Photo By Lt.Cmdr. Jim Remington | Senior Master Sgt. Eric A. Sabatino, harp soloist for The United States Air Force...... read more read more
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WASHINGTON - An elite and award-winning Australian band, Eltham High School Symphonic Band, which hails from the city of Eltham, a suburb of Melbourne, joined The United States Air Force Band for a combined concert band clinic and individual musical performances to kick off its two-week U.S. tour Dec. 8.
“Today is a fantastic opportunity, one of those rare times we can come together as two nations in a common language of music that we’re hearing here today, seeing it work effortlessly across any distance and just harmonizing together,” said Royal Australian Air Force Air Commodore Gary Martin, who serves as the air attaché at the Australian Embassy in Washington, “which is exactly what we try to do with our military relationships on a one-to-one basis throughout all of the American armed forces, whether working together within a coalition, separately or supporting one another.”
During its three-hour visit to Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling (JBAB), the 54-member Eltham High School Symphonic Band sat side-by-side with The U.S. Air Force Band, during which time the two participated in a mentorship clinic before each separately rehearsed and recorded musical selections of their own choosing for a video produced by the Air Force Band’s production staff. The Air Force Band subsequently webcast the video, featuring a total of four pieces (two performed by each band) during the next morning on Australia-time for Eltham’s audience back home.
Kate Scalzo, assistant to the principal at Eltham High and mother of recently-graduated flutist Lauren Scalzo, said she first watched it on her laptop at 5:30 a.m. because that’s when she first received it from Lauren. She added that many of Lauren’s friends and family also watched it because the link was sent so far and wide.
“I walked into work and our Principal Vincent Sicari was sitting at his desk with the performance playing; half of the school were doing the same thing. It was wonderful to see our kids holding their own with such a band as the U.S. Air Force Band. They are all such lovely young people and have worked so hard. The students in the symphonic band have truly created a family environment, and each one of them will tell you it's a unique experience. I know that even as Lauren moves into university life, she will always talk about her time in 'Sympho,’” said Kate Scalzo.
Putting the pieces in place
Initial contact between the bands came from Rick Plummer, conductor of the Eltham High School Symphonic Band and director of music at the school. Plummer reached out to the Air Force Band’s director of Education Outreach, Master Sgt. Bryce Bunner, after the Eltham High School Band had been selected to perform at the prestigious annual Midwest Clinic International Band and Orchestra Conference in Chicago. Plummer knew that including a visit to The United States Air Force Band along with a performance role at the Midwest Clinic would make for a motivating, exciting and memorable trip for current band members and would be in keeping with Eltham’s proud legacy.
“This particular ensemble has come to America twice before, and both times they’ve gone to the Midwest Clinic in Chicago. That’s why we’re coming this time of year, because we’re ending up at the Midwest Clinic in Chicago. Once we locked that in, we thought let’s do a tour this year,” Plummer said. “We felt that this group of students was particularly committed to the program, quite talented, and before they left school it was time to take them on a tour.”
With a tour in mind, Plummer knew that the Midwest Clinic would mark the end of the tour because it finishes just days before Christmas. He also knew that the band would need a solid start to launch it.
“We thought, the one ensemble that we really want to work with is The United States Air Force Band,” Plummer said. “They’re kind of our heroes.”
Bunner, originally from Evansville, Indiana, who heads up the Air Force Band’s education outreach remembers Plummer’s call.
“So this Australian band contacted me out of the blue last spring and said they had applied to the Midwest Band and Orchestra Clinic, which is a very prestigious conference to which secondary and elementary school ensembles can apply. Only a very small percentage of applicant bands actually get in. They had applied and they had been accepted,” he said. “And so now they were building this U.S. tour around it. And they wanted to build the beginning of this U.S. tour around us, coming in and having a performance and then at the end they would culminate at Midwest.”
A natural fit for The U.S. Air Force Band
The visit and collaboration were a natural fit for the Air Force Band because of its role and interest in mentoring student musicians from the elementary to collegiate levels and its long-standing relationship with the Australian air attaché.
The band calls its mentorship program Advancing Innovation through Music (AIM), which it formally established in the spring of 2012.
“The band used to do lots of education outreach, but we decided, with our commander, to make it more of a formal program and to really expand our outreach opportunities in 2012. That’s part of our Department of Defense mandated mission from the secretary of defense, to promote outreach in schools. And we’ve really started doing some amazing things leading us to this Australian event,” said Bunner, the program director within the band.
