Dr. Patricia Backhaus is a trumpeter, conductor, composer, author, teacher and adjudicator. As a trumpet soloist she has performed in Germany, Switzerland, England and Finland. In addition she has performed all across the USA. Many of these performances are collaborations with keyboardist, Valerie Floeter. The Backhaus-Floeter Duo – known as In His Service – has recorded 6 CDs together. Much of their repertoire is original music composed by Valerie.
Pat has had a varied career as a conductor leading several Milwaukee area community groups including the Milwaukee Metropolitan Community Concert Band (a group that she was instrumental in forming), Milwaukee Concert Band, Brookfield Civic Band, Shorewood Concert Band and Milwaukee Festival Brass.
She led The Studio Orchestra in Madison, Wisconsin for a number of years and then their partner organization, Dimensions in Sound, a 17 piece big band. Both groups performed around the greater Madison area with Dimensions in Sound playing several times for the return of the Badger Honor Flights at Dane County Airport.
During the pandemic she invited seven brass players to read through any brass music they could find to keep their lips in shape and to boost their moral. These weekly rehearsals took place – socially distanced – in her driveway. This group is still together performing under the name Sine Nomine Brass. Sine Nomine means “without name” since they don’t have a name. They have grown to ten brass players and play for worship services in local Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) churches.
In 2024 they were a featured recital group at the WELS National Conference on Worship, Music and the Arts. In 2025 they will appear in concert at Trinity Lutheran Church in Osceola, Wisconsin as well as First Evangelical Lutheran Church in Racine, Wisconsin for their summer concert series First Fridays.
Pat has been the guest conductor of several High School Honor Bands in Wisconsin. She has also been privileged to conduct the premier band of the US Coast Guard Band in New London, Connecticut and the Fort Sheridan Army Band.
She has been the guest conductor in Germany for the Bi-annual Kirchen Music Tag festival of the Evangelisch Frei Kirche three times since 2002.
Composing and arranging has always been a part of her full identity as a musician. She has over 200 pieces published. (See list of works below). Her most recent composition is for concert band entitled Fanfare & Polychrome.
Now entering 50+ years of teaching trumpet she greatly enjoys this aspect of her career. She began to teach when her first band director, Ralph Bisek, asked her to work with two of his students. There were no special programs available in the school district at that time. One student was learning challenged and the other was a young girl who had many physical challenges. Though Pat wasn’t very good when she started to teach, she lavished one-on-one time with students who would not get this time in school. Her former students play in major symphony orchestras, on Broadway, in jazz clubs in the USA and Europe. They teach school bands, are on award winning university faculties and are Grammy award winning record producers. She is proud of all of them and is especially thrilled with the former students who play in community groups and for their churches.
While working on her Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Minnesota she became interested in the history of early American band music, especially the cornet players. This led to the discovery of many lady cornet players. Having grown up in an era where it was considered unusual for a girl to play the trumpet she found it fascinating that there were hundreds of band women in the 1800s. She began to tell their stories, starting with Helen May Butler: The Female Sousa.
Pat formed a historically costumed all-female band to replicate Helen May Butler’s band. They performed the exact arrangements of music that Butler had performed. She was a presenter on the topic of women in band music at several conferences across the USA and in Austria and England.
To better share her research, she began writing Concert Band Mysteries with Recipes. To date there are six titles published:
- The Last Rose of Summer
- Royal Pageant
- The Golf Club
- Yellow Flames
- The New Woman
- The Tourist Club
These books follow the fictional Betsy Ross All-lady Silver Cornet Band. She identifies real women musicians from the late 1890s and identifies them through footnotes creating an historical record of these women musicians where none existed before. Through this process she hopes to encourage further research into their lives and contributions to American music.
Other books by Pat include:
- Dinners with Paul – a tribute to band research scholar, Paul Bierley.
- Building a Brass group for your Lutheran Congregation
Pat enjoys working with students at all levels. She has been an adjudicator of bands throughout Wisconsin and in the Chicago area and has judged for WSMA and other solo/ensemble contest festivals.
