Looking back at Caramoor and ahead to next season

My late-July post includes:

  • Kudos/gratitude for the season and Caramoor
  • 2024-2025 season preview (including a Side-by-Side Concert at White Plains HS)
  • Cuong commission update
  • Library for next season
  • Auditions

Season finale at Caramoor

This was an amazing season, filled with challenging repertoire and unique performance opportunities. The two collaborative concerts with the West Point Band gave us some amazing experiences to engage with these phenomenal players. The reboot of the Wind Conducting Symposium garnered excellent reviews. The audience at our sold out performance on July 4 really appreciated your technical and musical artistry, and the 65 handbells really added the icing to the cake at the end of 1812. I thank all of you for your diligence and dedication, which brought the audience to its feet on several occasions. It finally felt like “we’re back” after the hiatus caused by the pandemic. Special thanks go to Katherine for juggling all the personnel matters, David for stepping in to wrangle the bellringers, Barton for his amazing arrangements, Marge and David for managing our finances, the board for its support, and YOU for making it all happen.

Donna pointed out after Caramoor that many of you on stage could not hear me speaking between numbers. I’ve added a reminder into my notes for 2025 to ask the sound engineer to place a monitor speaker on stage to correct this. In the meantime, if you’d like to read any of my Caramoor 2024 podium notes, click here to see that document.

Caramoor 2025

Next year, July 4 is a Friday night. On the personnel commitment form, I listed Monday, June 30 as our dress rehearsal, but on reflection, it does seem quite far ahead of the performance that week. I will ask the board to consider moving the dress to Wednesday, July 2, and if approved, request this with Karina at TMH. For now, please keep both Monday, June 30 and Wednesday, July 2 penciled in your calendars for now until both the board and Karina have a chance to assess and act.

Commission and 2024-25 season

Viet Cuong just celebrated the successful premiere of John & Jim. He has a symphony commission pending with the US Air Force Band, which will premiere in 2026. And the parts and score for our commission is due for delivery on February 15, 2025; we will premiere it at our May 2025 concert.

The 2024-25 season is filled with exciting new works, celebrating the work of many diverse composers. Our guest artists are coming from near and far, and are truly excited to work with us.  I’ve created this page with audio links to the majority of the works programmed. I encourage you to check out the recordings.

We will dedicate the time for our Monday, January 27 rehearsal to perform a Side-by-Side concert with the instrumental music students of White Plains High School (no additional time will be required of you outside our normal rehearsal schedule). The works we will perform that evening will be pulled from the current Winter rep.

I’ll prepare and distribute a final spreadsheet detailing repertoire and instrumentations by the end of the summer.

Library

Our electronic distribution of music parts was extremely successful last season, and so we will continue to use the same method this season. Nancy will distribute black folders at the first rehearsal. Everyone will download their own parts from the links posted on the home page this site.

Auditions – Tuesday, September 3

Our annual member auditions are scheduled for Tuesday, September 3 at Irvington Presbyterian Church, just south of Tarrytown. Subs who have not yet played a formal audition, in addition to any new players considering membership, should contact Katherine at kathf.music at gmail.com to request detailed audition information and schedule an audition time. If you know of a qualified player who would be interested in WSW, please send them to Katherine.

Enjoy the summer!

I’ll be in touch again at the end of August to update you on our opening rehearsals.