Through AIM, the Air Force Band conducts outreach with bands in the national capital region (NCR), but also well beyond. In some instances, the band makes contact with school bands and musicians while already on tour across the United States and around the world. While at these destinations beyond the NCR on Air Force missions, the band will take time to visit and work with students in the area. Other times student bands visit the Air Force Band’s hangar on JBAB, as Eltham did, while in Washington. These visits can range from a tour of the band’s headquarters to clinics focused on specific ensemble types (e.g. jazz, concert band, or choir) or on individual instruments or instrument families.
“Our AIM program is an overwhelming success. In the last year, we’ve gone to more than 70 schools and reached more than 15,000 students and educators. It’s just a perfect Air Force program that gives us face-to-face contact with students for no cost to the Air Force, and it’s also just a wonderful experience not just for the students who are featured but for our folks as well,” said Bunner.
Since the Air Force Band had been performing at the Royal Australian Air Force’s Washington ball for as long as he can remember, Bunner thought to invite the Australian air attaché.
“Bryce was our hero here, getting us involved with the whole process. This has also been passed down to our embassy’s cultural area and they can distribute the link for this performance to give our people back home the opportunity to listen and get our ambassador on board with it,” said Martin. “We have an enduring relationship from the embassy side with The U.S. Air Force Band because we get together every May when we hold our ball in Washington, D.C., which is attended far and wide. We always use the services of the Air Force Band, and the Strolling Strings is our favorite. They’re generally in there every year with us and that’s been going on for about 18 years.”
Musical selections
With both the Air Force Band locked in at the front end and the Midwest Clinic on the back, Plummer said, he and the band began to work on the music and the remainder of the tour dates that would fall in between.
The band began preparing for this tour almost 18 months ago according to guest conductor Ingrid Martin. The specific works they performed for the Air Force Band and their audience back home began in July and September 2014. For the occasion the band chose one piece by an Australian composer and the other by an American.
The Australian composer the band chose, Taran Carter, is a former student at Eltham High School. He and a number of his siblings have been in Eltham’s music program over a long period of time. The band’s selection was an unusual and dramatic score titled “Moondani: Black” and features unconventional instrumentation. The piece is a reflection on Carter’s experience dealing with violent bushfires that came through the local area of Eltham High School in 2009, fires to which he lost his family home.
“So this work was a response to that experience,” explained guest conductor Ingrid Martin. “Taran is very interesting in terms of how he uses color. That’s one of the things that’s so unusual about that piece. There are a lot of extended techniques for the ensemble: Using radios in the middle of the piece, asking percussionists to bow cymbals, and things like that to create a lot of soundscape. These ideas really evoke the Australian bush sounds that were around and the sounds to which these students are accustomed to waking up to, or hearing when they come to band rehearsal at 7:30 in the morning. So that’s sort of a little bit about why that piece sounds the way it does. We wanted to bring something Australian and this is something so unusual and interesting.”
Of Carter’s “Moodani,” Plummer said there are many different things happening musically and emotionally in the piece, “from a beautiful serene section in the middle, where everything strips back and we hear some very, very basic writing in the sense there’s not a lot going on, but the way that it’s put together sounds really beautiful because of how sparse it is. So really it shifts the music back to just a few notes. It’s amazing how they combine and create emotion.”
The second piece the band performed is written by American composer Scott McAllister titled, “Black Dog” which features a rock ‘n’ roll-style clarinet solo.
“‘Black Dog’ is a really famous Led Zeppelin tune, and the idea of this piece is the clarinetist, the soloist, is meant to be depicting a culmination between a lead singer at the front of a heavy metal band, and I also hear a little shred guitar in it. So basically the clarinetist is the rock star and the band is the rest of the band backing her,” said Plummer.
Ingrid Martin said that “Black Dog” was chosen in part to feature one of the band’s most talented members, clarinetist Alessandra Prunotto.
“It’s really kind of rock ‘n’ roll for concert band. Even though it has this kind of rock ‘n’ roll flavor to the way the music is constructed and the sound of it, I believe the background of it is, ‘Black Dog’ is referring to that idea of depression as it is being a euphemism for depression and moving through it. I know that has been a theme in a number of Scott McAllister’s pieces. I think it has some link to Frank Zappa as well,” said Martin.
Eltham High School Symphonic Band’s exceptionalism
Listening to Eltham High School’s Symphonic Band for even a few moments reveals that this group has something very special going on; not many high school bands sound quite like this. They are an exceptional band performing at a professional caliber.
Eltham High School is part of the Eltham public school system. Students in the town’s music program begin learning their instruments at 12 or 13 years old. The Eltham High School Symphonic Band starts in seventh grade and goes through 12th, with the youngest band member being 14 and the oldest 18. Among its 54 members, approximately 20 graduated one month ago when the Australian school year came to an end and their summer vacation began. But all of the band’s recent alumni stayed with the band beyond graduation for what will be prove to be a memorable finish to their high school experience culminating with their performances at the Midwest Clinic.
