Now that the marching season has come to a close, students in the Concert Band and Wind Ensemble have begun preparing for a series of concerts to begin the season.

The first of these will be Saturday, featuring the Concert Band in Boone Family Theatre.

The band is open to anyone, whether or not they are a music major, without an audition. Dr. Dan Harbaugh, associate director of bands, said he has enjoyed getting to work with the students in the band. Moreover, he said that even though it is an open group, it doesn’t miss out on anything because of that.

“I don’t think it loses anything from the prestige,” Harbaugh said. “It’s just a group of hard-working people that love to make music.”

The concert will begin with five smaller ensemble performances, featuring students across disciplines, including strings, woodwinds and percussion. From there, the band will perform three pieces together.

Continuing on campus, the Wind Ensemble will perform on Sunday. This concert is in preparation for their performance at the College Band Directors National Association Southwest Division Conference. This conference, in which the ensemble was selected to perform, is meant to highlight bands in the region alongside other research and presentations from scholars in the field. 

After their show on Sunday, the Wind Ensemble will also go on its annual tour, further preparing them for the CBDNA Conference. 

For Laura Evans, junior French horn player, this will be her third tour with the Wind Ensemble, but it will be her first time playing at a conference like this.

“It’ll be cool to play at a conference,” Evans, junior music education major, said. “I know for me it’s more real once we actually start doing it.”

That start will come this Monday, immediately following the concert on campus. The ensemble will perform at four high schools in the course of three days, with each of the performances being free to the public. The full calendar of performances is available on the ACU Bands website – https://acu.edu/academics/arts-humanities-social-sciences/music/events/.

Their tour will conclude with a 2 p.m. performance at the conference on the campus of the University of North Texas.

But to kick things off, both bands will perform in Abilene at Boone Family Theatre. The Concert Band will perform at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, and the Wind Ensemble will perform at 3:00 p.m. the next day.

“Most importantly, just to see the relationships that they form with each other, the friendships that last far beyond here, to me that’s the most important and most impressive thing that we do,” Harbaugh said.