No shows booked at the moment.
The Heritage Brass Band (a special formation of the Orono Cornet Band for this occasion) of the Great Canadian Town Band Festival will recreate two performances of the Newcastle Music Society Band. The first concert is July 1 st , 2022 at 1:30 pm in the Bandstand beside Newcastle Town Hall following the commemoration of the 100 th anniversary of the cornerstone laying of the Newcastle Town Hall. The second concert will be held August 13 th 2022 at 2:00 pm on the Newcastle Library Lawn at the Newcastle Historical Society’s 1890s Garden party.
Newcastle Musical Society Band circa 1890-1914
The Newcastle Music Society Band was part of the Brass Band movement that began in the
1850s and spread across Ontario and all of North America to almost every town and village.
These bands performed music written for 12 Brass players and 2 drums. The Newcastle band
was unique in that it included an e-flat Clarinet to play the highest parts in the band giving it a
unique sound. Katherine Carleton of Peterborough will join the band on e-flat Clarinet. Lead
sponsors for the concerts are Massey Ferguson Canada and Massey Ferguson dealer. Todd
Equipment of Millbrook. Massey Ferguson and its owner Agco Inc are celebrating the 175 th year of operation in the world and it all started with the Massey Factory in Newcastle Ontario
founded by Daniel Massey in 1847. Other sponsors: A Gift of Art, Ontario Power Generation,
Hamilton’s Insurance and Clarington Toyota.
New Article about us in Wholenote.
Sound the Cornets! News from Orono
By Jack MacQuarrie
The Orono Cornet Band: While I was at the aforementioned Amis du Jazz concert in Port Perry I bumped into two friends that I hadn’t seen for some time. I first met Dave Climenhage about twenty years ago in the Clarington Concert Band. I first met Herb Poole over thirty years ago while playing in the Metropolitan Silver Band. They invited me to a concert by the Orono Cornet Band in the town of Orono, where Dave Climenhage had organized the Great Canadian Town Band Festival (GCTBF) in Orono from the year 2000 to the year 2005.
For six consecutive years this festival brought together some of the finest brass and woodwind ensembles in Canada and the U.S. such as The Boss Brass, The Hannaford Street Silver Band, The True North Brass, The Spitfire Band and The Central Band of the Canadian Armed Forces. It also hosted guest artists like conductor and trombone virtuoso Alain Trudel.
After the annual festival was discontinued, the Great Canadian Town Band Festival still existed as an entity in name. Dave was looking for a project that would bring alive Canada’s musical heritage and further the objectives of the GCTBF. He still had the charter for the GCTBF and the desire to continue in some fashion. He was a long time collector of brass and woodwind instruments and eventually linked up with fellow collector Herb Poole, bass trombonist with the Canadian Opera Company.
Together they began to work on the idea of a Heritage Brass band that would recreate the 19th century Brass Band movement in Canada. From the early 1850s on, the saxhorn band concept (12 brass instruments) had spread to almost every town and village in Canada. This movement began in France and England in the 1840s and quickly spread all over Europe and North America. These newly developed valved brass instruments were relatively easy to learn to play and could play any notes on the chromatic scale. They became the mainstay of musical performance in Canada, which did not have a classical orchestral tradition at the time. These bands performed at local dances, in parades and at all civic events including July 1 which later became Canada Day. In short it was the music that was most accessible to Canadians from 1850 to the end of the century.
Herb and Dave decided that they would hire professional brass players from the GTA who were interested in taking up the challenge of performing on 150-year-old instruments and who were willing to work with them as they tried to establish an audience for the brass music of 19th century Canada. Herb recruited musicians from the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra and a number of top level freelance brass players from other GTA ensembles.
The aim of the Orono Cornet Band is to recreate a 12 piece brass band of the Confederation period in Canada to perform on period instruments and to play music composed in Canada or known to be regularly performed in Canada. Gathering Canadian music of the period took time. As they looked at brass band music collections from the period, it was clear that most of the music they performed came from American publishing companies. They worked hard to glean
from these sources important works by Canadian composers such as Calixa Lavallee (Marche Indienne). They have also found music originating outside Canada but performed regularly here, such as popular
marching songs like The Girl I Left Behind Me. Herb Poole is the band’s artistic director and has sourced music with very distinct Canadian period content. The instruments the band performs on come from Herb’s and Dave’s collections and were built in the period 1850 to 1870. Many of these were restored by Herb. They are both constantly researching historic events for important music. The Battle of Ridgeway in 1866 is one such event, for example. It resulted in the composition of The Maple Leaf Forever and the words to the Canadian Militia Fenian Marching Song. They hope to perform these at a re-enactment of the Battle of Ridgeway in June next year. The band has been performing now for over five years. They have performed at heritage events each of those five years, including the V-Brass festival at Toronto’s Harbourfront, Clarington’s Heritage Festival and the RCMP Musical Ride. For the RCMP Musical Ride they performed music of the Band of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police at Fort MacLeod, Alberta, first performed in 1876.
They are currently working on getting people to know about the Orono Cornet Band and have completed their first recording. They also have a new website at oronocornetband.com with videos and soundtracks. It’s worth checking out that website.