But even before this moment, these students have achieved several noteworthy successes. And before any of them were students, in fact before any of them were born, their predecessors in the same band were achieving great things and building the foundations of what they have become today. The Eltham High School Symphonic Band began to pave the way for outstanding high school wind ensembles in Australia. The previous director, from whom Plummer took over, steadily built the program over more than 20 years.
“At the time, nothing like it existed. Now there are three or four really outstanding ensembles like this in Victoria. In previous times the band has had streaks of 20 years straight where they’ve won the Victoria state championships,” said Plummer. “Most recently we won it in 2012 and 2013, and this year we came second to another great high school band, Blackburn High School in Victoria. So there is a strong tradition of this ensemble competing well at the Royal South Street Eisteddfod.”
When asked what makes his student musicians and their band exceptional, Plummer credited the culture of the whole program as being the main reason.
“Most of them don’t start learning their instrument until they get to the school, which is when they’re about 12 or 13. And they start in group lessons of say four students per group. And if they stick the path and they practice regularly and just work with their great teachers they should get into the symphonic band,” Plummer said. “So every ensemble that you move through you have to audition. The audition is just to make sure that the student has done what the teachers have asked them to do.”
The school has teachers who teach all of the instruments in the band, teachers who are specialists not just in teaching the instrument but also at knowing how to get the students through the program so that one day they can achieve these sort of high standards on display at an Eltham High School Symphonic Band performance.
“And then, of course, we have some outstanding students, like Alessandra, who you heard today perform the solo. There are half a dozen or so of those students who are truly, truly talented and may want to pursue a career or future in music. But the general group of them are just normal kids who work really hard for this ensemble,” said Plummer.
While Eltham High is a public school with a music program that gets lots of support, the children’s families must pay for their lessons, and they must pay for them to go on this tour.
“The school does what it can to support us with buying some equipment. But I’m thankful that we’ve got an active parent group called ‘The Friends of Music Group,’ who do a lot of fundraisers throughout the year to raise some money to help buy some of the bigger instruments. Most recently they bought a grand piano for the school; we never had a grand piano before,” said Plummer.
Plummer added that he feels lucky that the music program is led by the school and the school council, rather than the state government. Together, the school and the school council determine what role music plays in the school and they strongly support the music program.
Guest conductor Ingrid Martin explained that the band is different from many U.S. high school bands in that band is an extracurricular activity, so it does not run during class time.
“This ensemble rehearses only twice a week outside of normal school hours and has a music camp once a year for a weekend and this is the result,” she said. “There are competitions that run in Melbourne. One is the Royal South Street Eisteddfod competitions and another is the Victorian School of Music Festival. And the band has a very long history of being successful in those competitions.”
The reason the school’s music leadership brings the students to these competitions, Plummer said, is to give the students a goal toward which they can work and to inspire them to play together musically within a sophisticated repertoire.
“From that if we’re successful [placing in a competition], we are, and if not, it’s still been a great journey. We are very lucky that we have been very successful over the years with the program.”
A musical sidebar of harp and flute
At the conclusion of Eltham’s visit with the band, while the other musicians departed for a quick lunch, two of the band’s recently-graduated seniors chose to stay behind and give up half of their lunch time for a smaller, more personal mini-clinic with Senior Master Sgt. Eric A. Sabatino, harp soloist for the Concert Band, originally from New York.
The two flutists, Anna Telfer and Lauren Scalzo, both recent alumni of Eltham High School, hope to continue their music education at the university level. Each has auditioned for the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and are awaiting word on their acceptance.
About her experience working with Sabatino and his harp for just a half hour, Telfer said, “We’ve never had the experience of playing with harp before and it’s pretty rare to be able to do that. He helped us with phrasing and expressiveness.”
Bunner, the Air Force Band’s AIM director, said Sabatino is one of the top musicians and mentors his band has.
“They couldn’t get enough. Eric is super; he just wanted to give as much as he could because they wanted to take some time to play with him. Flute and harp are complementary instruments. There are a lot of pieces written for that combination. And he was able to use a little bit of their lunch break which I thought was special,” Bunner added.
Scalzo, the other flutist, said she was especially grateful for her experience with the entire Air Force Band and the short time they were able to work with Sabatino.
“I’ve looking forward to this for two years now. And this day has been the main thing I wanted to do on this tour so, being able to work with the U.S. Air Force Band has been amazing and a fantastic experience,” said Scalzo.
Not all work and no play
After 20 hours of travel, the Eltham High School Symphonic Band touched down in Washington, and with a day to spare before its morning with the Air Force Band, the students and conductors managed to put in a solid day of touring Sunday starting around 9:30 a.m., in spite of their jet lag. They went to the Smithsonian Institute’s National Air and Space Museum, Natural History Museum, the White House, the Washington Monument and nearby memorials.
