The Allentown Band

The Allentown Band

Allentown, Pennsylvania

Drawn from within a fifty-mile radius of the Lehigh Valley, the band’s musicians share one common goal: to create and preserve concert band music at a level of excellence rarely heard from a community band. A typical Allentown Band schedule includes roughly forty yearly performances, from church picnic to New York’s Carnegie Hall. In addition to providing annual free concerts for the greater Lehigh Valley’s younger school children, the schedule includes a yearly event called the “Side-by-Side Concert,” where talented secondary-school student musicians are invited to sit “sideby-side” in a joint performance with the Allentown Band.

Many leading figures of the music world have appeared as guest conductors with the Allentown Band, most notably some early “greats” of the concert band tradition: Herbert L. Clarke, Edwin Franko Goldman, and Arthur Pryor, to name a few.

John Philip Sousa’s influence on The Allentown Band should not be underestimated. The more than twenty local musicians recruited to perform with the “Grand Bandmaster” returned to Allentown remembering and sharing stylistic traits unique to the famous Sousa band. Significantly, Albertus L. “Bert” Meyers, cornet soloist with Sousa in the mid-1920s, later served as conductor of the Allentown Band for fifty years. Today, under the direction of Dr. Ronald H.Demkee, the “Sousa style” continues as an integral part of the twenty-first-century Allentown Band.

The Allentown Band has entered into a project to record an ongoing series of compact disc recordings called Our Band Heritage in an effort to document the sound of the band throughout its modern existence. To date, twenty-six CDs have been released—with more to come!