The Causeway Youth Band Festival Concert at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Mondavi Center features top performers from 50 area schools and universities with a thrilling finale featuring all 350 performers.

I am a UC Davis alumnus with a political science (pre-law) major, but I had more units in my music minor. I returned to Davis in 2004, making contact with my music teacher, Professor Jerome Rosen, who passed away this year. He encouraged me to return to playing the clarinet, so I joined the Woodland Community Band and invited Professor Rosen to our first concert.

Jerry suggested I contact Pete Nowlen, director of the UC Davis Concert Band, and said, “Tell Pete I sent you, sit in the back row and the muscle memory will return.” That was 2005 and I am still in the Concert Band and volunteer as the community promotions coordinator, writing releases and contacting newspapers and other media outlets.

In the spring quarter I produced the Community Fair Expo in the Mondavi Center lobby prior to the concert, saluting, biology, ecology and agriculture. We delivered 16 exhibitors from the campus and the community, including YoloArts, the Yolo County Farm Bureau, Heidrick Ag History Center, the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame and the Woodland Community Band, to name a few. We also saluted fellow Aggies Evelyne and Richard Rominger, Richard being former California secretary of food and agriculture.

I have worked with both bands for five years and my concern is the demise of the grammar, middle and high school music programs. Reaching both inward toward the campus and outward toward the surrounding community, my passion and message is both concern and hope for a brighter future for the school music system.

In many of the schools, the first to go is music, dance, fine arts, painting, sculpture, theater arts, performing arts, the classics and the history of all the arts, which fill our souls with our cultural history.

Be it the history of music, art or literature, if we don’t maintain the study of our basic cultural foundation, we are left with the mystery of not knowing our roots, which give the answer of who we are today.

Bill Hollingshead

Davis

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