Plummer said that, as Australians, they obviously understand a lot of American history through their very close cultural relationship with the United States and access to its media. But even beyond that, as a band, he and his students perform many American compositions to include a selection by Mark Camphouse, professor of music at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia titled “A Movement for Rosa.” The piece, which the Eltham band studied and prepared, honors civil rights heroine Rosa Parks. The composition has three sections to represent her life. The first covers her early years from her 1919 birth in Tuskegee, Alabama, until her marriage in the 1930s. The second reflects a period of racial strife in Montgomery, where she and so many others were seeking social equality. The third section finishes depicting Park’s quiet strength and serenity with some final moments of dissonance at the very end which serve as a commentary and warning on racism’s lingering presence in society.
After all of the preparation on “A Movement for Rosa,” and then the anticipation of working on it firsthand with the composer at George Mason University by the next afternoon, Plummer said it made the experience of seeing the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial all the richer.
“To be able to go to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial yesterday was really great because we were able to connect what some of that means to the American people and to what we’re going to be doing with the music,” said Plummer. “And then also to see all those places you want to have on your bucket list, like the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, all that sort of stuff that we see quite often, but have never seen in the flesh, was amazing.”
The band then completed its night with a family-style Italian dinner at Carmine’s before turning in for a good night’s rest.
Between the Air Force Band and the Midwest Clinic
After leaving the Air Force Band, Eltham’s students had a quick lunch at the food court in JBAB’s Base Exchange before heading on for another clinic at nearby George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. There the band played with the university’s director of music, Dr. Dennis M. Layendecker, retired colonel and former commander of The United States Air Force Band from 2002 to 2009, as well as the previously mentioned Professor of Music Mark Camphouse.
From there, Eltham’s band headed north to New York City for approximately a week, where it participated in a number of workshops and performances in New York, even working with American composer, big-band leader and Grammy Award-winner Maria Schneider who recently collaborated with David Bowie on his new single “Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime).”
Eltham’s young musicians also worked with composer Michael Markowski in Brooklyn on his 2011 composition, “As Midnight on a Moonless Night,” and later performed it in concert with the Brooklyn Wind Symphony.
The Midwest Clinic
The band performed in two separate events at its final stop in Chicago. Their guest conductor Ingrid Martin gave a presentation on Australian band repertoire. Together she and Eltham’s musicians served as Australian cultural and musical ambassadors to the clinic’s attendees. Additionally, Australian composer and music educator Jodie Blackshaw, a good friend of the Eltham, also used them as the demo group for her education workshop.
“Ingrid Martin, she’s put together a clinic of Australian repertoire. The idea of that clinic is we’re wanting to expose some of the great writers from Australia that maybe the Americans haven’t come across. Everyone knows Percy Grainger, and everyone knows a few of the more well-known composers that have been writing repertoire for the last 10 to 15 years, but we’ve tried to bring some of the composers that perhaps the American ensembles and band directors don’t know,” said Plummer.
“For mine it’s mainly a survey of Australian repertoire,” said Martin. “So we’ll be playing excerpts from a number of different Australian works, and Jodie’s is somewhat unconventional so there’ll be kids running around with drumsticks hitting chairs and helping the band directors who are coming to the clinics understand some different ways in which they can teach in their band room.”
Plummer said that Blackshaw’s work is starting to get noticed and played in America, but beyond her music she has so much important knowledge to convey about how to teach music to young musicians.
“Jodie is really passionate about drawing a connection with the students and understanding a lot of different musical concepts and how that goes within their understanding before they even touch their instruments. So we’re doing a clinic with her that’s based on alternative ways to rehearse your band. So there’s a lot of interaction. They’ve got drumsticks at one stage they’re using, all sorts of stuff, and then eventually at some point they’ll pick up their instruments and play some music at the end,” Plumer said.
And with the conclusion of these performances, this particular collection of Eltham High School Symphonic Band members will reach its proud end.
Outside of their performance role, the Midwest Clinic will give all of the band members an opportunity to see several world-class ensembles in one place.
“Once we finish this tour,” Plummer said, “this particular ensemble as it is composed with this group of students is finished.”
For Eltham’s recent graduates, they will always have the memory of how it felt to go out on a high note.
| Date Taken: | 12.20.2014 |
| Date Posted: | 12.20.2014 19:58 |
| Story ID: | 150861 |
| Location: | WASHINGTON, DC, US |
| Hometown: | ELTHAM, VIC, AU |
| Hometown: | EVANSVILLE, IN, US |
| Hometown: | NEW YORK, NY, US |
| Web Views: | 632 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
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