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Dogwood Park Hosting Community Band Festival Saturday

A chance to enjoy local music and celebrate the legacy of community music as Cookeville’s Dogwood Park hosts the annual Community Band Festival this Saturday.

Cookeville Community Band Conductor Carroll Gotcher said the festival is a free event where people can sit around and listen to different community bands play. Gotcher said the event is something that everyone can enjoy.

“This is an opportunity where people who played in bands when they were in school can come out and remember those times,” Gotcher said. “People who heard bands as they were growing up can remember those, and kids who aren’t often exposed to these kinds of musical instruments can see them live and in person and perhaps want to start playing themselves.”

Gotcher said the festival offers a mix of bands and types of music. Gotcher said the festival will feature bands such as the Middle Tennessee Community Band, the Big Band Sound Orchestra, and the recreation of the Rugby Coronet Band.

“It’s a really interesting group,” Gotcher said. “Rugby, as you know, was a historic second sun city in rural East Tennessee, and one of their residents found out about the band that they had for a few years, and she has recreated that. So they play period music like you would hear in the late 1800s.”

Gotcher said the festival is not like going to a formal concert where you have to sit stone still for a couple of hours. Gotcher said he hopes people who attend the festivals enjoy themselves and seek out other opportunities to hear this kind of music or even participate themselves.

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