The Texas Tech University Symphony Orchestra is putting on their annual “Hauntcert” this weekend. Philip Mann, conductor of the orchestra is here to share more about the event.
For people who do not know what this is, what is the "Hauntcert" all about?
People come in costume with their families, with their kids, even grandparents, and we come for a big Halloween concert. But it’s more than just one concert, it’s a whole afternoon of events that are really focused around the importance of music in our lives and introducing young people to the possibility of playing an instrument.
And from my standpoint, the possibility of introducing an instrument to a child’s life, helps them to open up extraordinary potentialities of their lives, to reach the full measures of their potential in other words. Essentially, we have a three o clock concert, which is called the “Hauntcert,” and we encourage people to come in costume. There will be a costume parade. There will be a costume contest and that costume contest will happen at 1:30 prior to the concert start time. If you want to come early, there’s all kinds of fun activities for people to take part in.
At one o’clock, we’re going to have what we call an instrument petting zoo, and that’s a chance for people to really put their hands on instruments, try out different things, try some percussion instruments, maybe try a string, wind, brass instrument…And just kind of explore, have some fun with it. We’ll have young music education major who will be full of wonder and excitement introducing kids and adults to trying the instruments. And we’re going to have some faculty there as well who will give a little guidance and some follow up if someone maybe wanted to contact someone to rent an instrument or maybe even take some lessons.
Then we have another annual tradition, which is prior to each year’s Hauntcert, we always invite the TTU string project to do a performance, and it’s a performance that they always get ready for since August they’ve been gearing up for this...What ends up happening is all of this put together really becomes a great tradition.
Listen to the full interview at the top of the article.
