Friday, December 16, 2005

Please suggest name for brass group

Hello Everyone, (including non-brass-group-members: I'd like your opinions too.)

The Triadelphia Brass has consisted, until quite recently, of musicians from the Triadelphia SDA church. Now we are beginning to expand our membership and, I hope, becoming capable of performing, without significant embarrasment, in churches where our members are not already known and loved individually. <grin>

There are two reasons that I feel it would be wise to distance ourselves from association with any particular congregation.
  1. In the past we have been refused use of GC space for practice purposes because we were associated with one congregation. They wanted to avoid the appearance of favoritism.
  2. I'm concerned that association with one congregation will dissuade members of other congregations from joining our group.
The Southeast Asia church, where we will be playing January 7, would like to list us as a group with a name. Do we have one? A couple of options come to mind, but I'm not sure that either is spot-on:
  1. The brass group I conducted in Atlanta was and is known as Zephyr Brass. Zephyr is a name for the west wind, which was appropriate because that group originated on the west side of Atlanta. There was talk of extending the Zephyr organization to embrace additional ensembles, potentially including brass ensembles in other cities, so I would feel comfortable using this name, at least on a temporary basis.
  2. The name Adventist Community Brass was abandonded by David Workman in favor of Washington Community Brass, which has fallen into disuse as that group has remained in hibernation. I think we could lay legitimate claim to ACB if we wanted to.
Association with a larger organization might be appropriate: the Columbia Union Conference encompasses a wide enough area that we would not need to fear excluding any potential members, I think. However, this would require agreement from whatever organization we wanted to associate ourselves with.

What do you suggest?

As always, your comments will have a longer shelf-life if you post them directly to the weblog.

Update: Here are the options I have observed so far.
  • Triadelphia Brass
  • Zephyr Brass
  • Adventist Community Brass
  • Sounds of Brass
  • Triadelphia Regional Brass
  • TriBrass
  • TriBrass.org (If Amazon.com can do it, I suppose we can too.)
  • Maryland Music Brass
  • Maryland Chamber Orchestra Brass