College Bands to Perform at Annual Founder’s Day Concert

The 10th annual Founder’s Day Concert in the Park will be held on Sunday, September 16, at 2:00 p.m. in DeWitt Park. The featured ensembles will be the Ithaca College Concert Band, directed by Mark Fonder, and the Ithaca College Symphonic Band, under the baton of Henry Neubert. The rain location will be Ford Hall in the James J. Whalen Center for Music.

Sponsored by the Friends of Ithaca College, this free concert is designed to bring music back to the original Ithaca College downtown "campus quad" and to celebrate the College’s partnership with the local community. It has been held annually since 1992, when it was first produced to mark the centennial of the founding of the Ithaca Conservatory of Music.

Both bands will present music evocative of the town square concerts in the tradition of John Philip Sousa. Harold Reynolds, associate professor of trombone, will join the concert band as the soloist on Arthur Pryor’s Thoughts of Love, while professor of trumpet D. Kim Dunnick will perform a cornet solo with the symphonic band, playing Herman Bellstedt’s La Mandolinata.

The concert band will also perform Claudio Grafulla’s Echoes of the 1860s and Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Procession of the Nobles. The symphonic band will present Franz von Suppé’s Poet and Peasant Overture, Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever, and selections from the Richard Rodgers–Oscar Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!

The Founder’s Day Concert in the Park is made possible through the generous support of Baker Travel and the Boardman House.

For more information on the concert schedule at Ithaca College, see the School of Music concert calendar.