Vintage Band Festival 2013 – Cornets, Community and Contentment

Northfield’s motto is Cows, Colleges and Contentment, but during the Vintage Band Festival 2013 last weekend, Cornets, Community and Contentment felt like a more appropriate description.

My great-grandfather, G. Oliver Riggs, performed as a cornet soloist from the 1890s through the early 1920s, so it’s probably no surprise that I was particularly drawn to performances that featured that lovely, mellow instrument. Here are a few sights and sounds from the festival that involved cornets:

• Elisa Koehler, with Newberry’s Victorian Cornet Band, performs a solo during an Aug. 1 concert in Way Park. I would have recorded more of it, but my camera was running out of juice!

• Mark Ponzo, a professor of trumpet at Northern Illinois University, performs on the cornet Aug. 2 at the First United Church of Christ. He was accompanied by masterful pianist A. Dewayne Wee, a professor emeritus of music at St. Olaf College. Wee gives piano lessons to my 12-year-old son Elias and has also taught my other kids, Louisa and Sebastian.

Ponzo performed five cornet solos from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and he talked about the different cornets in his collection. Afterward, he let people play them.

Sebastian, who plays trumpet in the high school band, tries one of Ponzo’s cornets.

• The antique instrument exhibit at the Northfield Historical Society museum included 10 cornets from various collections. Three (Nos. 23, 24 and 26) were Conn Wonder Brass instruments from the collection of Paul Maybery, a Sousa and band scholar who directed Saturday’s massed band concert.

Below Maybery’s collection was the glass case of G. Oliver Riggs items, including his hat, baton and cornet solo portfolio (on loan from the Stearns History Museum in St. Cloud) and his 1933 Conn cornet, which he gave to my dad when my dad was a young boy.

The G. Oliver Riggs items on display at the museum during the festival.

A cornet solo from G. Oliver’s portfolio.

These last two videos aren’t cornet-focused, but they fall under the categories of community and contentment. It was exciting to see so many people of different ages and from different states and countries come together in downtown Northfield on Thursday and Friday nights to enjoy the music of the headlining acts.

• Even though the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble concert started late due to a flight delay, people stayed to groove the night away in Bridge Square.

• The next night, Kenny Carr and the Tigers, a trombone shout band from North Carolina, succeeded in motivating typically reserved Minnesotans to clap, dance and generally enjoy themselves as the sun set over the Cannon River.

It was a picture-perfect night, and one of the most memorable experiences of the festival for me.

It took the efforts of many, many people working countless hours to make the festival happen, but it was all worth it in the end. A weekend filled with cornets, community and contentment – what could be better? I am already looking forward to 2016!