Welcome to New Members of the Cowichan Valley Concert Band

April 2023

Welcome to the Cowichan Valley Concert Band. We are a diverse group of musicians, from advanced students to professionals, who simply love to make music. We play a wide variety of music from classical to old standards to popular show tunes, including a number of challenging scores that help us to develop our skills further. We invite you to take a few weeks to get to know us and hope that our band will be a good fit for you.

After a couple of rehearsals with the band, our conductor, Ron MacFarlane, and your section leader will meet with you privately to find out how you are feeling, to discuss how things are going and to ensure you have a reasonable chance of success. Hopefully you will be enjoying the experience and finding the music to be a manageable challenge. If that’s the case, we hope you will join the band on a permanent basis. If you aren’t having fun we want to see what we can do to make it more enjoyable for you and everybody else.

Should you become a member of our Concert Band you will asked to pay your membership fee. We have a membership fee of $75.00 per year ($25.00 for students) to help cover the cost of new music, the conductor’s honorarium and incidental costs. (If there are individual extenuating circumstances the membership fee may be waived or reduced, in confidence, by the executive.)

In addition, out of respect to our director and all the other players, we ask you to make a commitment to attend rehearsals regularly and to be punctual. Please let your section leader and the president know in advance if you will miss a practice or performance. As a member of the band, your parts will be important to the group as a whole. Continuity and stability of attendance not only allows us to progress faster; it is of great value to our less-experienced players, assisting them, by example, to further develop their skills.

We generally perform two formal concerts per year, for which we sell tickets to the public. All band members are expected to help with ticket sales and the provision of baked goods for sale at intermission. There are usually a number of other performances which, in past years, have included Canada Day at Maple Bay, Duncan Farmers’ Market, Duncan Christmas Light-up, Fee-for-Service performances (Catalyst Family Xmas Party, Chemainus Arts in the Park, etc), Charity Fundraisers, and some outdoor concerts in local parks. We usually do one Fee-for-Service performance in the fall and three in the spring/early summer and two public service performances in addition to our Xmas and Spring Concerts. We need everyone’s participation in these commitments. Members who are available are also asked to augment the Cowichan Secondary School Band at Remembrance Day, Awards Night and Grad Walk-up.

If you have any questions, concerns or would like more information about the Cowichan Valley Concert Band please contact any member of the executive or email us at mail@cvconcertband.org