FROSTBURG - Ron Horner conducts the rehearsal of the Arion Band of Frostburg for its gala anniversary concert tomorrow night like a starting pitcher warming up with an all-star softball team.
He's got an athletic platform style, muscular and confident. He's wearing knee-length shorts, a loose polo shirt and sandals. He'll wear a white dinner jacket for the commemorative concert. Most of his predecessors wore military-style uniforms that made them look like leaders of the Palace Band in the Kingdom of Ruthenia. He's only the seventh director in the 125-year history of the Arion Band. It claims to be the oldest, continuously functioning community band in the United States. And it's playing just fine.
Jay Stevens, the band's historian, acknowledges there are community bands that were formed before Arion - the Repasz Band in Williamsport, Pa., dates to 1831, for example - but he insists the others have gaps in their history. Arion has been in existence continuously since 1877.
True community
The band members are all volunteers and amateurs, playing for the love of music and to have a little fun. They're housewives and high school girls, accountants and schoolteachers, farmers and music students at Frostburg State University. But they don't fit Garrison Keillor's definition of a community band as people who used to play an instrument.
"We like to think we're beyond that," Horner says.
They're certainly no village band playing oompah, oompah, oompah-pah.
Horner teaches percussion at Frostburg. He played about two years with the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra and he has performed regularly with the Pittsburgh Symphony. He's performed under such conductors as Leonard Bernstein, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta and Sir Georg Solti.
He picked challenging works for the anniversary concert, including The Battle Pavanne by the 16th-century Flemish composer we all know and love, Tielman Susato; Marching Song by Gustav Holst, who is of course the composer of the very popular orchestral suite The Planets; Risen Angels, a memorial piece by Tom O'Connor, written as an elegy for a teacher and four little girls killed in a school shooting in Jonesboro, Ark.; and Frostburg Suite, commissioned for the band's 120th anniversary from Dr. Jon Bauman, a professor of composition at Frostburg State. He'll conduct it tomorrow.
And there will be the rousing marches: Americans We, by a prince of marches, Henry Fillmore, and The Liberty Bell March by the king, John Philip Sousa, will be the finale.
It marched, once
The Arion Band, after all, started out as a marching band. But during a period when the band members were aging fast, they quit marching. Frostburg is a hilly old mining town and while there are two directions, up and down, the band always seemed to be going up. It's a concert band now that plays Memorial Day and Fourth of July fetes and a schedule of about two dozen concerts at such places as nursing homes, shopping malls and parks. But it doesn't do parades.
"You want to know why the marching stopped?" asks Stevens, who has played clarinet with the band for 29 years. "I can remember when I was in high school most of the other members were older than me, and some of them were very old. And they would get invitations to the Chicken Festival in Moorefield, W.Va., and stuff like that. And the guys were too old to be hiking along.
"The last one we did was in Cresaptown, in 1986, I think. I remember it was like 100 degrees. Because they were older people then we'd get invites to all sorts of parades, and they would just say, 'Here's another one. What do you think? I vote we don't attend. OK.' And that was it."
But there's been a transition, and there are lots of younger people now. Alison Welborne, assistant conductor, secretary-treasurer and first clarinet, is just 23.
"Now I'm one of the oldest ones," Stevens says. "I'm 46. When I was in high school there were guys in their 80s."
A long-timer
Mike Pfaff, the president of the band who plays baritone sax, says John Close has been in the band longer than anyone else now, 40 years.
"He came here as a kid," says Pfaff, who is 36 and has been in the band himself since 1983. He's an inspector for the Allegany County environmental protection department.
Close is the lone tuba onstage at Monday's rehearsal. Three will play tomorrow. In the old photos at the Frostburg Museum, there were often a half-dozen or more tubas in the band.
Ron Horner sometimes has to work to find enough musicians. He was still looking for a bassoon player Monday. Most of the works he was preparing require a bassoon. And more black bears then bassoon players inhabit these Appalachian foothills.
Close, who is 55, taught school 30 years. Now he's a traveling computer consultant for the Allegany County schools. He joined the band in 1962 when the local legend Gus Zeller was about midway through his 46 years as the longest serving director of the band.
Close plays with a half-dozen bands and he says, "One of the nice things about playing with this band is that they have a lot of very old music. The music was in the band hall, which made it nice to go [there] because you were stepping back in time and playing."
Like a museum
The Arion Band Hall was built in 1900, and the band has been practicing there ever since. The band's older instruments, tubas and euphoniums that once hung on the walls of the practice hall, are now displayed in the museum, where much of the older music is stored in an old walnut armoire.
Horner figures some enterprising graduate student would find enough material in the band's old music for a couple of theses.
"We have some pieces over there that are definitely prior to the abolition of slavery," he says.
"Titles that are not exactly 'P.C.,'" says Welborne.
"Some things that are going to remain in the library as historical pieces," Horner says.
Even in the early days, the band never seems to have shied away from difficult works. The music on the stand at the museum is Finlandia, the symphonic tone poem by Jean Sibelius.
"Those old bands must have sounded pretty good," Close says. "They always went down to the Luray Caverns to play. And they went down to Baltimore and Ocean City. They were an award-winning band all the way back."
Close, incidentally, wears gloves when he plays his tuba. Otherwise his fingers wear away the lacquer finish from his horn.
"They're too expensive to keep replacing," he says.
In the beginning
The two bass drums in the museum are emblazoned with the year the band was formed, 1877.
Allegany County was coal-mining country in 1877. According to local lore, mine shafts still exist under Frostburg, which, by the way, was named for early settlers Josiah and Meshach Frost, not Jack.
Stevens, the historian, says the German, English and Welsh miners were cultured people who appreciated academics and fine arts. They took up a collection to start the teacher training school here that became Frostburg State.
"Some of these same miners were original members of this band," Stevens says.
In 1875, one Conrad Nichol, who made and sold furniture from a store on Main Street, got a bunch of miners and other folks together and formed the Arion Gesangverein, a singing society for German men.
"These people were as blue-collar as they come, digging in the earth," Stevens says. "But they spent their free time with books and with music, and we can tell you some of that old stuff in the museum, that music, is very difficult. These people worked in the earth, but they practiced their instruments very diligently."
The concert program for tomorrow night explains that Arion, a Greek musician, was the greatest lyric poet of his time, which was the seventh century B.C. When kidnapped by sailors, he was saved by dolphins after he cast himself into the sea. Arion was a popular name for choral societies in the 19th century. An Arion Gesangverein still holds concerts and Liederabende at Zion Lutheran Church, on City Hall Plaza in Baltimore.
And then they played
Nichol got some instruments for the Arion singers in 1877. They liked them so much they quit singing and started playing and so far have never stopped. And they played in Nichol's store until it burned down in 1880. They then practiced in the Odd Fellows Hall until they moved into their now slightly dilapidated home in 1900.
The band was drafted as a unit for the Spanish-American War.
"They were going to be sent to Cuba," Stevens says. "And they were given uniforms by the state of Maryland. But the war ended before they were shipped out.
"There are letters over in the museum from officers of the bands asking the governor of Maryland: 'Can we keep the uniforms?' I think they let them."
The museum also has a program from an Arion benefit concert for the victims of the Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, and no one doubts that Allegany County gave generously.
The band played patriotic concerts in World War I and World War II and it even began to let women join the band after the Second World War.
And Ron Horner says: "If I had to sum up what this band is all about, I could really do it in just a couple of words: 'living music history.'"
Show time for the anniversary concert is 7:30 p.m. in the Pealer Recital Hall in the Performing Arts Center at the university.