A landscape, friendship, and a premiere come together
LSM Low Brass Faculty Member Dr. Benjamin Yates with Composer Katherine Bergman
This summer, when LSM students performed Loess Hills during the 2026 Festival Band concert, they were premiering a new arrangement shaped by a Midwestern landscape and years of musical collaboration.
Loess Hills is the second movement of composer Katherine Bergman’s three-movement trombone concerto Prairiescapes. The July 16 concert marked the premiere of the concert band transcription, with Bergman present and LSM faculty member Dr. Benjamin Yates serving as soloist.
LSM Executive and Artistic Director Thomas Bandar views a premiere as a chance for students to experience their role in the ongoing life of music.
“At LSM, we are committed to preserving and renewing the rich musical heritage of classical and sacred music,” Bandar said. “That means honoring the great music that has been handed down to us, but it also means preparing the next generation to be active participants in the future of music. Experiences like this, working with a living composer and premiering a new transcription, give students a firsthand understanding of what it means to interpret and share new music. That is part of a larger conversation on how we steward musical traditions and help carry them forward.”
The students spent several weeks rehearsing the piece under the direction of Dr. Jeffrey Scott Doebler.
“It’s been really fun to bring new music to LSM and Boe Chapel,” Yates said. “I’ve gotten to talk about what this movement is and why it’s special to me.”
Focusing on Iowa landscapes was a natural fit, as Bergman and Yates both grew up in Cedar Falls.
“Benjamin and I both grew up in Cedar Falls, Iowa,” Bergman said. “We went to high school together and played in band. We went separate ways and both became musicians beyond high school and studied in college and now made careers in music.”
Yates commissioned Bergman to write Prairiescapes for trombone and orchestra in 2020. Since then, the concerto has evolved to include a piano reduction and, most recently, a concert band version.
For Yates, returning to the piece at LSM was an opportunity to revisit a work that has developed over time.
“It’s great to have Katherine here as the composer of this piece,” Yates said. “It’s really fun to have worked on this project at several different stages. And re-experiencing that music over the course of four or five years has been great.”
The concerto explores three distinctive Iowa landscapes: the tallgrass prairie of central Iowa, the Loess Hills along Iowa’s western border, and the Driftless Region of northeast Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
“The Loess Hills are called Loess Hills because the soil that they’re made up of is called loess, and it is a very fine, almost dusty soil,” Bergman said.
Bergman used blowing instrumental sounds to evoke wind moving soil through the air, followed by heavier chords representing it settling into hills. Later, rising and falling musical passages suggest movement through the landscape.
Yates added that the trombone’s long, beautiful notes suggest “the person experiencing the hills” and convey a sense of “awe and interest.”
Bergman’s presence at the Festival Week performance added another dimension to the experience. Yates said it was meaningful for students to meet the person who created the music they had been preparing.
“It’s also really great that Katherine gets to be here so that the students get to know who this composer is, and this is a real person who is living and has written this music, come up with this artistic idea, and now they get to present the idea to an audience, which is really neat.”
For Bergman, having the opportunity to share the music with young musicians was meaningful in its own right. She hoped students would “feel the music,” understand more about the landscape represented in it, and appreciate the experience of having the composer in the room for their performance.
For Yates, the project also brought together several parts of his own life.
“This project with the movement Loess Hills is really important to me because it combines many different communities for myself,” he said. “It combines my professional community, the LSM community, my work with Katherine Bergman as a composer, and also friendships.”
He hopes this experience stays with the students.
“I’m able to tie in all these ideas of music, faith, and community, and present something that’s a really important work — that’s interesting to the students,” he said. “It’s about a landscape where a lot of them are from in the Midwest, and maybe many of them haven’t visited before, but maybe they’ll be excited to visit this place and have a different understanding of it from the music and the art we’ve been able to present with it.”
About Lutheran Summer Music
Founded in 1981, Lutheran Summer Music provides high-quality musical training and performance opportunities for young musicians while celebrating the rich musical heritage of the Lutheran church. During this immersive four-week program on a Lutheran college campus, students grow as musicians and form a strong community. Thousands of young musicians have experienced LSM, many of whom have gone on to careers and vocations shaped by their musical and faith experiences.