The Opinionator

Cape Cod Band Concerts

In the past few years my wife and I have enjoyed summer band concerts on the Cape, sponsored by local banks, chambers of commerce and art foundations. Many summer evenings you can find a band concert going on somewhere on the Cape.  They are often listed in the calendar section of Cape Cod Today. The Register and the Cape Cod Times are good back up sources. Our favorite is the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod and the Citizens Bank Summer Concert Series given from 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM on Monday evenings on the Village Green on Route 6A in Dennis.  We arrive early for these 7:00 PM concerts, carry our folding chairs to a strategic place, put a blanket on the ground and settle in.  I've brought a book before and sometimes, when the grandchildren are with us, we pick up a pizza on the way to the band stand and eat supper on the grass.

I have observed many times the unbridled joy which children, particularly pre-school children, appear to bring to these concerts and the magical way they run around band stands, sway to the music, and frolic with each other like young puppies while the band plays. While parents sit on blankets or on beach chairs, children venture out toward the bandstand, do their run around thing, and then crash back to the family unit which sits lovingly observing and supporting them. It is hard to know why they like this.  Perhaps an evening out with friends is what they love, maybe the joy of having an audience watching, perhaps they have some kind of a mystical peek into these Norman Rockwell moments although they may never have heard of this artist or seen a cover of an old Saturday Evening Post.

The people who organize these gatherings are always most gracious and hospitable.  The same cannot be said about the band directors who sometimes seem to want to control the flow of children around them and do things to assure that the focus of the spectators be on the band rather than the kids cavorting in front of the bandstand. They sometimes try to use the microphone to engage the kids, to admonish them to stay with their parents, to make unlistened to rules about when to run and jump and when not to.  Maybe these musicians don't understand kids. Maybe they feel the children compete with their patter between numbers about the year Sousa wrote the last march they played or the fact that Glenn Miller and Johnny Mercer collaborated on some arrangement they are playing.  Maybe they are over-reacting to complaints from patrons.

At any rate, I fear that too many more of these admonishments by band concert performers will keep parents and children away. That will be unfortunate because it will have the effect of removing the most charming aspects of these gatherings from spectators.  Let's keep the kids a focal point of these concerts.  Today's kids running on the green will grow up to be the adults who put together future concerts.

Above photo: the Monday evening band concert on Route 6A in Dennis. cctoday photo.