UMaine Concert Band to Perform at Wagner Middle School in Winterport

It will be a homecoming for two University of Maine students when UMaine’s Concert Band performs a run-out concert Thursday, March 20, at Wagner Middle School in Winterport.

Aaron Beaulieu, a first-year mechanical engineering student, began playing the trumpet in the fifth grade. Jay Baines, a civil engineering major also in his first year at UMaine, began playing percussion at the same time. Both students have returned to the direction of their first teacher, Dana Ross, who conducts the UMaine Concert Band and is band and chorus director at Wagner Middle School.

“It’s safe to say that without him, I wouldn’t be where I am today in my music,” Baines said.

The Concert Band will perform at an afternoon assembly at the school and at a free public concert at 7 p.m. The performances will feature arrangements by Clare Grundman, Henry Fillmore and Frank Ticheli. Wagner’s band will join UMaine’s Concert Band for the finale.

The music program at Wagner includes more than 100 instrumentalists and almost 100 vocalists, out of a total student body of 220.

Ross is in his fourth year as conductor for the Concert Band, a nonauditioned group that performs both on and off campus in a variety of communities, especially public schools.