The Melbourne School Bands/Strings Festival is a two week program where school bands mainly from metropolitan Melbourne, Australia, as well as country Victoria and interstate, gather to perform, listen and participate in tutorials. The Festival has an education focus. All ensembles receive either a Gold, Silver, Bronze, Merit or Participation shield. The Melbourne School Band festival is the brain child of Barry Croll and Douglas Heywood who created the idea and event under the Music Junction Blackburn Banner in 1989 to support the on going development of music education in schools. The festival is currently produced and sponsored by Billy Hyde Music Foundation.
In 2008, the Festival's 20th anniversary, over 300 concert bands, jazz ensembles and string ensembles performed at the Robert Blackwood Concert Hall and School of Music Auditorium, Monash University. Since the inception of the festival in 1989 the number of students electing to learn an instrument through their school music program has increased substantially. The festival is now one of Australia's most prestigious musical events for school musicians.
The festival is designed to support and develop instrumental music education. Not only do students have the opportunity to perform at Australia's finest venues (acoustic-wise), but they receive adjudication from an outstanding panel of adjudicators.
The festival runs for two weeks until the Festival Finale on the last Saturday of August. The Finale showcases the most outstanding ensembles from the Festival and features the distribution of the awards.
Famous quotes containing the words school, bands and/or festival:
“And Guidobaldo, when he made
That grammar school of courtesies
Where wit and beauty learned their trade
Upon Urbino’s windy hill,
Had sent no runners to and fro
That he might learn the shepherds’ will.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)