Category Archives: Upcoming Events

Around Town, Fundraising, OBFR 2023, Upcoming Events

Getting Ready To Play Our Heart Out: Unveiling The Upcoming Season!

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I’m excited about our upcoming concert band season! It begins with the Old Bills Fun Run on September 9th at the Jackson Elementary School fields. We’ll be playing music that is energetic and uplifting, such as “The Captain America March”, “Magnificent Seven” and “The Rocky Theme”.

The Old Bills event is when our community comes together to celebrate non-profit organizations through an outdoor activity. It’s our biggest moment to remind our donors why it’s important to give to the community band. Concerts don’t just happen! So much work goes behind the scenes to make a concert enjoyable for all audiences. We have to order new music and library supplies. Our rehearsal spaces are rented through the Center for the Arts. Some members need to borrow instruments and we have to take care of the ones we own. If you donate to our organization, it makes a difference!

I’d like to summarize the rest of our events for the season. We’ll be playing our annual Halloween Concert at Walk Festival Hall on October 28th. This is my favorite event of the season because we get to play fun and spooky music for kids in their Halloween costumes. The kids also get Halloween candy and sing along to the Addams Family. 

Our Holiday events include the Lighting of the Town Square on November 24th at Jackson Town Square and the Holiday Concert on December 16th at the Center for the Arts Theater. The Town Square event has the band playing traditional carols alongside the Jackson Hole Chorale and “Here Comes Santa Claus” as Santa arrives on a fire truck. Our Holiday Concert features classic Christmas and Hanukkah music, as well as some interesting twists on classic themes. You will also see us at the Wyoming Special Olympics opening ceremony and local schools.

Our Spring Concert is our most ambitious concert, showcasing our most challenging repertoire of the season. This season’s theme has not been decided yet, however it will have a story-like approach, taking our audiences on a musical journey. The Spring Concert is on April 28th, 2024, at the Center for the Arts Theater. 

The last part of our season is our patriotic concerts, which occur in May, June and July. We’ll be playing in two parades, Old West Days Parade (now Best of the West) and the Independence Day Parade. We also play a short show for Elkfest and the 4th of July Lion’s Club Breakfast in Town Square, an instrument petting zoo with the Grand Teton Music Festival, and wrap up our concert season with a full show at Jackson Lake Lodge on the last Saturday of June. The patriotic shows feature music that celebrates America and the brave men and women who fought, or continue to fight, for our country. 

Overall, the concert band season seems to be packed with exciting events that you won’t want to miss. Make sure to mark your calendar, and we hope to see you there!

Auf Wiedersehen!

-Zach Singer

Around Town, Press Release, Upcoming Events

Announcing our Spring Concert

Back to Basics ~ performing a pre-pandemic concert in a post-pandemic world.

Announcing our Spring Concert ~ performing a pre-pandemic concert in a post-pandemic world.

This year’s Spring Concert features a program that was planned two years ago, but was never performed. The subtitle of this concert is “Back to Basics”. Not only is the band playing a straight-forward wind ensemble concert with no obvious theme, but they’re also going back to performing a pre-pandemic concert in a post-pandemic world. 

Highlights of our upcoming concert include a piece by Percy Grainger called “Lincolnshire Posy”. Grainger was an interesting fellow and his music reflects that. He wanted music to reflect nature and have a free-flowing sense of time, which is why you’ll often hear lots of meter changes in his music. The second movement of “Lincolnshire Posy” is a great example of this free flow in time because the melody is not strictly in common time or a basic meter throughout the movement. 

Another highlight of this concert is a selection called “Alligator Alley” by Michael Daugherty. Daugherty is a modern day composer who incorporates pop culture into his music, such as “Dead Elvis” or “Metropolis Symphony” (the story of Superman). “Alligator Alley” is the nickname for a stretch of highway between Naples and Ft. Lauderdale in Florida’s Everglades National Park. Daugherty composed this music to celebrate the management of the National Park Service in preventing poachers from hunting alligators. Listen for the snap of the alligator from the whip player when you see this performance!

Announcing our Spring Concert ~ performing a pre-pandemic concert in a post-pandemic world.

One last piece of music I’d like to showcase is Shostakovich’s “Waltz No. 2”, which has been arranged for wind ensemble by Johan de Meij. You may have heard of this famous waltz in Kubrick’s movie “Eyes Wide Shut” or the holiday classic “Bad Santa”. It was composed as a part of Shostakovish’s “Suite for Variety Orchestra”. In the original orchestral version, it included alto saxophone, which is not an instrument that normally plays in orchestra. It’s great to hear Meij’s band arrangement because the sax part is now accompanied by wind instruments that match the tone quality of that instrument.

There are eight other pieces that will be performed for this year’s Spring Concert. Please come see our concert this May 1st at the Center for the Arts main stage at 4:30PM. 

Best,

Zach Singer

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Around Town, Concerts, Press Release, Upcoming Events

A Night at the Movies: The Sequel!

Free Concert! 07:00 pm – Sunday, May 05, 2019 at the Center for the Arts

True Believers,

I can’t wait for Spring Concert this year! I’ve been itching to do a movie themed concert ever since I became the conductor of the community band. The last movie themed concert performed by the band was in 2016 with Jennifer Levanduski conducting. That concert featured such classics as “Officer Krupke” from “West Side Story”, the theme from “The Godfather” and music from “Tombstone”. Just like Hollywood, I wanted to do that concert again, but bigger! This concert features only music that has been found in movie sequels, hence the title of our concert, “A Night at the Movies: The Sequel!”

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All of the music selections feature music from movies that have sequels.  Movies like “Jurassic Park”, “Superman”, “Star Wars” and “Back to the Future” have many sequels and feature their main themes in all of them. Some of the more obscure movie sequels in our concert include “Blue Danube Waltz” from “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Wizard of Oz”. Some might remember their respective sequels, “2010: The Year We Make Contact” and “Return to Oz”. “Return to Oz” might be one of my favorite sequels to a beloved classic because of it’s very dark tone and memorable scary moments. Some of our selections will feature themes that are only found in their sequels, such as “Yoda’s Theme” from “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back” and music from “Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”.

To celebrate our 30 year birthday we have invited our founding conductor, Don Cushman, to conduct a special piece.

This concert is going to be a blast! All of the musicians have been working real hard to bring the power of cinema to your ears. I can’t wait to see you at The Center Theater on Cinco De Mayo!

Excelsior!

-Zach

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