The North-Central Montana Honor Band and Choir Festival takes place the Monday and Tuesday after Thanksgiving, this year on December 1-2. Several schools that have nice auditoriums take turns hosting the festival. This year Cut Bank HS is the host school.
Students in the Class B or C schools of Music Districts 6 & 7 may audition to play in this band. This area is more-or-less the Golden Triangle area of Montana. The band is made up of about 50 students from these schools. Only those who are good enough make it, and the instrumentation of the band has to be considered also, you wouldn't want a band with 40 trombones and 2 flutes! The choir is usually a little bigger than the band. Balance is one of the major factors determining the choir's size also.
Congratulations to our musicians who made it into the honor groups!!
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Honor Band
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Honor Choir
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Mariah Satterwhite - clarinet |
Allison Gates - alto II |
The directors for this year's festival are, as usual, wonderful. The choir will be led by Steve Holte from Columbia Falls. John Schuberg is the band director. He has retired as band director in the Missoula school systems. We are excited to have these awesome directors work with our students.
This festival is a great experience. The students get a chance to perform in a group with balanced instrumentation and voicing, have a different conductor to learn new things from, work on more challenging music than most small groups can hope to do, and make music with others who take it seriously. Some of these factors are hard to come by in a small school. Meeting new friends is also a benefit of a festival like this.
Use the menus at the left for our itinerary and permission slip.
Here are samples of some of our music to help the students hear how it goes.
Band:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzeqTyO5Mbs
English Folk Song Suite, 3rd movement (starts about 7 minutes 45 seconds into the video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7IWiODxqD0
Choir: