Dr. John Snavely, Music Director/Conductor
2024-2025 GVCB Season Rollout
from your wand waver John Snarly
A Hearty WELCOME to the friends, supporters, audience members, families and musicians of the Green Valley Concert Band Inc. As always, I promise to make each concert an event to be cherished: a wide variety of excellent music impeccably performed and interpreted to make your listening experience meaningful. May I also mention hats and costuming to compliment each work being performed? Following is a nutshell description of our concerts to whet your musical appetite. Each concert will be a gem, so come to them all! Consider inviting your friends and neighbors. Tickets to our concerts make excellent gifts!
Disney, Dixieland and Destinations
10/24/24 at CPAC, 5 p.m.
10/27/24 at Pima County’s Canoa Ranch, 5 p.m.
Who can resist memories of Disneyland sparked by a medley of top Disney tunes? That’s what Disney Fantasy will provide. A musical portrayal of our Southwest’s Mesas will be heard in Mesa Dances. Want some excellent English Band music? Holst’s 1st Suite is your ticket. To kick up some excitement we’ll perform a medley from Wizard Of Oz. Like to sing? Warm up those vocal chords for Home On The Range found in Gould’s Cowboy Rhapsody. Like to dance? Our very own arranger and bass player David Rudloff composed Strut Your Stuff we DARE you to keep your feet still in this music! A Dixieland Funeral with the traditional tune played sad and slow then jazzed WAY up ends our first season musical ventures.
December Delights
12/15/24 at Sahuarita District Auditorium, 3 p.m.
Our music featured in this concert is guaranteed to fill your heart and soul with joy and holiday cheer! A Christmas Overture overflows with traditional December carols and melodies. We Wish You A Mambo Christmas spices up a traditional tune with Latin pizazz. JS Jig puts an Irish lilt to a tune penned by the legendary J.S. Bach. Christmas Day by Gustave Holst is infused with tasty arrangements of memorable English carols. Hanukkah Festival Overture showcases familiar Hanukkah tunes then revs up the tempo for some Klezmer fun. Then there’s Good King Wence-Salza, A Canadian Brass Christmas Suite, A Fireside Christmas and Sleigh Ride to enhance your holiday spirit!
America’s Best
1/19/25 at Sahuarita District Auditorium, 3 p.m.
This concert features memorable music from a sampling of America’s top composers and much more! Bernstein is represented by Simple Song from his Mass and selections from West Side Story. Leroy Anderson’s Bugler’s Holiday is played as a tribute to long time band member and Manager Carmen Catania who passed in the spring of 2024. Hmmm... I wonder what out of this world music John Williams In Concert will feature? We toot our horns in George Gershwin’s American In Paris, then as a tribute to late band member Ed Curtis we perform Transcendent Journey by Galante, music Ed donated to the GVCB. For the grand finale we’ll perform Jitterbug then Salute To Dick Clark which FYI includes “Y-M-C-A” and y’all know what happens when THAT song is performed!
Around The World In Ninety Minutes
3/2/25 at Sahuarita Auditorium, 3 p.m.
We begin our tour in the U.S. performing John William’s dynamic Liberty Fanfare then travel to France performing selections from Darius Milhaud’s Suite Francais. Want some excitement? Visit Pilatus, Mountain Of Dragons high in the Swiss Alps near Lucerne, area of John Snavely’s ancestors. Time for a tribute to our Armed Forces members with an Armed Forces Salute. Sing along and clap your hands with gusto! Stand up for yourself or represent a family member or friend in any of the U.S. military services. Several years ago the GVCB performed music to pay tribute to Vietnam Vets. This time we perform Inchon written by composer Robert Smith saluting those who served in Korea. More on our journey: Arabesque, music from the middle east, then to Spain with the spirited Fiesta De Toros. We bring it back home performing America The Beautiful arranged by Carmen Dragon.
Chapeaux!
4/13/25 at Sahuarita District Auditorium, 3 p.m.
Ever noticed that I plays dress up and wear hats? Apparently the GVCB Board noticed and contracted composer Jack Stamp to compose a work with five movements. Stamp will conduct his new piece while I sit on stage and wears a different hat prescribed by Stamp for each movement! The name of Jack’s composition is Chapeaux, also the title of the concert! Other outstanding works on the concert include: Fuego Del Almo, Chorale and Alleluia, Lincolnshire Posy and we hope you’ll enjoy singing along to My Fair Lady! Lively music Jack Stamp composed for our late timpanist Peg Boweden Border Dance will be followed by my performance of John Denman’s Crossover Concerto for clarinet and band.
Sincerely,
John Snavely
Biography
John Snavely, affectionately know as “Dr. John,” earned his doctorate in music at the University of Arizona. He began his conducting career when he founded the Evening Wind Symphony in the mid-1990's at Pima Community College in Tucson. Now the ensemble is Sonora Winds and John is director emeritus after twenty years of his leadership. In the mid 2000's GVCB board members came to a Sonora Winds concert, saw him conduct Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue, and hired him to be their musical director. As a high school senior, John won an audition and performed with the American Youth Performs Orchestra in Carnegie Hall under the baton of Carmen Dragon. He performed all summer in 1971 with the first Disneyland All American College Band. John is a member of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra where he won an audition to play clarinet and bass clarinet in 1969, his first year at the University of Arizona. He has also performed with the Phoenix Symphony and Flagstaff Summer Festival orchestra and was principal clarinetist with the Tucson Pops Orchestra. His doctoral lecture recital, Benny Goodman's Commissioning Of Clarinet Concertos, was performed for the International Clarinet Society's Clarfest in the summer of 1991, and then again for the British Society of Clarinetists and Saxophonists in Ripon, England during their 1993 summer meeting. John toured Arizona, Mexico and Puerto Rico as an artist roster member of the Arizona Commission On The Arts with the Sonora Quartet (saxophones) and his own ensemble Concertissimo. He performed for a decade with the Arizona Musicfest in Carefree, Arizona and performed Ibert's Concertino as alto saxophone soloist with the orchestra. His career includes woodwind, music education and music history teaching at Pima College, University Of Arizona, and Black Hills State University. He was program director and instructor of the Tucson Symphony's Young Composer Project for seven years in the early 1990's enabling middle and high school students to compose works and hear them played by the Tucson Symphony Chamber Orchestra. John assisted in founding Opening Minds Through The Arts for the Tucson Unified School district and co-authored a major grant from the U.S. Department of Education, funding the program for it's first three years. John is retired from teaching as an Arts Integration Specialist at Howell Elementary. John for thirty years was director of childrens' and youth music at St. Mark's Presbyterian Church in Tucson. He resides in Green Valley with his wife Carol West.