BACB History

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1976-1999

For those of you who do not realize how much of a “family” a band is one would venture to guess it’s because you haven’t been in a band.

Founding members of the Bay Area Concert Band (BACB) did a lot to nurture, nudge, nourish, and recruit so that almost 50 years after its formation, The Concert Band is still alive and well.

Many people have contributed to the continued successes, of this family - far too many to name them all. But for this project, it seems only fitting to acknowledge our Band Historian, Eileen Schaefers, for the role she played in getting this webpage together and also Bonnie Cox, who spent countless hours editing copy and obtaining research material. Thank you to Peggy Christensen who did the bulk of the research and wrote the biographies. For all those who came before us, the BACB is eternally grateful. And for those of you who are in the band, we are happy to be a part of your family.

Eileen along with her friend and fellow musician, Peggy, worked together to come up with a plan, and then a workable format that enabled them to post biographies of principal and guest conductors, record and post the history of featured members (going back more than four decades) and then to scan Programs that were saved from those concerts and post them online.

The history page is a labor of love. The storing and filing of programs from past performances, along with some newspaper clippings, and photos was the work of founding member Marlene Carpani. Marlene has been invaluable.

Once the project got rolling, it was met with a lot of enthusiasm and added assistance. Members volunteered to track down and locate photos. Peggy spent hours researching, and Eileen lent hours of her time proofreading and going over documents. Bonnie Cox contributed research information, proofread and formatted documents. Many others helped to write their own (or their loved ones) biographies.

As you read through the different biographies and stories, you will notice a pattern to how much the lives of the musicians in the band have intersected and intertwined over the years. It’s pretty interesting to make those connections.

Finally, it is important to get the information as accurate as possible and a great effort has been made to do just that, but if the reader sees mistakes, we want to correct them. If someone should be on the History page that currently is not, we want to correct that too. Just drop us a line.

We know there is more work to do. We refer to the time period of 2010 – Current as The Next Chapter. We will get to it. But there is a lot of prehistory to sift through as well. It will all happen as we have the time. We hope, for now, you enjoy what we have.

BACB 1978

BACB circa 1978, Robert Gillett Conductor

Conductors

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