By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
The Bowling Green Area Community Band has an added reason to be in a celebratory mood this holiday season. The band is marking its 10th year. It was about 10 years ago that several area musicians, including then Bowling Green High band director Thom Headley and Nick Ezzone, a retired educator and conductor of the North Coast Concert Band, started meeting to discuss the formation of a community band. The ensemble was launched early the next year.
So the theme Rejoice! is doubly appropriate for the band’s upcoming concert. The Bowling Green Area Community Band and the BiG Band will perform a free concert Sunday, Dec.11, at 4 p.m. in the Bowling Green Performing Arts Center.
The concert will be conducted by Catherine Lewis, the band’s assistant director. She joined five years ago, recruited by Headley, who now directs the band.
The program took shape when she found an arrangement of the 16th century hymn “Gaudete,” which means rejoice.
In selecting repertoire, she said, “I’m always trying to find something that pushes everyone in the group.”
On this concert it is “The Eighth Candle,” a fantasy on Hanukkah themes by Steve Reisteter. After what Lewis called “a very prayerful” opening for the woodwinds, the piece shifts into a vigorous rhythmic section that has the band negotiating through different musical meters. Headley, who was conducting a recent rehearsal, was intent on making sure the band brought out all the harmonic and rhythmic subtleties of the piece.
Lewis said that’s important. Playing challenging music makes the band experience more fun for the members and lifts the musicianship of the entire band. And that translates into deeper playing on everything the band plays.
Also on the program will be arrangements of traditional fare including “Carol of the Bells,” “Greensleeves,” “Ding! Dong! Merrily on High” featuring hand bells and popular Christmas songs from the 1950s. The band will play music from the movie “The Polar Express” and conclude with Leroy Anderson’s “A Christmas Festival.”
The membership of the band has a range of skills. The ensemble has more than a dozen current or former band directors in its ranks. That includes Lewis who said she was glad to get a chance to pick up her bassoon again when she joined five years ago.
Others are avocational musicians, many who hadn’t played their instruments much or at all since they were students.
Diane Rausch Huffman, a lawyer by day and flutist with the community band, said between the time she was first chair flutist in the Napoleon High School Band, and when she joined the community band about eight years ago, the only time she’d get her flute out was around Christmas to play with family members.
“The first year was pretty much work in progress,” she said. “You forget the mind to the fingers connection isn’t quite as quick as it was” Still, “it’s really fun to have that distraction.”
She likes that the directors push the limits with some music; it expands her own musical outlook. “The music is pretty challenging, especially for a community band.”
That the band includes so many professional musicians is also a plus. “It’s really fun to be among great musicians like that.”
While the community band is “a more mature outfit” than a high school band, Huffman said, “it does take you back to that era of when you were making music and proud of it.”
That’s especially true of Dan Van Vorhis, a parole officer who plays saxophone in the band. He is a Bowling Green High graduate, and his high school band director was Headley. Despite the years that have passed since his high school days, “he’s still Mr. Headley to me.”
Headley is able to balance the varying abilities of the band from his music education peers to those like Van Vorhis who describes his own skills as “basic.”
Van Vorhis did continue playing after high school, both in the Bowling Green State University marching band and in several dance bands.
He was glad when the BiG Band, the jazz band associated with the concert band, was started several years ago by William Lake, a retired BGSU music professor.
The smaller ensemble with one player on the part really puts more focus on individual musicians. “You become a better player,” Van Vorhis said.
The BiG Band as well as a clarinet choir will perform on the holiday concert.
Joining Van Vorhis in the BiG Band is trombonist John Kloor, a web applications developer at BGSU’s Jerome Library. A 2003 BGSU graduate who played in the University Band, he missed not having a concert band to play with after graduation. When the Bowling Green ensemble took form, he joined right away.
“I always enjoyed playing trombone and being in bands,” he said. He appreciates that the directors explore new and challenging repertoire, which is more interesting than the music he played in college.
Though there’s a mix of skill levels “everybody that’s in the band is very serious about the musicality and performance.”
Van Vorhis echoed that sentiment. “You have all different ages participating and from all different walks of life … and then everyone has a common goal of preparing music so its concert ready.
