Today is August 20th 2020. I feel the date is important because by the time I finish writing this, half of what I know to be true will change. That said, I am very excited to say that we will be allowed by the division to continue making music. 

While it will look a little different than in years past (for most of you anyhow) I'm gearing up and buying music for what this year is going to look like. My number 1 priority is safety (obviously) with a close number 2 being making great music (as usual). 

This school year as indicated in Mr. Scott's email will have it split into 3 days to reduce the number in school. What that means is that our bands will no longer range from 30 - 60 people (Concert band) and 18 - 30 people (jazz band). Depending on the way students are split (as we have no control over it) we will be making music in the following ways:

Band:
- Many of the band tunes we have grown to know and love have miraculously been rearranged for small ensembles because of smaller band programs. I will be purchasing some of these :)

- I have a fairly large repertoire of percussion music, we may look at one of our tunes being a percussion ensemble (chairs, drums, buckets, etc)

- Lot of small ensemble music is available and is FANTASTIC (better than those cheesy books in the practice room) and honestly one of my favourite ways to make music is in small ensemble (such as brass quintet, ww quintet, etc). Those of you that have done the small ensemble test before may have some ideas for music we could do too. Anything on musescore is very easy to alter for whatever our instrumentation will be

Jazz:
What this looks like exactly will depend on our mix of folks. Right now, the plan is to do the small ensemble arrangements of big band tunes, head tunes, etc. Much like big band, it won't be focused heavily on soloing and more repertoire with hopefully people getting more comfortable with soloing. 

Wind Ensemble:
more details will be announced when school starts. Because of the size of our room and the complexity of this group rehearsal times, etc we are very much considering something like Mon / Wed from 4:00 - 5:00 with the entire ensemble. Please don't hold my feet to the fire on this one but Mr. Scott and I are brainstorming. If you see smoke coming from the south end of the city, fear not as I'm just thinking really hard :)

Any other questions? Feel free to email me or send me a remind.