In the days before the symphony orchestra came to dominate the American musical scene, there was the wind band.

That’s how most Americans in the most of the 19th and the first part of the 20th century came to learn the big orchestral works, tunes from the hottest operas of the time, and fancy treatments of tunes they had known all their lives.

Next Sunday (April 10), a new ensemble debuts in South Florida that should demonstrate the power of that traditional repertoire, as well as the health of music currently being written for it.

The Miami Wind Symphony, formed last year by Rodester Brandon (pictured above), chief of the music, dance and theater departments at Miami-Dade College, contains 50 members. Although there are several prominent wind ensembles nationwide associated with universities, this independent wind symphony is one of only two in the United States (the other is the Dallas Wind Symphony).

Allan Tavss, who founded the Greater Miami Symphonic Band more than 30 years ago, is executive director of the new wind ensemble, and says the new ensemble is partly designed to help train band musicians in schools, where budgets for music have been cut across the country.

“The largest group of students who do extracurricular activity, has to do with wind band,” Tavss said. “So we want to give them the opportunity to continue that … This is the kind of music that people love. When they go to a concert for the first time, they always come back for a second time.”

Tavss said the Wind Symphony’s initial budget is $500,000, and that it plans to be the “Starbucks of wind bands” by offering concerts in different venues: Saturday nights, they will play at the South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center in Cutler Bay, and on Sunday afternoons at the Gusman Center downtown.

The key ingredient in the new band is passion, he said. While amateur community bands such as Tavss’ own Greater Miami Symphonic Band offers its own social attractions, and while the best college ensembles offer technically spotless performances, a professional group such as the Miami Wind Symphony is about expert musicians tackling terrific music, he said.

“You get the emotion that comes with professional musicians who really know what they’re doing, just as you hear when you go to a concert by the Cleveland Orchestra or the New York Philharmonic,” he said.

Although things are changing somewhat these days, the symphony orchestra repertoire tends to be conservative, with an emphasis – often for box office reasons – on tried-and-true masterpieces that reliably bring in the crowds. Wind ensembles in the United States are quite different. Rare is the wind concert that doesn’t contain much new music, and for some composers, concentrating on the band repertoire makes for a solid, interesting career.

One of those composers is Frank Ticheli, who teaches at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music. His Blue Shades will be on the program, along with the Vientos y Tangos of Michael Gandolfi and the Armenian Dances (Part II) of the late, great Alfred Reed, who taught for decades at the University of Miami.

Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man opens the program, and news anchor Calvin Hughes of WPLG-TV will be the narrator for the same composer’s A Lincoln Portrait. There also will be the standard flashy solos typical of this genre, with trumpeter Brian Neal doing the Carnival of Venice variations by Herbert L. Clarke, the legendary cornet soloist of the Sousa Band, and Rafael Mendez’s arrangement of the Spanish folksong La Virgen de la Macarena.

Rounding out the program is the La Forza del Destino overture of Verdi, Gustav Holst’s popular Suite in E-flat, and the George Washington Bicentennial March of Sousa, one of the March King’s last marches, premiered not long before he died.

Like most classical music organizations these days, outreach is a big part of its mission, and an introductory video shows its members going into the schools and interacting with band students and performing in offshoot ensembles such as brass and woodwind quintets.

As a guy who looks back on his days as a French horn player in high school and college with fondness, I’m already a fan of anyone who wants to set up a professional wind ensemble. Concert bands are the native symphonic ensembles of the United States, and these bands have a large and growing repertory of fine American music that help show how broad classical music culture is in this country.

The Miami Wind Symphony debuts at 4 p.m. Sunday, April 10, at the Olympia Theater, which is in the Gusman Center on Flagler Street. Tickets are $25, $15 for students, and there are higher prices for those interested in preferred seating and a post-concert reception featuring longtime Miami-Dade band director Melvin Baker, who’s getting a lifetime achievement award at the concert. Call 514-9463 or visit www.miaWS.org for more information.