Roland Moehlmann

From Wind Repertory Project
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Biography

Roland L. Moehlmann (5 March 1907, Madison, Wisc. – January 1972, Cedar Rapids, Iowa) was an American composer, arranger, and bandleader.

Moehlmann studied music in Madison, Wisconsin, and at the Hochschule fur Musik in Berlin, Germany.

Moehlmann was the founding director of Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Municipal Band, and led the ensemble from 1951 to 1967. He came to Cedar Rapids in 1929 as the second full-time instrumental music teacher hired by the Cedar Rapids Community School District. In the early 1930s he began writing a series of band transcriptions on J.S. Bach's preludes and fugues. He dedicated his arrangement of Bach's Prelude & Fugue in G Minor to Ms. Alice Inskeep, who was one of the original founding members of the influential Music Educators National Conference. She was also a Cedar Rapids Public School Music Supervisor and a faculty member at Coe College for forty years at the beginning of the 20th century. The success and fame from these transcriptions earned him the name Bach-Moehlmann in the national band community.

In the 1950s he composed a number of pieces for high school sight-reading band contests. The Municipal Band would often proofread his green ink, copper plate proof sheets by playing through and looking for errors in the music. In the 1960s he transcribed and published band arrangements of music by composers such as Mozart and Dvorak. He also wrote many band accompaniments for soloists who performed with the Cedar Rapids Municipal Band. Today, around 125 of his unpublished manuscripts exist. Many of these have been rented out and performed all over the United States.


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