear,” Brandon O’Donohue said in a university press realese.
O’Donohue is a master’s student in Music Performance who recorded on the “Out of the Blue” album.
“It also is a little bit intimidating because there are so many great trumpet albums out there with ours. It is still an honor to be a part of it,” he told the university.
The school plans to continue recording with their students releasing an album every year or two.
“We have students who are willing to be pushed out of their comfort zone into something new,” Millsap said.
The albums “Dendrology“ and “Out of the Blue” can be found on Spotify.
