As part of Youth Art Month, Great Falls Public Schools (GFPS) is hosting this year’s AA Band Festival. It will be held at the C.M. Russell High School auditorium on Tuesday, March 5th. This year, the three high schools performing are Great Falls High School, C.M. Russell High School, and Helena Capital High School. The three bands combined will feature about 130 students performing in the concert.
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Dusty Molyneaux, music and arts supervisor for GFPS, said, “The purpose of this is for our students in Great Falls to interact with other band students from across the state; when we are able to travel and go to other communities, that's a really good experience for us, and it's also nice to bring guests in and be a host as well.”
“It’s a massive learning experience every year,” said Duane Zehr, band director at Capital High School. “We’re really excited to prepare for all this big literature and with a large band.”
The AA Band Festival is an opportunity for students from different high schools to learn from one another about how they work and share with each other why music is important to them. It allows them to meet other students their age, who share their passion.
“It’s easy as band directors and band students in programs to kind of get [isolated] in our own little rooms and so events like this bring us out and we get to see what other people are doing and how other people are working, how different conductors are working,” Zehr said. “Just meeting the other students, I think, is the coolest thing for my students.”
Each school’s band is going to be featured individually on Tuesday night during the concert as well as the large, combined performance of all three bands.
The concert will be at 7pm on Tuesday, March 5th, in the C.M. Russell auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.
