Anchorage Community Concert Band

Anchorage Community Concert Band’s April 7th Performance

Contributed by Kathleen McArdle

Adult hobbies are extremely important. Not only to give you something to look forward to regularly outside of work and family obligations, but to help keep mental stimulation and cognition strong and active into later life when dementia is a risk factor for many of us.

Performing music especially is shown to be beneficial. By integrating both the left and right hemispheres, playing music lights up the entire brain and forges new pathways. As a result, you can reduce the natural brain shrinkage that starts after age 30 (yikes!) and instead look forward to improved memory, cognition, spatial reasoning, and literacy. Likewise, the multitasking involved with playing an instrument can also improve your multisensory skill set and stop the natural decline of your ability to divide your attention.

These are among the many reasons that I am excited and proud to find myself as part of the Anchorage Community Concert Band. I learned to play saxophone as a student and continued playing in ensembles through high school and college. But as an adult, I found myself only interacting with my instrument when it was time to pack up and move and decide if it was something I wanted to keep in my closet.

After I moved to Anchorage, I learned about the Anchorage Community Concert Band and decided to give it a try and see if playing music was anything like “riding a bike.” The Band was formed in 1981 by a local conductor and some of his peers who were involved in jazz but interested in performing in an accessible classical concert wind band. The Anchorage Community Concert Band is a 501(c)(3) Alaska non-profit corporation whose mission is to support music rehearsal and presentation by dedicated individuals who consider musical performance a lifelong avocation and to promote the appreciation of live music performance in the community.

The band meets for about 10 weeks per semester, rehearsing about 2 hours per week, and presents a community concert at the PAC that’s just under 2 hours including an intermission. We’ve been extremely lucky to receive support from the Atwood Foundation for several years running that has enabled us to present a FREE concert to the community at the Discovery Theatre for these twice a year shows!

Please join us for our next accessible free classical concert! Our next is called Remembrance, held on Sunday April 7th at 4pm, and we hope you don’t miss it! Our most recent concert brought nearly 500 audience members, and we’d love to welcome you as part of our community.

Our free concert is the perfect space for seniors, families, students, dates, teens, individuals, community organizations and more, to ‘come as you are’ and enjoy music appreciation. There are no tickets, just show up in time to take your seat!

For more information, check out our website, anchoragecommunityconcertband.org or our Facebook page at facebook.com/AnchorageCommunityConcertBand to follow us for the latest news and updates. Looking forward to seeing you on April 7th!