SOUTH ROYALTON — Last year, concert bands didn’t have much need for conductors. With gatherings on hold during the coronavirus pandemic, most musicians became soloists.
But as more people get vaccinated, outdoor concerts seem more reasonable, and the South Royalton Town Band has resumed its search for a conductor. Regardless of the pandemic, the search has been difficult.
“I’ve gotten a few young musicians to respond,” Ria Blaas, a member of the band who’s been active in the search for a new conductor, said Monday. The respondents all had family and work commitments, she said. “They want some money.”
The position pays $500, and is not without its demands. There are 12 to 14 rehearsals in the spring, plus a dozen concerts, eight in South Royalton on summer Thursdays, as well as performances in Woodstock, Chelsea, Randolph and Hancock, a small town in the western reaches of the White River Valley. The band performs a vast repertoire, ranging from marches to Broadway showtunes and the Great American Songbook, that it’s built up over the decades. The conductor also usually handles the logistics and scheduling, but Blaas said she and other band members are trying to decouple those responsibilities from the conductor’s commitment.
For the past 80 years or so, leading the town band has been a labor of love. Richard W. “Dick” Ellis conducted it for over 60 years, from the 1940s until 2015, when he died at age 91.
Thereafter, Phyllis Kadlub, who joined the band in 1959 as a high school sophomore, held the baton aloft until 2019, when the band celebrated its 150th anniversary. Now, she has other things she wants to hold aloft, including a year-old great-grandson.
“It’s a good little band,” Kadlub said Monday. “All the people in it just like to play.” Kadlub, whose primary instrument is the trumpet, also performs with the Vermont Philharmonic and the Vermont Symphonic Winds, among other ensembles.
Leading the band will take someone with conducting experience, she said, though she had relatively little when she stepped in for Ellis. She’d taken a conducting course when she was a student at the Hartt School of Music, “and then I just watched what other conductors did that I played under,” she said. “You really need somebody who knows what they’re doing.”
Often, that somebody is a high school band director, as Ellis was, but so far, the South Royalton Town Band hasn’t drawn much interest from that quarter, Kadlub said.
Perhaps, Blaas said, more pay is required. Each year, Royalton voters appropriate money for the band, around $2,500.
“Not much,” John Dumville, a member of the Royalton Selectboard, said Monday. “It never has gone up an appreciable amount.” The Selectboard hasn’t been asked for more and so the amount on the Town Meeting warning remains the same. Ellis and Kadlub were volunteers, essentially.
“It’s hard to find volunteers to do anything in town now,” Dumville said. The town has a community betterment fund, money contributed each year by Vermont Law School.
Last year, a big chunk of money went to the food shelf. The band might be eligible for some of those funds, Dumville said.
Last year, the band had someone new lined up, a retired musician, but the pandemic put an end to that and this year the candidate withdrew, Blaas said.
“I hope I get some more people responding,” Blaas said. “Otherwise, I don’t think it’s going to continue.”
There aren’t many unbroken traditions that date back more than 150 years. And there aren’t many places where musicians can just show up and play, which is what Blaas said Kadlub told her to do a few years ago.
Blaas, a visual artist who took up the clarinet several years ago, was worried she wasn’t good enough, but Kadlub “was quite adamant,” Blaas said.
“ ‘How else are you going to learn if you don’t do it?’ ” Kadlub told her.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
