When Lew Sbrana strikes up the band this coming Sunday afternoon at Healdsburg Community Church, it will mark the end of a remarkable career for a man who has probably touched more lives through music than anyone else in Healdsburg, and perhaps the county.
For the last time, he’ll take up the baton to lead the New Horizons Band of Sonoma County though a holiday season concert of Christmas, Hanukkah and big band music. The band is the local chapter of an international organization of community bands made up of musicians 50 years and older—the sort of senior who may have played in high school or college but left his or her instrument behind as they moved into family and career.
For Sbrana, music has been his life, since even before he took his first school directorship in Boonville just after he left a stint in the Navy, where he played trumpet in the marching band. He graduated from Humboldt College (later Humboldt State University, now Cal Poly Humboldt) over 65 years ago. And though his first teaching job was in Anderson Valley, he soon moved to Healdsburg, where he taught both high school and junior high students for 31 years.
During that time, he also started a community band of adults of all ages, from high school grads to senior citizens, who rediscovered their love of performing music or who never forgot it.
“I’m pretty sure it started in 1982,” he said of the Healdsburg Community Band. “A couple people contacted me about playing Christmas music, and they told me they played for a community band down in Rohnert Park. I said, ‘Oh gosh, I wish we had one here in town.’ The woman on the other end of the phone said, ‘Why don’t you? Why don’t you start one?’ So that’s how we got off the ground.”
Though he learned other instruments during his college music studies in Arcata, his fondness for marching band music has stayed with him for decades—he turns 87 this year. His Sousa Concerts were a popular staple of the Healdsburg Community Band for years, from the stage at the Raven Theater, where a giant American flag would be revealed as the band launched into “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
Add it all up—the secondary school musicians, the community band, the New Horizons group—and it’s easy to see that Sbrana has affected the musical life of hundreds of people; it’s quite possible the number reaches into the thousands.
The New Horizons International Music Association was founded in 1991 in Rochester, NY, by Dr. Roy Ernst, who believed that playing music was good for people of any age—and it’s never too late to learn. As he wrote in 2011, “The goal of New Horizons groups is to create an entry point to group music-making for adult beginners and a comfortable re-entry point for adults who played music in school and would like to resume after long years of building careers and raising children.”
Sonoma County’s New Horizons Band was formed in 1991, and with Sbrana’s enthusiastic direction grew over the years to 80 members just before the pandemic. “We attracted a lot of better players, people who have been playing for quite a while,” he told the Tribune this week.
Santa Meets Sousa
“The band has really improved. I started them out with beginning band music. Then I robbed the junior high school library, and we started to play that. Pretty soon, I had people saying, ‘C’mon Lew, can’t we play something a little more difficult?’ It started to blossom from that.”
They are now down to a more manageable 60, all of whom will take the stage for the final time under Sbrana’s direction at 2pm on Dec 18.
“It’s been a lot of fun,” he said more than once. “But I’m at peace; I’m ready to step down.” But not before he has found someone he can, most literally, pass the baton to: former Piner High music instructor Michael Milbrath.
“He came to us right after we started up after the pandemic,” said Sbrana. “I laid it on him right away, and said, ‘Mike, would you like to do some conducting?’ He said, ‘Let me think about it.’ Then after the first rehearsal, he came up and said, ‘Sure, I’d like to do some.’”
Add it all up, and Lew Sbrana has been conducting for over 60 years. Still agile, alert and animated at 87, it seems he could go on forever. But a homeowner’s accident a couple years ago—a freak sonic squeal while trying to remove a stuck nail—wreaked havoc on his ears. “What I did was destroy some of the cilia in the upper register of my ears,” he said the audiologist told him. He could tell: The piccolos sounded tinny or flat, and in Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” that matters. A lot.
“Music has been such an important part of my life,” he said, yet he was clearly at peace with handing over the baton for the New Horizons Band, as he did years ago for the Healdsburg Community Band.
“So now, this will give my wife and I an opportunity to get on the road. We haven’t seen family members for years, and we’re looking forward to seeing them,” he said.
For Sbrana’s final concert, he’ll conduct four numbers himself. Milbrath will do a couple, and some eager band members will even try their hand. Expect a total of nine numbers, said Sbrana, with an emphasis on “Christmassy” music and, no doubt, some Sousa.
The concert is free, and Sbrana expects a big crowd, many of them probably former members of a band he once led.
“I think it’ll be packed,” he said. “It should be fun.”
New Horizons Band of Sonoma County will perform on Sunday, Dec. 18, at 2pm. Healdsburg Community Church is at 1100 University Ave. Admission is free.
Wow! Googling around for people I remembered from Boonville, I came across this article. Mr. Sbrana was my band teacher in 5th grade, my first year in band. My mom always told me it was Lew Sbrana who advised her to have take at least six months of piano lessons before starting on trombone. I now regret stopping the lessons at that six-month mark, wish I could play piano now, but it definitely gave me a good start understanding music, and on playing trombone through high school.
Congratulations, Mr. Sbrana, on a fine, long career, and thank you.