Frederick Fennell, who died Tuesday at his home in Florida, was the conductor who was most responsible for making the wind ensemble a respectable musical form. He was 90.

As a young professor of conducting at the Eastman School of Music at Rochester, N.Y., in the early 1950s, Fennel reconceptualized the idea of the wind ensemble, establishing it as a kind of chamber orchestra with brass and percussion, normally utilizing a single player for each part, instead of a traditional brass band.

In a landmark series of 22 high-fidelity recordings on the Mercury label issued between 1952 and 1962, Fennel dramatically enlarged wind ensemble repertoire, which had been characterized by march music. He added the music of modern composers, including Cole Porter and George Gershwin, as well as Gustav Holst, Vaughan Williams, and Percy Grainger. Fennel was also credited with inspiring many modern composers to write for wind ensemble.

According to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Fennell sparked a “reconsideration of the wind medium, establishing a model for the 20,000 wind ensembles subsequently established in American schools.”

If Fennell seemed to have been born with a baton in his hand, he nearly was, having begun his career in music at age 7 as the drummer in a fife and bugle corps. By age 17, he was conducting at the National Music Camp at Interlochen, Mich., an association he would continue until this year through summer residencies.

In 1931, Fennell played the bass drum in the National High School Band at Interlochen when John Philip Sousa himself conducted his second-to-last march, No. 135 “The Northern Pines.” “It was a great and unforgettable occasion; seven months later Sousa was gone,” Fennell wrote in liner notes to the Dallas Wind Symphony CD “Marches I’ve Missed” (1988).

Brought to Eastman in 1933 by the school’s enthusiastic dean, Howard Hanson, Fennell enrolled in the nation’s only degree-granting percussion program. He founded a football band for the University of Rochester in his freshman year and then founded a concert band. “I wondered how we would get enough interested students to form the wind ensemble,” Fennell told the American Record Guide in 2002.”But Doctor Hanson solved that by posting a message: ‘If you are studying a reed, brass, or percussion instrument, you will play in the Eastman Wind Ensemble.'”

Fennell joined the Eastman conducting faculty in 1937. He was renowned for his dedication to teaching. At one point he taught a conducting class under water to demonstrate the perception of resistance that a conductor’s gestures should convey.

In appearance, Fennell evinced a courtly, commanding manner, sported shoulder-length hair, and was fantastically animated at the podium. He was every inch the maestro, although at 5 feet 1 inch, there weren’t many inches, and his podium was usually raised to compensate.

Fennell established the Eastman Wind Ensemble in 1952. He said that he conceived the idea while laid up with hepatitis.

Speaking to the Cleveland Plain Dealer before a concert last July, Fennell said the ensemble “played better than any bands most people heard. … The music was waiting for someone to do something with it, and we did it. Now everywhere in the world there is a wind ensemble.”

The Mercury recordings quickly began to emerge. They were unusual for the period for their high production values and most remain available, remastered and reissued on CD. The series included several eclectic touches typical of Fennell – for instance, the collection of Civil War songs included recordings of gunfire that he collected during family trips to re-enactments at the Gettysburg battlefield. The collection won him a citation and a medal from the Congressional Committee for the Centennial of the Civil War in 1961.

In 1977, the ensemble’s recording of Percy Grainger’s “Lincolnshire Posy” was selected by Stereo Review as one of the “Fifty Best Recordings of the Centenary of the Phonograph.”

In 1962, Fennell left Eastman to become associate music director of the Minneapolis Symphony, and he later became conductor-in-residence at the University of Miami, where he also founded a wind ensemble. Fennell went on to a series of guest conductorships at Cleveland, Dallas, and Tokyo, where he was principle conductor of the Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra. So esteemed were Fennell’s biennial tours of Japan that a music hall was named for him at the city of Kofu.

He continued to record regularly, and in 1978 he made the first symphonic digital recording in America, selections of Holst, Handel, and Bach with the Cleveland Symphonic Winds for the Telarc label.

Of the many awards and degrees he garnered, Fennell said he was fondest of a gold medal from Interlochen, an honorary doctorate from Eastman, and being inducted as a chief of the Kiowa Nation in 1984.

Frederick Fennell

Born July 2, 1914, at Cleveland; died December 7 at his home in Siesta Key, Fla.; survived by his wife, Elizabeth, and daughter, Cathy Fennell Martensen.