The W.D. Packard Concert Band will celebrate its 70th anniversary with the debut of a newly commissioned work.

Jerry Ascione, a 1975 Dana School of Music graduate who spent 31 years as a musician, composer and arranger with the U.S. Navy bands, composed “We, Are Packard” and will conduct the work at Sunday’s concert at Packard Music Hall.

Ascione has written several pieces for the band and knows the ensemble well.

“I went to college with a lot of those folks,” Ascione said.

“I know pretty much everybody.”

He drew upon those connections as he was writing.

The first part was inspired by the death of Stephen L. Gage, a retired Dana School of Music professor who was conductor of the W.D. Packard Band from 2012 until his death in 2023.

“I wanted to give a nod to what Steve had imparted to the band,” Ascione said.

“He was a tremendous musician. So the first part of what I wrote is sort of an elegy.”

For the middle portion, he drew inspiration from Percy Grainger, a 20th century composer whose work was influenced by British, Irish and Scottish folk music.

He was a favorite of Gage’s, and the Packard Band has played several of his works.

“I wrote a song called ‘Through Heather and Thistle,’ which kind of reflected the countryside of Scotland,” Ascione said. “My wife and I were there not too awfully long ago, and I thought this would really speak well to the influences that I had going through college and with the Packard band.”

The third part is a jazzy section written in two keys, first in C and then in F#.

“The Packard band is very, very unique,” he said. “It is a tremendous classically-oriented concert band, but they also play jazz arrangements incredibly well, and I’ve done a lot of vocal arrangements for them and some jazz arrangements of various composers. I wanted to spotlight that.”

The title “We, Are Packard” was inspired by something he heard when he returned to the Mahoning Valley in May for the Stephen L. Gage Legacy Concert at Stambaugh Auditorium. Ascione penned a piece for that concert. At some point during the performance, one of the speakers said something like, “Youngstown State — this is what we are,” and the phrasing stuck in Ascione’s mind.

“In ‘We, Are Packard,’ the ‘we’ refers to everybody in the band, but it also refers to the multi-faceted musical abilities of the band — classical, marches, jazz, vocals, everything,” he said. “So I use the word ‘we’ to encompass the people and the styles.”

Thomas Groth, executive director of the Packard band, said, “I love his writing. It traces the musical history of Packard, the different things that we’ve done and played and the different groups we have within the band. I really like it. I think it’s going to be a great piece and people will enjoy it.”

Technology allows a composer to simulate what a piece of music will sound like using digital re-creations of the different instruments, but nothing compares to hearing it played by live musicians, which Ascione is looking forward to when he leads the band through it during rehearsal and in concert.

“I always say at a concert, I hold up a piece of music and say, ‘You can’t see these, but they’re little, tiny dots on this page. Those notes on the page, in and of themselves, mean nothing until you have human beings like the tremendous musicians on the stage turn those little dots into music,'” Ascione said. “That’s when it really happens.”

“We, Are Packard” will be the penultimate selection of the concert, which will be conducted by Galen S. Karriker. Groth said he tried to assemble a program that captured the legacy of both Packard and the Mahoning Valley for the 70th anniversary concert.

To honor the Packard legacy, the band will play the fanfare “A Vision and A Dream,” which the band commissioned from composer Ryan Nowlin in 2008, as well as Roy M. Miller’s “A Salute to Packard” march. Also included is the “Anniversary” march by B.D. Gilliland, who was W.D. Packard’s choice to lead the band his trust funded. Gilliland died in 1931, 24 years before Packard’s dream of a concert band and a music hall where it could play became a reality.

The Valley’s steel mill history is represented by Wayne Samskar’s “Study in Steel” and Charles S. Belsterling’s “March of the Steel Men.” Julie Giroux’s “Italian Rhapsody” and David Bennett’s arrangement of the “Clarinet Polka” recognizes the different ethnic groups that settled here. The polka will showcase the band’s clarinet section — Al Colella, Rachel Cline, Erica Mapus Michelle Monigold, Cathy Ogram, Emily Onufrak, Ruth Rea, Marissa Smith and Becky Yoho.

The Packard Trumpet Quartet — director John Veneskey and Lou Pisani, Joe Yaksich and Gabriella Sandy — will be featured throughout the concert playing from the music hall’s balcony.

The quartet will perform the Opening Fanfare, also written by Ascione, as well as “Amazing Grace,” the Belsterling piece and “Down by the Riverside,” which Groth has renamed “Down by the (Mahoning) Riverside” to be in keeping with the local theme of the program.

Packard Music Hall also served as the home for Kenley Players for many years, and that theater legacy is represented by the overture “Broadway Show Stoppers.”

The concert will close with Patrick Roszell’s “Drive,” which will commemorate the 1902 cross country trek by a Packard automobile. It will be accompanied by a video created by Daniel Carioti, director of the Big Band Sound of Packard and the Packard Dixieland Band.

“In 2 minutes and 15 seconds, we’re going to take them from San Francisco to New York with video and music,” Groth said.