A free concert at 3 p.m. on Sunday, July 12, by the Knoxville Community Band will take you on a musical tour from “Les Miserables” and a bit of Benny Goodman’s swing to Bugs Bunny’s most popular hits.
The concert will be at the Clayton Center on the campus of Maryville College. The band will perform in the R&L Nutt Theatre, the main hall in the center.
Many concertgoers will be familiar with “Irish Tune from County Derry,” a rendering of the popular tune “Londonderry Air.” The well-known song “Danny Boy” is sung to the same tune.
John Philip Sousa will be represented at the concert with the march “Bullets and Bayonets,” composed during America’s involvement in World War I. If you listen closely, you can hear machine gun fire in the trio toward the end of the piece.
The concert will feature two of the band’s instrumentalists. “Zigeunerweisen” (it’s easier to pronounce its subtitle, “Gypsy Airs”) will feature Joel Tillman on trumpet. Tillman is a band director in Roane County.
Mike Layland, a retired band director from Fairfax, Va., will play the alto saxophone solo in “Classical Rondo” by Antonio Capuzzi.
In case you’re wondering about the Bugs Bunny pieces, “What’s Up at the Symphony?” features a medley of tunes you heard in the cartoons. Who knew then that these are actually classical numbers? Selections include Rossini’s “William Tell Overture” and “The Barber of Seville,” Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2,” and Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries.”
Selections from “Les Miserables” will include “I Dreamed a Dream,” “Master of the House” and “Do You Hear the People Sing?” by Claude-Michel Schonberg. He and Alain Boublil came up with the idea for a musical based on Victor Hugo’s book. The original production was staged in Paris in 1980. The musical opened in 1987 on Broadway and won eight Tony Awards that year. The Broadway production closed in 2003, making it the third longest-running Broadway musical. Only “Cats” and “The Phantom of the Opera” played longer runs.
The band is directed by Larry Hicks, retired band director of Heritage High School in Blount County. Mark Boring, also retired from the Blount County school system, is the assistant band director.
The Knoxville Community Band is made up of instrumentalists in the community who like to play, and most have been playing since grammar school. Some players are band directors who like to take time out from their own bands to keep in practice on their major instruments, and others are professionals in the community who learned to play in school and don’t want to lose their expertise. All are volunteers, and all play because they love music.
The band is sponsored by the Knoxville Parks and Recreation Department. The group plays year round at festivals and other special events and performs a series of outdoor concerts during the summer.
New members with expertise on any band instruments are welcome. Practices are from 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesdays at Northwest Middle School.