Musician's Information About Central New York's Community Bands and Orchestras

Alost all groups are currently active because of the availability of vaccinations and the normally less severe effects of COVID19, at least for now. STAY SAFE & HEALTHY

This is a free CLEARINGHOUSE presenting some very useful instrumental musician's information (eg, rehearsal schedule and location; see the info table below) about Community Music organizations around the central region of New York state. The intent is to help both the instrumental musicians and the bands and orchestras. More useful information is often needed for instrumental musicians who do not know what regional performing resources are available to them or how to contact the groups. (Community music organizations are called groups here.) The simple interface with no advertisements and no pop-ups should be easy to navigate; besides the site creator is not a decorative type person. All useful information is available to anyone; you do not need to request access to read these pages.

Purposes:

• to make visits/interchanges between the groups much more feasible, especially for CNY musicians who may be traveling or moving to locations of other groups.
• to facilitate the organization of regional band or orchestra festivals/symposia by publicizing the existence/contact of groups among themselves.
• to facilitate groups in recruiting members playing needed instrumentation by getting the word out over the region.
• to allow groups to announce their programs to the interested musicians or public, or at least to other people surfing this site.
• to facilitate searching for groups of interest by use of the Navigation system I have built into the site (see the sidebar).

Sharing Information is the goal of this web project. This project needs additions/corrections from those people knowledgeable of the individual organizations, or otherwise those who know more correct and complete information. This has largely been a one-man operation so far, and our information sources are incomplete. Very few groups' websites provide all of this information, and many groups have no websites. (Over 113 groups.)

YOU CAN HELP make this clearinghouse site more complete and useful for you and your group. We provide are two ways to do this: (1) You can supply the missing group information to the site administrator who will enter that information (EASIEST WAY USUALLY), or (2) you can edit your group's page yourself after requesting access from the administrator (you set up your own password). Email the site administrator at freds.bands@gmail.com to:  provide your  suggestions of this site, provide more information on these groups, or request to be an editor to correct or add more group information.

As an additional benefit if you want to participate as an editor, besides corrections, we certainly encourage adding more info to your group's page such as performance schedules, background info, musicians wanted, etc. We are being scanned by Google (and now Yahoo, Bing, and Ask), Your group's page in this web site is easier to find worldwide. You will need me to link any additional page you add to your band's page.

NAVIGATION: First, move and minimize that Navigator panel on the right side to below the Sidebar. See the SIDEBAR for links to each group's information page.

TIP: a screen resolution of 1024 X 768 is adequate. I prefer 1280 X 1024 for my larger monitor. Site was designed with IE6 & 7 and tested with Firefox/Mozilla 3. I know it works with Chrome and Edge. 

Information Presented for Each Community Music Group:

Limits to Group Selection:

We've made practical Limits to Group Selection in region and type of community music group. First, these instrumental groups do not pay their musicians (they are not union bands, professional groups, etc.), with a few exceptions -- eg, expenses for travel (especially marching bands), and maybe for the conductor. Second, these groups are not small jazz or rock combos; those are completely different group categories and not covered here. Third, generally no admission is charged to the public for performances; however, the tradition for community orchestras has been to request 'donations' at the door, usually just a few dollars.

• Group locations have been limited to west of Albany, east of Buffalo, south of Ogdensburg, and including the Southern Tier. Many groups are outside of the official CNY region but within about 1.5-2 hours of Syracuse. This is a map of the region and a table for the counties covered.
• Group types have been limited to community music organizations (wind/percussion bands, ensembles, and orchestras), even though some may have invited memberships and auditions. We list marching-only bands in a separate page. We have not generally included pages for academic (university- and college-based) groups except for a draft of a general listing, but we have included pages for a few specific groups that we are aware of where community people are allowed. Understandably most emphasize students and tend to exclude regular community members. If you have specific information about college-based community groups we should consider, please contact us on this issue.

Note on Information Sources:

We are making available more up-to-date and complete info about New York's regional community music groups to supplement existing basic band and orchestra sites. But that is only one of the reasons for developing this site. See the Purposes listed above. This project started in May 2007 after finding several large community music sites that are out-of-date and incomplete for purposes of musicians. We've searched the web mainly by using Google to investigate regional groups; we have checked with the sites of the Association of Concert Bands, Active US Community Bands Project, and Ron Boerger, and we have asked some band/orchestra people that we know. Phone calls and emails (where available) to group contacts are still needed to complete most group info pages, with contact cross-referencing to provide the remainder. This will take a long time unless you help us. Though the list of groups may be incomplete, it is not very incomplete. But changes will happen and uncertainties will exist (see this about rumored groups). More useful and complete group information types will be added occasionally; see Site Plans.

This site was conceived and implemented by me, Fred Rushden. I hope you find this site USEFUL, and thanks for your time and (I hope) your participation.  

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