From the Idaho Panhandle

The Festival at Sandpoint May Be Over, but the Interest in Music Lingers On

By Cate Huisman, 8-16-10

	Sandpoint High School music teacher Aaron Gordon at work.

The Festival at Sandpoint closed out its 28th season last night, and it seems to have been the usual copacetic experience, with good ticket sales and (mostly) good weather making it a successful event. Fans of Cape Breton fiddler Natalie MacMaster didn’t seem perturbed as a not-too-desperate rainfall and just a modicum of lightning introduced her performance Thursday night, and otherwise the weather’s been excellent, not even hot.

Last Sunday’s annual children’s concert included an instrument “petting zoo” at which children could try out playing different orchestra instruments, and later the familiar strains of Tchaikovsky’s “Peter and the Wolf” drifted over the south Sandpoint evening.
Many people are not aware that this children’s concert is just the tip of the iceberg with respect to what the festival does to encourage local youth to learn about music. We think of the concert series as entertainment for festival goers, but it actually also plays a significant role in what has been the recent phenomenal growth of youth music opportunities in town.

The high school now has a concert band, a symphonic band, a steel pan band, and two jazz bands. Fifteen percent of all the students in the school are in one band or another, and an additional 15% are in one of its choral groups. And music teacher Aaron Gordon expects those figures to increase this fall. That’s because the largest elementary band program in the state is feeding a large middle school music program, which is graduating young musicians to the high school.

Last fall, 95% of all sixth graders in the Lake Pend Oreille School District were in its music program. Because not all families can afford to rent or buy the instruments their youngsters want to play, the Festival started an instrument assistance program to help. It’s donated an oboe, two pianos, a trombone, two marimbas, and drum sets to various schools. And it has provided maintenance kits to help prepare and maintain the five flutes, six clarinets, four trumpets, two trombones, saxophone, and cornet that were donated in response to a plea for instruments in the Daily Bee last fall.

Why all the interest? It feeds on itself, of course, but it’s not coincidental that the Festival’s outreach program sends professional musicians into all the grade schools to introduce fifth graders to their musical potential each spring, and it reaches out to home-schooled fifth graders as well. Each child gets three tickets to attend the Festival’s grand finale orchestra concert. Those youngsters were out in force last night as the Spokane Symphony played Russian favorites, finishing off with the 1812 Overture, with fireworks over the lake providing the requisite booms.

In a few years, one of those young audience members may trundling the tuba (purchased with help from the Festival) in the high school band, filling in a base that wouldn’t be there but for funds the festival donated.

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