Concert Band’s Busy Autumn

The band have already been very busy around the village this autumn, holding an open rehearsal at Heathlands in September and a primary school workshop (again at Heathlands) in October.  Coming up as well we have a concert in the Church of St Mary in November, and of course we’ll be playing for the village Remembrance Service.

Workshop

Surprisingly the workshop was the first one we’ve held at Heathlands, as historically the school musicians were encouraged to join the band by its founder Sid Cooper who taught music there. These days our approach to maintaining a wide range of ages in the band is to hold regular primary school workshops, which have proven to be an incredibly popular and fun way for us to encourage tomorrow’s musicians. We were delighted to see so many players from Heathlands join us for the workshop and perform a wonderful  “mini concert” at the end of it, and to see such enthusiasm for music at the school. The final word goes to somebody at the workshop…

The band made everyone feel very welcome indeed – what a fun afternoon!

Concerts & Charities

At the time of writing this, we’re looking forward to performing our “1966 And All That” concert in the village.  This will be our first concert on home turf for a couple of years. This time we’ll be raising money for Children In Need to add to the £35,000 that we’ve raised for local & national charities since we started recording the amounts a dozen years ago. That amount includes:

• almost £10,000 for St Helena Hospice, not including the amounts we raised for them before our records began,
• £4000 we’ve raised over the years for the village Church and its charities, including at 2004’s impromptu “Last Night Of The Proms In A Barn” when the heavens opened unexpectedly.

Christmas

As always we’ll end the year with a concert featuring the wonderful music of Christmas.  This year we are  at the beautiful St Peter ad Vincula Church in Coggeshall again on Saturday 10th December at 7:30pm. The concert will include music from Vaughan-Williams, Irving Berlin, Leroy Anderson (Sleigh Ride), The Beach Boys (Little Saint Nick) and many others. We’ll also be performing a selection of carols, some to sing to, and some beautiful arrangements that are perfect for listening to. We hope you’ll join us for a lovely evening of festive music in a lovely setting.

As always, details on all of our events are available on the band website www.wbcb.org.  New players of any age are always welcome to come along on Friday evenings at Heathlands School, or our next Open Rehearsal on 20th January.  We look forward to seeing you at our Christmas Concert, and we wish you a Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year.