Join Festival Band & Orchestra, as well as Concert Band, Jazz Band, and Intermediate Guitar next Thursday and Friday for our Spring Concert series, Cosmic Voyage. Tickets are available here.
Festival Band & Orchestra performed at the Hutchinson Band & Orchestra Festival at Excelsior Auditorium on Tuesday. Both ensembles performed well and received a hard-earned rating of Excellent from the panel of three music adjudicators. We are very proud of them!
Join Festival Band & Orchestra, as well as Concert Band, Jazz Band, and Intermediate Guitar next Thursday and Friday for our Spring Concert series, Cosmic Voyage. Tickets are available here.
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Dear Benton Family,
Congratulations to our Festival Band & Orchestra - both ensembles received a silver rating at yesterday's festival which, according to festival organizers, means that they are in the top 20% in their category. Both ensembles performed well and I could not be more proud of them, especially all our kids who have only been playing their instrument since August. Last year, my first year at Benton, Orchestra received a silver rating while Band received a bronze rating - and that was in mid-May, two and a half months of preparation later than yesterday's festival. We are making progress! Thank you to teachers for excusing students from your classes for these performances, thank you to administrators for their support, and thank you to parents for encouraging your young musicians to practice regularly (with a tuner!) and to come to rehearsals fully prepared. As a wise musician once said, "Practice is when you learn your part. Rehearsal is when you learn everybody else's part." Thank you also to Mr. Arenzana and the parents who chaperoned yesterday. Finally, I would like to shout out our cello section, who received an outstanding musicianship award, flutist and woodwind captain Marlyne Rosa, who received an outstanding musicianship award, trumpet soloist and brass captain Izaiah Argumedo, saxophone soloist Jacob Mondaca, and our 8th-grade pianists Marina Saffold and Brigid Snell, who learned the teacher piano parts (!) and accompanied our orchestra with grace and style. We now have just a little more than a week to take the judges' comments from yesterday and try to improve in some key areas before the Hutchinson Band & Orchestra Festival on March 13th. We still have a few chaperone slots to fill for this one; please sign up here. |
Geoffrey D. Summers
Instrumental Music Director "Practice is when you learn your part. Rehearsal is when you learn everybody else's." Archives
April 2024
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