The Quesnel Junior School (QJS) Band held it’s final concert before it relocates to Maple Drive to celebrate a good year and $10,000 worth of new instruments on Monday night (June 4).
The concert comes after the band qualified for Nationals for the third year in a row, but was more lighthearted than their usual concerts. They played music from Pirates of the Caribbean, James Bond, and even a Harry Potter medley.
The QJS band recently won a $10,000 grant from the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (CARAS) to buy new instruments. The last of which, a bass, arrived on the Monday before their final concert.
Anita Mamela, the band teacher at QJS, says the grant is meant for band programs “with a lot of potential and a good track record.”
The application process for the grant considers the diversity of the school, the percentage of student body active in the band, the track record of the program’s director, and, perhaps most importantly, the need.
“Most of our instruments are old and broken,” says Mamela.
This isn’t the first time the QJS Band has won the $10,000 grant. The school first won back in 2001. At the time, there were only four grants given out across Canada. This year, CARAS gave out 75 grants across the country.
The Correlieu Secondary School Jazz Band also performed at the concert, joining the QJS students for some songs and performing a few of their own.
The performance follows a series of concerts the QJS band performed in elementary schools around Quesnel after qualifying for Nationals earlier this year. Mamela says that by qualifying, their band is in the top 10 per cent of all school bands in the country.
Mamela is clearly proud of the students of the music program at QJS.
One the students from Correlieu qualified for the provincial honour bands, she says, while one of her current students recently won a provincial fiddling contest for the second time in a row. “That’s huge, because that’s [for people of] any age,” says Mamela.
The band program at QJS is also a harder program to teach, says Mamela, since she only gets two years with them and because of the school’s semester system. The students are able to start band at four different times during their tenure at the school and this often leads to several new faces joining the band not long before competitions.
In February, before the festival where the band qualified for Nationals, Mamela says that 15 out of the band’s 40 students had either changed to a new instrument or were brand new to music.
Grace Syvertsen, a Grade nine student who has played clarinet in the band since she started at QJS, says the students have to “work really hard to get these songs.” She says that Mamela also works hard for her students.
Syvertsen says they spent months practising to qualify for Nationals. “It felt really good [to qualify] because we did these three songs and we worked really hard on them.”