Music
Over half of the students in the school are involved in the music program.
Williamsville East currently has the following ensembles: a Symphonic Orchestra (audition required for entry), a Philharmonic Orchestra (under the direction of Mr. Wayne Moose), a Wind Ensemble (audition required for entry), a Concert Band, a Jazz Ensemble (audition required for entry), a Chorale (audition required for entry), a Mixed Chorus and a Women's Chorus. There is also a Jazz Band (under the direction of Mr. Carl Mazzio) and a Vocal Jazz group that practice after school on a weekly basis.
The Bands/Chorale and Orchestra alternate yearly trips in the Spring in order to tour and compete nationally, and have won multiple awards for their performances. Most notably, the Williamsville East Jazz Ensemble was a finalist in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Essentially Ellington Competition in 2007. The winter concert of the Music Department, Winterfest, is known for the diversity of music presented as it includes all the major ensembles plus small ensembles created by East students.
Most recently, the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors donated a $70,000 grant to assist the Williamsville Poetry Music Dance Celebration, begun at Williamsville East in 2000 by band director Dr. Stephen Shewan and English teacher Mr. John Kryder
In 2010, the symphonic orchestra was awarded the opportunity to play at the New York State School Music Association (NYSSMA) Winter Conference. They performed Gustav Mahler's Adagietto from his fifth symphony and Leonard Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story.
Read more about this topic: Williamsville East High School
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“I defied the machinery to make me its slave. Its incessant discords could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough.”
—Lucy Larcom (1824–1893)
“We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,—at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives on the sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“While the music is performed, the cameras linger savagely over the faces of the audience. What a bottomless chasm of vacuity they reveal! Those who flock round the Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, whose vacant faces flicker over the TV screen, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures . . .”
—Paul Johnson (b. 1928)