Founding Board of Directors
Our Board of Directors
The Detroit Concert Band is governed by a founding board that brings together some of the most respected voices in American concert band music — conductors, composers, educators, publishers, and one man who played on this very stage under Leonard Smith himself.
Anthony Messina Founding Director
Anthony Messina came to the Detroit Concert Band the way most meaningful things happen — through a combination of deep personal history and the refusal to let something important disappear. A former high school and college band director who led ensembles of up to 400 musicians, Anthony's graduate thesis centered on the Detroit Concert Band's Sousa Bicentennial Collection. He knows this organization's history not as a casual admirer but as someone who has spent years inside its archives. He founded the revival in 2026, incorporated the nonprofit, joined AFM Local 5, assembled the board, and is leading the effort to return professional concert band music to Belle Isle. He lives in Metro Detroit, where he also works as a Mortgage Loan Consultant — a career he approaches with the same discipline and care for people that shaped his years on the conductor's podium.
John Pasquale Board Director
Dr. John D. Pasquale is an internationally recognized American and Italian conductor, lecturer, author, and educator. He holds the Donald R. Shepherd Professorship in Conducting at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, where he serves as Director of the Michigan Marching and Athletic Bands and Associate Director of University Bands. His research advances contemporary rehearsal pedagogy, with a particular focus on the development of aural analysis skills for conductors, and he is co-author of The Directed Listening Model: A Rehearsal Guide For Ensemble Musicianship, widely adopted as a foundational text in undergraduate and graduate curricula worldwide. He has conducted, cliniced, and lectured across North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and has provided instructional leadership for some of the most elite marching ensembles in the country. He brings to the Detroit Concert Band's board both the prestige of one of America's great university band programs and a deep personal investment in what professional concert band performance can mean to a community.
Kevin Wilt Board Director
Kevin Wilt composes music for a variety of ensembles that balances sophistication with accessibility, and experimentation with solid craftsmanship. He is Associate Professor of Music, Composer-in-Residence, and Chair of the Department of Music at Florida Atlantic University — a career that has taken him far from where it began, which was in Detroit. He holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts in Composition from Michigan State University and his Bachelor's degree in Music Composition and Theory from Wayne State University in Detroit. His compositions have been performed by orchestras and ensembles across the world, and he earned a Michigan Emmy Award nomination for Best Musical Composition for his work in film. He describes himself as a classical music evangelist — composing music to introduce new audiences to the joy, drama, and adventure of classical music. There is no better description for what the Detroit Concert Band exists to do, and no better temperament for the person helping to guide it.
Brand Ulrich Board Director
Brandon Ulrich is Director of Orchestra and Choirs at Stony Creek High School in Rochester, Michigan — which makes him the board's most direct connection to the students, families, and communities of Metro Detroit that the Detroit Concert Band exists to serve. A working educator in the trenches of Michigan music education, Brandon brings to the board the practical knowledge of what it means to build musical audiences from the ground up, to inspire young people to listen and perform, and to sustain a music program in a community year after year. He understands that the Detroit Concert Band's mission is not abstract — it is about real people, on a real stage, in a city that deserves to hear great music.
Andrew Glover Board Director
There is a word for what Andrew Glover's presence on this board represents, and that word is continuity. In college, Glover joined the Detroit Concert Band, conducted by Leonard B. Smith, and performed for four seasons on euphonium. He participated in numerous recording sessions with the DCB, including ten phonograph records of Gems of the Concert Band and a documentary film soundtrack. He did not merely witness the Detroit Concert Band at its height — he was part of it. He sat in that section, under that baton, on that stage on Belle Isle. He is the living link between what the band was and what it is becoming again.
Since joining the C. L. Barnhouse Company in 1998 and being appointed President and CEO in 2022, Glover has built a career as composer, arranger, editor, and publisher — with over 200 band works to his name, performed and recorded by ensembles worldwide. An enthusiast and advocate for classic concert band music and history, he oversees Barnhouse's 135-year archive of publications and historical memorabilia and is frequently involved in band history research projects. C. L. Barnhouse, founded in 1886, is one of the oldest and most respected band music publishers in America — and its catalog includes recordings by the Detroit Concert Band itself.
Andrew Glover does not need to be persuaded that the Detroit Concert Band matters. He already knows. He was there.
The History
In 1946, Leonard B. Smith stood on the stage of the Jerome H. Remick Bandshell on Belle Isle and raised his baton for the first time as conductor and founder of the Detroit Concert Band. What followed was 45 years of summer evenings that Detroiters of a certain generation remember the way others remember a smell or a photograph — vividly, and with something that resembles longing.
Smith was not a typical bandleader. He had served as principal trumpet of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and performed as cornet soloist with Edwin Franko Goldman's legendary band in New York — the gold standard of American concert band performance at the time. He was the trumpet voice behind the Lone Ranger's iconic fanfare. He was, by any measure, one of the great virtuosos of his era. And he chose to give the best years of his conducting life to the people of Detroit, on a stage in a public park, for free.
At its height, the Detroit Concert Band performed before audiences of 10,000 or more. It recorded 31 LP albums — including, famously, the complete set of all 116 known Sousa marches, a feat matched by no other ensemble at the time. It was recognized nationally as the premier civilian concert band in America. Musicians who played under Smith spoke of the experience as the standard against which everything else was measured.
Smith led the band until 1991. He passed away in 2002.
For more than thirty years, the Remick Bandshell has stood without its band. The stage is still there (and with the help of the MoBIG organization, working toward its own restoration). The summer evenings are still there. The music has been waiting.
We are bringing it back.