CBDA Update

by David Green, CBDA Director of Communications

As one school year ends and another approaches on the horizon, CBDA looks to build on its past successes as well as finding new, innovative ways to serve both band directors and students. As our organization navigates a post-COVID world and prepares to move to Sacramento in 2024 with the rest of our CASMEC family, the time has never been better for us as an organization to continue to evolve and grow as an organization. Below are some of the exciting things we have going on within CBDA!

CBDA All-State Saturday

CBDA is in the planning stages of a brand new event called “CBDA All-State Saturday,” which will serve as an audition clinic day for students across the state to come and work on their audition material with top-of-the-line educators and instructors on their specific instruments. Additionally, we plan on offering this event at multiple locations from northern to southern California in order to increase accessibility to our students. As we finalize details, please check in at our website (www.cbda.org) and our social media pages on Instagram and Facebook so you have access to the latest updates!

Cbdf

Connected to CBDA is the California Band Directors Foundation (CBDF). Started with the intention to help support band programs and all-state students, the foundation looks to help provide opportunities to all-state students in need. In order to accomplish this, CBDF runs the Mike Gangemi Memorial Scholarship Fund in honor of the great educator Mike Gangemi, a longtime CBDA board member and incredible educator. Mike was a prolific volunteer for CBDA who truly believed in the mission of our organization and donated anonymously to CBDA for many years in order to help students who had trouble paying their student fees. We would invite everyone to give (and help spread the word about this incredible scholarship fund!) by heading over to our site https://cbda.org/home/cbdf/

CBDA Golden State Band

CASMEC 2023 included the first-ever performance of the CBDA All-State High School Golden State Band! After a terrific first year performing, CBDA is proud to offer this ensemble again for students from ensembles whose schools have a total enrollment under 1750 students or have less than 5% of the student population in the instrumental music program. Additionally, the school must either be a Title 1 School, have 5% or less of band members taking private lessons, or only 1 concert band performance ensemble in the school’s program. CBDA is excited about the direction of this ensemble and the role it plays in helping provide an all-state experience to even more students!

CBDA Social Justice Consortium

2023’s Social Justice Consortium performance of “I Am Enough” by Marie Douglas was met with rave reviews. To follow up on that, CBDA is excited to continue the work we are doing with our Consortium by partnering with two composers from the Indian community: Aakash Mittal and Shruthi Rajasekar. Not only are we ecstatic about playing a small part in helping to create new music by composers of Indian heritage for the concert band ensemble, we are thrilled that we are able to expand our Consortium offerings to include multiple composers who will be writing music for multiple grade levels (grades 2 and 4) in order to offer more options for band directors and their ensembles.

CBDA Fall Bulletin

The 2022 CBDA Fall Bulletin brought forth a large variety of articles across the band realm that served as helpful resources for our educators. We plan on continuing this in Fall of 2023 and are already in the process of soliciting articles from people across the music education realm in order to serve our members. If you would like to contribute to said bulletin, please reach out to us about submitting an article by contacting us at www.cbda.org!

As CBDA (and CASEMC as a whole) begins our new chapter in Sacramento, we are excited to continue evolving as an organization that plays a role in the broader goal of advancing music education in California! We look forward to seeing everyone in February of 2024!