To commemorate the 250th birthday of the United States of America, the Highlands Community Orchestra will honor the impact that immigrants have made on this country with the music that they brought with them from their homeland and the music that has been created by them here in the USA.
On April 19, the free concert will be held at 3 p.m. at the Highland Center in Monterey, Virginia, and at 7 p.m. at Pendleton County High School.
The celebration will start off with the music right here in these mountains. Who brought their music with them and where did they come from? The majority of this concert will be devoted on the predominantly Scotts-Irish music of the immigrants in this area. To help celebrate, the Highlands Community Orchestra will have two guests and one group of students joining the orchestra – Josh Blount, associate pastor at the Living Faith Church in Franklin, Alice Shumate, singer & songwriter in Highland County, Virginia, and a group of students from the Highland Studio of the Allegheny Mountain String Project.
Blount will be joining the orchestra playing the small pipes, which are a smaller version of bagpipes as the name suggests. What an opportunity to get a real bagpiper to play with the group in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Inspired by the beauty of Highland County in Virginia, in 1991, Shumate composed and recorded her wonderful tune, “Highland.” She sang this tune many times with her band, the Mountain Aires. Alex Hummel of the French Horn section in the orchestra did the orchestration of this piece. There is no music written down for “Highland,” so Hummel listened to this piece in the background of a Highland County Chamber of Commerce video about the beauties of Highland County on the chamber’s website and transcribed the music from listening to the video.
The last group of guest musicians will be members of the Highland Studio of the Allegheny Mountain String Project, under the direction of Kelley Mikkelson. Six students will join the group for a salute to the Scottish immigrants of the area. The music “of the people and for the people,” continues with the young musicians learning the joy of playing and performing with others, something that has been a mainstay of American culture as traditions are passed on through music.
