The Junee June Jam is coming up on the 29th of June at the Athenium from 2:00 pm, promising another great afternoon of amazing music.
Tamara Spencer, head of brass, woodwind and percussion at the Riverina Conservatorium of Music (RCM) is also conducting the Riverina Concert Band and the RCM student concert band.
She said, “The Junee Jam used to be a thing pre-COVID that would have happen every year and it was just an opportunity for different groups of musicians from the RCM community to get together and make music in a different location. We went on to hiatus for a few years over COVID, but we started it up again in 2022 and so this will be our fourth reimagined Junee Jam.
“What we do is we bring a number of our ensembles, so the RCM student concert band and the Riverina concert band out to Junee for a morning. We’ve also invited members of other community bands to join us, so we’ve got players travelling from Temora and Albury and hopefully, a few more will sign up before the weekend, they’re going to come and we are going to workshop some pieces together in the morning. One of those is a piece by Junee composer and RCM staff member Fran Griffin. This is a recently released piece that she’s released through Alfred Publishing in the US.
“We’re going to be workshopping that with the composer conducting the ensemble and then performing that at our concert along with other works by the other ensembles.
“We’ve got quite a good variety of music. There’ll be some things that people haven’t heard before, some things that are familiar to people, things that will get people tapping their toes. What I’m looking forward to is the mass band items at the end of the concert, as I mentioned, we have Fran Griffin’s new piece Midnight March being performed by the Mass Ensemble, as well as an arrangement of Shenandoah by Frank Kelly, and a couple more pieces, another one by an Australian female composer. But the opportunity to hear a large-scale band out in Junee is something of a treat for residents.
“We get such a warm response out in Junee. The Junee crowd are always so grateful to have live music coming to them so they don’t have to travel into Wagga because the RCM has a string of concerts going on throughout the year, but they’re mostly based in Wagga. The Junee residents appreciate the opportunity to just pop down the road after lunch on a Sunday afternoon and hear a nice afternoon of music.
“It’s going to be a lovely afternoon of music coming out of the cold on a nice winter’s afternoon and enjoy some music being made by local people. We’ve got students through to people who’ve been playing for decades. It’s a very varied program, there will be something for everybody to come and check out.
“Thank you to the Junee Shire Council for partnering with us on the event. They are partners, which is why we can bring it to the community without putting a large ticket price on the door. Junee Council have partnered with us to assist us in the use of the venue.”
Come along and enjoy the tunes.
-Jack Murray
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