Who We Are

Allentown Band 2021

A prominent feature of nineteenth-century musical Americana was the concert band, and the Allentown Band, America’s oldest, has kept that tradition alive since its founding in 1828. Drawn from within a fifty-mile radius of the Lehigh Valley, the band’s musicians, as different as their backgrounds may be, share one common goal: to create and preserve concert band music at a level of excellence rarely heard from a community band.

All members of the Allentown Band approach their music-making in a professional manner, though none makes his or her living from music performance alone. Many, however, are teachers of music in schools and in private studios. Some teach a variety of subjects unrelated to music. Others are engaged in engineering, accounting, sales, insurance, medicine, and dentistry, or in various office work or building trades. When they meet to perform, however, whether in a public park setting, retirement community, or in Carnegie Hall, both age and daytime vocation disappear. All effort is concentrated toward creating music with aspirations of integrity, inspiration, and impact, whether it be an overture transcribed from an opera, a modern composition written especially for concert band, or a Sousa march.

John Philip Sousa’s influence on the Allentown Band should not be underestimated. Over the years, Sousa recruited twenty members of the Allentown Band to perform with his band, and these musicians returned to share stylistic traits unique to the famous Sousa band. Significantly, Albertus L. “Bert” Meyers, cornet soloist with Sousa in the mid-1920s, later served as Conductor of the Allentown Band for fifty years. Under the direction of Ronald Demkee, Conductor since 1977, the “Sousa style” continues as an integral part of the twenty-first-century Allentown Band.

A typical Allentown Band schedule includes roughly forty yearly performances. The venue fluctuates, from concert stage to city park, from church picnic to university commencement, from Allentown’s Miller Symphony Hall to New York’s Carnegie Hall. In addition to providing annual free Educational Youth Concerts for the greater Lehigh Valley’s younger school children, the band also offers a yearly “Side-by-Side Concert,” where talented secondary-school student musicians are invited to sit “side-by-side” in a public performance with the band.

The band is heard regularly on Philadelphia’s Public Radio station WRTI, and in Sydney, Australia, for a program called “Music That’s Band.”

The band has made four European concert tours, including two to Switzerland, Austria, and the St. Tropez Music Festival in La Croix Valmer, France. The band has recorded 32 Volumes of Our Band Heritage series in order to document the sound of the band throughout its modern existence. To date these recordings have reached listeners in all fifty states and 27 foreign countries.

Many leading figures of the music world have appeared as guest conductors soloists with the Allentown Band, most notably some early “greats”: Herbert L. Clarke, Edwin Franko Goldman, and Arthur Pryor, to name a few; and, more recently, such world-renowned musicians as Frederick Fennell, Donald Hunsberger, and W. Francis McBeth, as well as many of the past and present conductors of the United States premier military bands of Washington, D.C.

The Allentown Band was featured with the U.S. Marine Band, the Cleveland Orchestra Blossom Festival Band, and the Wheaton Municipal Band (Illinois) in a documentary on the life of John Philip Sousa, “If You Knew Sousa,” narrated by Charles Kuralt of CBS-TV, and produced by WGBH-TV, Boston, for the PBS series “The American Experience,” which has been distributed internationally.

The honors and awards accumulated by the Allentown Band over the years, from various state and national music and music educators’ associations to the John Philip Sousa Foundation, and the American Prize are too numerous for complete listing here. Perhaps the Allentown Arts Ovation Award presented for “significant contributions to the cultural life of the community,” best encapsulates the Allentown Band’s commitment to the community at large.

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