Summer Preparations

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted. While a lot of work has gone into preparing for the school year, there are a lot of loose ends that need to be tied before I post in greater detail.

Band Camp
We don’t normally have much in the summer. When I first started teaching I’d offer lessons and spend countless hours at school teaching, organizing, and planning. I’m just too old for that now!

After calling around to some directors that have brought groups to Midwest in the past, I found that most held some sort of summer band either in the form of a camp, or weekly rehearsals. For some, it was something they regularly do, and their Midwest preparation was fitted into their normal summer.

Our camp is being modeled after the University of Illinois Summer Youth Music program. I had the privilege of guest conducting one of the junior bands there last summer and was blown away by the experience the kids received. It’s going to be a great week, with rehearsals, sectionals, masterclasses, chamber music, and a concert at the end of the five days.

While I’ll try to post even more specifics later, my basic hope for the camp is to be fun, set the tone and work ethic for the year, and hopefully we’ll be able to cram about a month’s worth of instruction and development into five days.

Fundraising
Other than planning our August camp, our parent group has been meeting to discuss how we’re going to raise funds to pay for our various expenses related to performing at Midwest. The concert program is the largest of these, but our band camp won’t be cheap either.

I’ve learned a lot by visiting the websites of the other performing organizations to see how they plan on raising money for their performances. The Instrumentalist Midwest Profiles of the last separate years were quite helpful as well. We’re taking several of their ideas to incorporate into our campaign. Instead of doing several new activities, we’ve added a little, but will invest most of our energy expanding some of our existing fundraisers.

I’ve got a whole post on our fundraising efforts already finished. It’s just waiting on a couple details to be set before I publish it.

Program
After school let out, I took a couple week break from thinking about our program. I really wish I could say our program is completely set and ready to submit to the Midwest Office for approval, but I’m just not completely happy with it yet. Most of the program is set, with two spots a bit in limbo.

We’ve commissioned a work to premier as the first piece on our program. I got a little bit nervous when I read Greg Snyder’s interview in the Instrumentalist this month. He mentions that commissioning a work his first time around was stressful. He wasn’t specific as to why, though, so I’m trying not to imagine nightmare scenarios in my head. We’ve commissioned this composer before, he writes very well at our level, and I’m sure that what we receive will be exactly what we’re looking for.

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