House lights dim, noise evaporates into silence, a rustle of paper, a restrained cough. Anticipation and apprehension are consistent, titanium tightly clutched, inhale, exhale and tread the historic oak floor to receive the applause.
“It’s funny,” said Roxanne Haskill, ETSU’s director of bands. “My mother said that I always used to stand in front of the stereo … and what ever they put on, I’d conduct with a wooden spoon from the kitchen, and stand there for a long time and wave the thing back and forth.”
Today, Haskill waves a baton, a conductor’s baton made of titanium. And with that slender instrument made of Earth’s natural element, she creates the sounds of music.
“It’s [conducting] a feeling almost like no other feeling,” Haskill said. “Almost like magic, because when you’re on the podium, you have the complete attention of that ensemble.”
Before Haskill started conducting in an official capacity, she was on the other side of the baton playing clarinet from fourth grade through her sophomore year in college, when she switched to French horn.
“When I was a young kid,” Haskill said, “a high school band came into our elementary school and gave a performance, and I fell in love immediately with the horn.
“… I told my parents that’s what I wanted to play, but they said, ‘We really don’t want you to play the horn, because girls will get funny looking lips and the guys won’t want to kiss you.’ ”
So, for 11 years Haskill played the clarinet, until one day she borrowed a French horn from a fellow student at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, practiced all weekend and taught herself Mozart’s First Horn Concerto. “I just fell in love with it,” Haskill said. “I switched from clarinet to French horn and have played it ever since, 30 years on the French horn.”
Now, at ETSU, Haskill teaches French horn and a conducting class, in addition to directing and conducting the ETSU Wind Ensemble and Concert Band.
“I became infatuated with conducting,” Haskill said, “and not wanting to be a bad conductor or a bad horn player, I put the horn away.
“What really fired me up though were my undergraduate studies at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. The conductor there of the Wind Ensemble, a guy named Willis Traphagan, a phenomenal conductor … just inspired me to want to be like him, a great conductor.”
Haskill took the usual undergraduate conducting courses, but after graduation, at 24 while living in Boston, found herself without an ensemble to conduct. “So I started thinking,” Haskill said, “… if I don’t win the $1 million lottery or something to buy my own wind ensemble … so I started thinking about the military as the only way to have a band, to learn how to be a conductor.
“I like to think of myself as a staunch patriot, but I looked at the military as a vehicle to get on the podium.”
Haskill succeeded in her patriotic pursuits. Not only did she have a distinguished career in the United States Marine Corps, she became the first woman conductor of a true Marine Band.
“I was a [horn] player for seven years,” Haskill said, “and I put in for the officer’s program and was selected. Even submitting the package to be considered to become an officer was controversial, because there were no female conductors in the Marine Corps, at that point.”
Haskill recalls walking down a hallway while attending the Armed Forces School of Music, when a captain, “who will remain anonymous,” she said, stopped her and said that he didn’t think that she should be submitting a package to become a Marine band officer, “because John Phillip Sousa didn’t wear a skirt.”
“I respected his opinion,” Haskill said, “and that he was entitled to it, and that she knew where he was coming from and – I never saw him again.”
In World War II, the Marines boasted an all-woman band, she said, but it was very controversial. “It was dissolved or decommissioned or something after World War II,” Haskill said, “and since then, there were not any female conductors in the Marine Corps, until I was selected.”
In 1985, 40 years after World War II ended, Haskill indeed became the first woman assigned to conduct a Marine Band.
She has since flown more than 30,000 miles a year with the Marine Corps and stood next to presidents, yet her greatest “moment of honor” was a day Haskill calls “a sad day.”
“I was the conductor of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing Band, El Toro, Calif.,” Haskill said, “for the state funeral of former President Richard Nixon.”
Despite all the military and musical protocol – state, national and foreign dignitaries, press and worldwide TV coverage – Haskill simply said, “I was serving my country.”
She is also the first woman to hold a similar position at ETSU, gaining the respect of students and faculty alike with her non-autocratic style of conducting.
“What has impressed me the most about Haskill,” David Bubsey, ETSU’s trombone instructor, said, “is not only her conducting, but the years of musical experience she brings to the program.”
Her students, too, are amassing experience – quickly. Haskill has the ETSU Wind Ensemble practicing six hours a week for its annual spring concert, Music of the Dance, March 31 at 7:30 p.m. in the Martha Street Culp Auditorium of D.P. Culp University Center.
Music for the evening includes “Riverdance,” “Clear Track Polka,” John Phillip Sousa’s “Washington Post” and “Three Dances Episodes” from “On the Town” by Leonard Bernstein.
“I strive to make music every day with the wind ensemble or concert band” Haskill said, “so there’s that magical moment that lifts everybody out of their chair, and they just want to scream they’re so excited.
“If you talk to a lot of professionals, it’s rare that a conductor who’s in front of them truly makes music with them.
“It [making music] happens here normally a few times a week, when I’m front of them, for just a short time they’ll be so excited after they finish playing a portion of something, that I can’t get them to stop talking.”
Haskill calls that feeling of making music with a band or orchestra “kinetic.”
“Conducting is not so much a feeling of power,” Haskill said, “but like there’s a physical connection between you and the musicians, you can almost see and feel. Of course it’s not there it’s in your mind.”
That connection, whether visible or not, between the conductor and musician is music.
“There you are playing a piece of music that’s very emotional,” Haskill said, “whether it’s slow or very fast and energetic, it’s almost primal. The feeling that you have goes right back down into your roots, if you’re really making the music.”
While Haskill demands that the students practice, in her professional career she has never resorted to the tactics reminiscent of the Toscanini tirades.
“I’ve never broken a baton because of poor playing,” Haskill said. “In the Marine Corps my habit was to simply close my score, take my baton, turn to the concertmaster and say, ‘fix the problem.’ “
When it comes to poor or messy playing and the ETSU Wind Ensemble or Concert Band, Haskill uses a somewhat different approach.
“If a [instrument] section is not sounding proper, if it’s messy, it’s just not together,” Haskill said. “I may go down through that section, person by person and ask them to play.
“The idea of that is not to put a student on the spot, but the idea of that is to put the student on the spot. This is often the most effective way to fix a problem section.”
Haskill has not had to resort to this technique yet, she said, because the students are working extremely hard this semester to produce the best music possible for their growing audience.
“Haskill knows the music literature very well,” Bubsey said. “She knows what to pull out, what to challenge the students with and to what level they can perform.”
The little girl who conducted her parents’ stereo with a wooden spoon (she still has that spoon), and grew up in the same area as Leonard Bernstein, made history, while serving her country in the Marine Corps.
Roxanne Haskill has inspired and motivated the members of the ETSU Wind Ensemble and Concert Band with “her style” of conducting.
“She is my mentor,” said Kimberly Correl, a senior and music education major. “I want to be just like her.”
So, what does her style of conducting feel like?
“Confident, well rehearsed and in control.” Haskill said. “But most important, very musical – I hope.

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