The World Adult Wind Orchestra Project

Mid EUROPE Wind Music Festival, Schladming, Austria 2025


A Philosophical Reflection and Appreciation

A Lingering Resonance of Musical Experience

An important measure of any meaningful personal experience lies in how it continues to shape our perceptions long after the moment has passed. Musical experiences, especially, exist in this reflective space between sensation and meaning. As Marshall McLuhan once observed, “the medium is the message.” In music, the medium of sound becomes both messenger and message. Words can only ever point toward the emotional and embodied reality of live musical performance. To describe music is to conceptually transpose and translate something living into another written language — a transmutation of the medium that inevitably leaves its essence behind. The musical experience of a concert performance is not a thing; it is a living process. A convergence of deeply focused present moment musical attention with its performative expression occupying ephemeral moments of acoustical space in time. A live performance immediately conveys acoustical information as vibrations Radiating sound pressure waves connecting us physically together in a transient yet direct experience. A contextual, inclusive, gestalt phenomena of collective imagination becoming a “remembrance of relationship” available for further reflection. Experiential observations of essential musical qualities and values that we can appreciate and consciously take forward into ongoing performances.  

Encountering WAWOP

In July 2025, I had the privilege of performing in the World Adult Wind Orchestra Project (WAWOP) as part of the Mid EUROPE Wind Music Festival in Schladming, Austria. This year's festival drew musicians from twenty-six countries — over 1,500 performers — including the renowned 300-member University of Michigan Marching Band. The WAWOP ensemble itself brought together sixty accomplished band musicians (over thirty-five years old) from established community orchestras in twelve nations. I learned of WAWOP when it was suggested to me by an American colleague as a potential postdoctoral case study in adult wind-band performance. The festival timing aligned with plans to visit Europe, and the generous provision of a new 5v CC tuba by the Miraphone Co. in Germany made my participation possible in traveling from Australia. The concept of performing together with musicians from around the world was both exciting and humbling as a novel opportunity to play within a shared global heritage of wind band performance. 

A Week in Schladming

Schladming’ alpine landscape provided an inspiring backdrop, offering immaculate hotel and concert facilities with an excellent festival administration that seemed effortlessly organized. Our self-selected ensemble rehearsed twice a day for a week - over thirty hours of intensive preparation - under the expert guidance of eight conductors and seven assistants. The faculty rightly expected musical excellence and we responded with consistent individual and ensemble attention and focus. The rehearsals were detailed, informative and fun. Thursday evening we performed a concert of traditional band and popular music (representing all the countries in our band ) held in the town square before (seemingly) thousands of people. A “Long Night of Music” bringing together the  bands representing 26 countries. Friday night WAWOP performed in the closing concert of the 2025 Mid Europe festival before an enthusiastic audience in a performative culmination to the week.

A Family of Sound

WAWOP is in many ways a family — both literally and metaphorically. Some musicians arrived with partners or children and many had performed together in previous Mid Europe festivals. Consequently there was an atmosphere of warmth, familiarity, and musical excitement - welcoming to the new members - that transcended international borders and languages. From the initial sounds made in the first rehearsal it was clear that this was a musical ensemble with a shared heritage. A collective fluency of musical grammar, dynamics, phrasing, and stylistic nuances - in which we easily understood one another -  in an embodied performative way through gesture, breath, and sound.  A reminder that as musicians we share a symbolic border less language, being and becoming an ensemble - a band - collaborating together to emotively communicate musical experiences of abstract thoughts non-verbally with others. An ensemble communicating musical sounds together with expressive purpose.

Musical Fulfillment

By the final performance our ensemble shifted focus from the work of rehearsals and practice to spontaneous musical connection. Instrumental technique becoming an informed embodied instinct empowering musically imaginative thoughts as symphonic sounds. Listening to the audio and video recordings some months later I hear evidence of a musically alive and beautifully balanced Symphonic ensemble presence. a collective living gestalt of potential musical expression and sonic collaboration, manifesting something grander than any one of us alone. In such a shared artistic space both musicians and audience become actually connected in the performance. Each listener will imagine their own inner music from the felt impressions and personal narratives being evoked through the performative experience. A shared dream-time of sonic resonance dissolving the space between a band on stage with its audience; a reunion of the self with another through sound. The WAWOP closing concert represents what I believe is an essential concept of Musicking: a public act of group musical communion, where idealistic artistic expectations meet interpersonal and trans-personal tensions, finding resolution, harmony, and completion as a shared collective presence of meaningful musical expression.

Philosophical Reflection

Concerts, at their best, are not competitions of skill or simply musical entertainment as spectacle; they can express potential resolutions of existential questions. Following the Mid Europe Festival in Schladming I felt an appreciation and performative resolution of artistic completion. A collective fulfillment of an idealistic, humanistic, social-cultural balance being potentially restored and renewed. WAWOP offered us a living demonstration of interpersonal cooperation and musical collaboration artistically expressing ongoing human agency and possibility being produced at a time when much of the consensus world feels socially divided and culturally fracturing. Our concert - literally and figuratively - embodied what it means to build consensus by creating balance and harmony expressing human musical agency as wellness.  Our collective participation briefly actualized a metaphysical potential of accomplished instrumental music performance: to cultivate empathy and remind us that beauty and belonging are always possible. It was an honour to play with WAWOP - contributing to our collective ensemble sound - as a somewhat rarefied and treasured experience attempting to manifest human excellence within a global musical community.

Closing

The World Adult Wind Orchestra Project reminds us that live ensemble music is not simply a personal quest for the perfection of culturally informed expressions of organized sounds. Its greatest gift is an ongoing manifestation of our personal spiritual connection to something profoundly human being created together. A shared presence of purpose and possibility offering us an experience of personal and shared completion. A simple, yet transcendent, creative activity of being and becoming richly alive together.

Now you can hear it


Then you don’t


Yet its resonance remains