Melbourne School Bands Festival
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Melbourne School Bands/Strings Festival was a two-week program where school bands mainly from metropolitan Melbourne, Australia, as well as country Victoria and interstate, gather to perform, listen and participate in tutorials. The Festival has an education focus. All ensembles receive either a Gold, Silver, Bronze, Merit or Participation shield. The Melbourne School Band festival is the brain child of Barry Croll and Douglas Heywood who created the idea and event under the Music Junction Blackburn Banner in 1989 to support the ongoing development of music education in schools. The festival was produced and sponsored by Billy Hyde Music Foundation, until their parent company Billy Hyde went into liquidation in 2012.
In 2008, the Festival's 20th anniversary, over 300 concert bands, jazz ensembles and string ensembles performed at the Robert Blackwood Concert Hall and School of Music Auditorium, Monash University. Since the inception of the festival in 1989 the number of students electing to learn an instrument through their school music program has increased substantially. The festival is now one of Australia's most prestigious musical events for school musicians.
The festival is designed to support and develop instrumental music education. Not only do students have the opportunity to perform at Australia's finest venues (acoustic-wise), but they receive adjudication from an outstanding panel of adjudicators.
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This entry incorporates text from “Melbourne School Bands Festival” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.