Junior Concert Band is one of the many groups of the junior performance music course at Burnside High School.

These Year 9 and 10 students meet once a week to rehearse, and this rehearsal time is a part of their weekly timetable. They have three main performances over the course of the year; Northwest Festival, the Christchurch Concert Band Competition, and the Junior Showcase. The Junior Concert Band is conducted by Helen Renaud, and their student conductor for this year is Kate King.

This year has been an enjoyable and successful one for the Junior Concert Band. For the first year in the bands history we received a Gold award at the Christchurch Concert Band Competition, which puts us in the same category as the all ages Concert Band at Burnside. For this competition we performed an arrangement of Bizet’s ‘Carmen Suite’, another arrangement of ‘Danny Boy’, and a piece called ‘Junk Funk Shuffle’. This piece featured our talented percussion section, who had to make use of odd instruments such as buckets and dog bowls. For the final performance at Junior Showcase, we look forward to joining with Junior Jazz and Junior Strings to form the Junior Orchestra and to perform and arrangement of ‘Finlandia’.

It has been a real privilege to conduct and work with Junior Concert Band. Having started in this ensemble at the beginning of my time at Burnside, it fuelled my own passion for music which has grown until today, and I hope that the students of the current band will look back on their time in the same manner. A huge thanks must be made to Ms Renaud for all of her work in conducting and preparing the band, as well as Antonio Dimitrov for his guidance particularly in the brass section.