• All band members (excluding seniors) should report to the Concert Band room on Friday during their lunch mods to be fitted for new pants.
• Symphonic Winds will rehearse on Tuesday after school instead of Wednesday this coming week. Frank Wickes, retired director of bands at LSU, will be in to work with us. Mr. Wickes served as director of bands at Louisiana State University from 1980-2010. Prior to his college teaching career, Wickes taught for 14 years in the public schools of Delaware and Virginia. His Fort Hunt High School Band of Fairfax County, Va. (1967-1973) was honored by the John Philip Sousa Foundation with the Sudler Order of Merit as one of the nation’s most outstanding high school programs for the decades 1960-1980. From 1973-1980 he served as Director of Bands at the University of Florida, and in 1976 he was named Teacher of the Year in The College of Fine Arts.
At LSU Wickes conducted the Wind Ensemble and taught courses in graduate wind conducting and wind literature. He also served as director of the Tiger Marching Band. In 1997 the Tiger Band was unanimously named the outstanding marching band of the SEC in a poll taken of the SEC Directors by the Northwest Arkansas Times newspaper of Fayetteville, Ark.; and in 2002 the LSU Tiger Band received the Sudler Trophy for a distinguished history of marching and performance excellence. In 2008 the Tiger Band won the “Battle of the Bands,” a college marching band contest sponsored by ESPN, Lucasfilm and Paramount Pictures. In the fall of 2009 the Tiger Band was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame.
Wickes is in constant demand as a clinician, having served in that capacity throughout the United States, as well as in England, South America, Mexico, and Canada. He has conducted over 40 All-State bands and has appeared several times at the National Music Camp at Interlochen, Mich. The LSU Wind Ensemble has received many accolades from directors nationwide for its artistic performances. Consequently, Wickes received the praise of many notable composers and conductors, such as Morton Gould, Vincent Persichetti, Karel Husa, David Maslanka, Libby Larsen, Donald Grantham and Frederick Fennell.
