By Coral Gables Gazette staff
The Greater Miami Symphonic Band closes its 47th season Sunday with a concert that is equal parts celebration and farewell. Robert Longfield — A Celebration Concert takes place May 17 at 6 p.m. at Maurice Gusman Concert Hall on the University of Miami campus.
A career built in South Florida
Robert Longfield is an American composer, arranger, conductor, and educator who earned degrees from the University of Michigan and the University of Miami, where he studied under Alfred Reed, one of the most prolific and frequently performed composers for concert band in American history. That lineage — from Reed’s expansive symphonic vision to Longfield’s own catalog — runs through Sunday’s program like a thread.
His career as a music educator spanned 42 years in the public schools of Michigan and Florida, including 27 years as band and orchestra director at Miami Palmetto Senior High School, where he also chaired the Visual and Performing Arts Department. His accolades include the Michigan School Band and Orchestra Association’s Teacher of the Year award and the Mr. Holland Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences — recognition that places him among the most honored music educators in South Florida’s recent history.
Longfield has served as Music Director and Conductor of the Greater Miami Symphonic Band since 1999, leading the ensemble for more than 25 years through regular concert seasons featuring diverse repertoire, including world premieres of works commissioned for the group. Miami-Dade County officially recognized April 5, 2006 as Robert Longfield Day in honor of his contributions.
The program
Sunday’s concert will draw from the full arc of Longfield’s creative life. The program features a selection of his own compositions and arrangements alongside works that have been audience favorites throughout his tenure — from sweeping symphonic moments to intimate, lyrical passages.
As a composer, Longfield has more than one hundred publications to his credit, with compositions and arrangements performed and recorded by bands throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan. His compositional style is characterized by accessibility without simplicity — works that make complex musical ideas available to a wide range of ensembles while retaining genuine expressive depth. His arrangements of major orchestral works for concert band, including adaptations of Stravinsky, Copland, and Gershwin, have become standard repertoire in educational programs across the country.
For audiences familiar with the Greater Miami Symphonic Band’s recent seasons, the program will carry the particular pleasure of recognition — pieces heard before, now understood as part of a larger body of work by the man who shaped the ensemble’s sound for a quarter century.
The ensemble and the hall
The Greater Miami Symphonic Band is a community ensemble dedicated to preserving the American band tradition, presenting regular concert seasons at venues across South Florida. Its home for major concerts, Maurice Gusman Concert Hall, is among the finest acoustical spaces in Miami-Dade County — an intimate 600-seat hall on the University of Miami campus whose warm, precise sound suits the concert band literature particularly well. For a farewell program built around the expressive range of Longfield’s compositions, from broad fanfare to quiet lyricism, the hall’s responsiveness will be an asset.
What the evening represents
Farewell concerts carry a particular kind of weight. They ask an audience to hold two things simultaneously: the pleasure of the music in the room and the awareness that this particular configuration — this conductor, this ensemble, this body of work performed together — will not recur. Sunday’s program is designed to honor that occasion without heaviness, to send Longfield off with music rather than ceremony.
The 47th season of the Greater Miami Symphonic Band ends where it began — in Coral Gables, in a concert hall that has hosted the ensemble through decades of programming, with a conductor whose connection to this community is measured not in seasons but in generations of students, musicians, and listeners.
What to know
Robert Longfield — A Celebration Concert takes place Sunday, May 17, at 6 p.m. at Maurice Gusman Concert Hall, 1314 Miller Drive, Coral Gables. Tickets are $20 for adults and $5 for students. Tickets are available at gmsb.org or by calling 305-273-7687. Valet parking and PayByPhone parking are available.
