Music News

What a difference a week can make! Specifically,  Week 3 of Term 2. 

We were, as a department, primed to take our Rock Band and Senior VET Ensemble to Phoenix Community College in Ballarat for the annual Regional Music Festival. This is a fantastic, once-a-year opportunity for music students from all around the region to perform for each other in a non-competitive, super supportive environment.

And we would have absolutely loved to be part of it, but then, as it so often does at critically inconvenient times, Covid struck. I was laid out for the week, along with several senior students. Was I the ‘super-spreader’? Who knows? 

This was a major disappointment for us all as the 2 ensembles had prepared a fantastic repertoire of songs. My solution to this was to maintain the standard of our repertoire and plan our own day out, so in week 9 of term 2 we all hopped into a bus and rumbled down to my old stomping ground, Port Fairy. 

On the way there, we stopped in at Cavendish Primary to perform our first concert to their entire school. All 30 odd students, which was an intimate but rewarding experience. Cavendish Primary is a fabulous little school and incredibly welcoming of us. 

Rattling further south, we ended up in Port Fairy in time for lunch and an afternoon concert at Port Fairy Consolidated School, where yours truly spent grades 4 – 6. To say there has been some development since I departed at the end of 1991 is underplaying it a bit. 

We ran the same concert again to a brilliantly enthusiastic full school concert of about 400 kids. Conga lines were formed, teachers were boogieing on down and as a result, our performance simply lifted to another level. Before we turned around to come home, I gave a brief tour of some of the places in Port Fairy where I got up to questionable activities as a youth, but it is such a beautiful corner of our state. 

Not long before this excursion we had our annual Regional Recording Day, where we form a combined concert band of staff and students from Ballarat High, Phoenix Community College and Horsham College to record 3 pieces I had written. This is, for obvious and very self-serving reasons, my favourite day of the year. It’s brilliant fun to work with such a dedicated ensemble of music students in a situation that very few music students actually get to experience. Performing and recording the music that the bloke conducting wrote. Getting insights into the creative process and how (and why) the music they’re playing came into existence. The final mixed down version of the 3 pieces we recorded should become available to listen to later this year.

After a much needed 2 week break, it was on to the Eisteddfod on the first Friday back of term 3. It’s important that we support this great event as much as possible, and we entered a number of drama students with monologues as well as the Senior VET class, who came 2nd in their section, performing the songs “Man or a Muppet” and “Send Me On My Way” admirably. 

The year continues with performance opportunities in the school production of ‘13’, Mega Music Day for our junior music students in Stawell, VETFest in Ballarat for the Senior VET Class and the planned “Friends and Family Concert” towards the end of this term. 

My eternal thanks must go to the tireless efforts of Miss Lauren Borg and Mr. Hugh Kirne for everything they do to help get students prepared for these events, in front of and behind the scenes. It’s a great team effort! Bravo.