Thursday 26th August saw the band back at work, preparing for another exiciting year ahead! 

First on the list is the preparation for a concert in the Delany Suite, in Irvinestown.  This is a new venue for us and we're all looking forward to playing there.  It's on Mill St, the road out of Irvinestown for Enniskillen and is reminiscent of the old ballroom of the Royal Arms Hotel in Omagh in that it's got a balcony area and is of similar size.

Our visitors that night are the Erne Valley Ensemble, who will co-host the function.  They are a small classical music ensemble based across the border and run by Cormac McCann.

Our programme that night will feature a lot of new music including a few pieces we'll play jointly.  The exact running order and programme fine tuning will take place at a residential workshop both ourselves and Erne Valley are attending.

This year we also welcome some new members, mainly on flute, clarinet and alto sax and even though our membership is fast approaching 50 members, we are very keen to hear from brass players, especially tuba players.  Please note that if you play any brass instrument and are interested in moving to tuba, we would also like to hear from you and do remember that we have in our stock, two excellent tubas waiting for someone to play them!

At the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York, on 17 December 2009, Sir James broke the existing world record for the largest number of flutes ever assembled into one ensemble.  The previous record was a mere 1975…but 1989 gathered together in the Big Apple as a centrepiece of the National Flute Association’s 2009 Convention.  Sir James received a lifetime achievement award and then led the huge ensemble in a new commission, ‘Galway Fantasie’, by composer David Overton.  Flute groups throughout the world played at the same time to show their support, while in the Marriott Marquis Hotel, plasma screens and no fewer than six conductors were needed to keep everyone together and in time!

If this was ‘Private Eye’ magazine, no doubt this feature would begin: ‘And so, farewell, season just concluded’ – but this isn’t ‘Private Eye’, so we won’t do that.

What we will do is mention some highlights of what’s been a successful and tremendously enjoyable season.  What to celebrate?  Well, not necessarily in this order:

For the first time, membership of the band reached forty musicians.  Not only is this great news in itself, but it was especially pleasing in that at the end of last season we lost several members to ‘natural wastage’ such as house moves, university and so on.  Of course, we’re now at the end of another season and with great regret we’ve now had to say goodbye to two more members.  We’re proud to say one of our clarinettists is off to study in London at Trinity College of Music and another has reluctantly had to bow to pressure of work as a paramedic.  Two band members have become parents for the first time, so congratulations to them on their new baby girl and boy.

We received financial support from Fermanagh District Council under their small grants scheme and used the money to commission a new piece of music (more on this below!) and to buy more music stands.  We welcomed ten more local businesses to our ‘Musical Chairs’ sponsorship scheme.  We now have no fewer than thirty sponsors, to whom we are profoundly grateful for support and encouragement.

We’ve extended the number of venues at which we’ve played by appearing in Ballyshannon, where we made a whole lot of new friends in May.  You can read a report of this occasion elsewhere on the website.

During the season, we embarked on the making of a DVD as a follow-up to the CD we made a couple of years ago (‘First Edition’, still available – email us via the website if you’d like to buy a copy).  We’ve completed several sessions of filming and recording and the process will continue next season.

We also began work on rehearsing a brand-new piece of music specially written for us by our Musical Director David Baxter.  David has already produced numerous arrangements for us to play, so we thought why not commission him to write a complete original piece.  Fortunately he too liked the idea and set to work, and ‘Moorlands’ has been the result.  So far we’ve tried out the first movement and it’s been fascinating to hear it all gradually coming together.  It’s extremely playable while still being difficult enough to stretch us both individually and as a band and without doubt we shall all be better musicians by the time we’ve mastered the whole piece.

What else…well, the website now has a photo gallery; the band is now on Facebook; and we’ve some really exciting plans for next season.  These include a big cross-border project in collaboration with the Erne Valley Ensemble from Belturbet.  Entitled ‘Border Harmonies’, the project is funded through the Peace & Reconciliation programme and will feature workshops, a residential weekend and concerts in two venues, one on each side of the border.

Finally, as ever we are constantly on the lookout for new members and for new opportunities to play.  If you would like to join the band, simply email us or go to the joining page of the website.  We welcome players on all wind, reed and brass instruments (we’d particularly like to recruit tuba players and we have two instruments available to lend to any interested tubists…).  Likewise, if you would like to engage the band to play, then again, either email us or go to the relevant page of the website.

So here’s to the 2010-2011 season, which begins on Thursday 26 August 2010.  Our season runs from September to June and we rehearse every Thursday evening from 7pm to 9pm in Erne Integrated College at Drumcoo, Enniskillen.

It seems to have become a kind of tradition with the band that we do at least two gigs for the National Trust in Fermanagh at some point during our season.  We’ve been playing at Florence Court House, for example, for so many years now we’re almost on first-name terms with the nesting swallows!  But two very welcome trends have become apparent.  One, these days we’re regulars at Castle Coole also; and two, after years of rainy days, we seem in more recent times to be bringing the sun out for the visitors. 

Certainly this was the case at both our gigs this summer.  We played in the colonnade at Castle Coole for their ‘Alice in Wonderland’ day, and in the courtyard at Florence Court for their ‘Fathers’ Day’ programme, the one in April, the other in June.  On both days, the sun shone, the visitors were out in force and we played a two-hour programme of what we might loosely term our ‘greatest hits’ to very appreciative audiences.

At both venues we also included in our programme a piece in total contrast with the rest of the music.  At Florence Court it was the same Brahms symphonic extract we encored at Ballyshannon (see the report on that gig) and at Castle Coole, a small ensemble of four players from within the band played our own conductor’s arrangement of Bruckner’s choral piece ‘Locus iste’.  Interestingly enough, both these pieces, serious and weighty though they are, proved immensely successful with our audiences.

However, both occasions were light-hearted affairs in the main and as befitted the atmosphere, a little levity was in order.  Our Castle Coole audience were temporarily stopped in their tracks by the sight of a rather large rabbit playing the tenor saxophone.  Well, it was an Alice in Wonderland day, so surely the White Rabbit had to make an appearance?  If you find this hard to believe, wait till you see our DVD (currently in production) because this surreal moment was captured on film.  At Florence Court we included one of our party pieces, playing ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ under the baton of an aspiring young conductor aged all of nine years old.  Go girl!