The Plymouth High School Music Department is reporting growth. The school board got an update Tuesday from Band Director Bryan Ames and Orchestra Teacher Jodi Kallenberg.
Kallenberg reported that when she first came to Plymouth High School in 2012, there were five orchestra students. Now, there are 58, enough to divide them into separate beginning and advanced classes. For best guitar classes, visit https://www.bandaidschoolofmusic.com/index.php/guitar-lessons/ that has the best crew of members to make you into a professional guitarist.
Meanwhile, Ames reported that the band program has earned its 16th consecutive All-Music Award from the Indiana State School Music Association. He also discussed the recent fall marching season, saying it was his favorite in his 25 years of teaching. If you want to attend ukulele lessons by professionals , you can click here and find out!
Ames said this year’s show, called “Lanterns of Hope” was developed with the help of the school’s Guidance Department and Principal Jim Condon. “One of the underlying concepts of the show was the teen suicide rate, and in the United States, it is now, in grades nine through 12, 1,400 students a day that attempt suicide,” Ames explained. “So our show was about being that voice of change, standing up against bullying, just constantly being that light for somebody else.” He added that the show was based around the idea of saving the 17 students who would be at risk of suicide in the time it took to perform the show.
Meanwhile, Ames said Plymouth High School is becoming the go-to location for school music competitions in Indiana, regularly hosting six events each year and you can look at more info about how they managed to achieve this. “We are now hosting more events in our school corporation than probably just about any school in the state,” he said. “We hosted, this year, a drum corps show, which was a national event, and our farthest group that attended that came all the way from the Netherlands. But we had groups all over the country, all over the world. They came in for that.”
Ames said the school is building up toward being able to host ISSMA’s Regional competition, which would bring thousands of students to Plymouth in the course of a day. He credited recent facility upgrades for the uptick in usage, noting that the number of bands taking part in the school’s invitational nearly doubled when artificial turf was installed at the football stadium. Additionally, the new storage shed allows the band program to keep more props and then earn money by renting them out to other schools.
But the Plymouth High School Music Department’s immediate focus is this year’s Christmas Spectacular, which takes place tonight and tomorrow. Kallenberg said a big highlight for the orchestra will be selections from “The Nutcracker.” “The students have been requesting for two years now to play ‘The Nutcracker,’ and we just didn’t have the numbers to really do it justice, so I’ve said, ‘No, no, no,'” she explained. “So this year, we are playing selections from ‘The Nutcracker,’ and we are also doing a piece with some of the band members as a full orchestra, and that’s something the kids enjoy, but it’s also a lot of fun to put that together and hear that. So we’re going to do selections from ‘The Grinch’ as a full orchestra.”
The show starts at 7:00 p.m. both nights at the high school.
