POTSDAM -- The Potsdam Community Band will play a concert in Ives Park as part of Potsdam Summer Festival on Friday, July 13 at 6 p.m. The performance includes music for all ages, and lasts just over an hour.

Directed by Theresa Witmer, the concert opens with a John Philip Sousa march, “Hands Across the Sea.” Sousa composed the march in 1899 and addressed it “To no particular nation, but to all of America's friends abroad.”

One-hundred years later, another American composer, Andrew Boysen Jr. wrote “Kirkpatick Fanfare,” and remarked, “This work has a definite Irish flavor, including a strain of Danny Boy. The ‘fanfare’ features driving rhythms and exciting brass figures.”

PCB’s cornet and trumpet section leaders, James Madeja and Paul Buell, are featured on the next piece, Thomas Short’s duet for cornets and band entitled “Short and Sweet.” This piece will give the audience a taste of the “old time” park band concerts heard in most every American town on every weekend at the turn of the 20th century.

“Cole Porter Medley” features some of the well-loved songs by one of our best composers of melody and lyrics. Cole Porter, born in Indiana in 1891, wrote over 800 songs in his lifetime.

This arrangement by Robert Russell Bennett, features the songs “Anything Goes,” “Begin the Beguine,” “Night and Day,” “Just One of Those things,” and “Blow, Gabriel, Blow.”

In “The Beatles: Love,” arranged by Jay Bocook, the group turns to favorites by the Fab Four, including: “Baby You Can Drive My Car,” “Hey, Jude,” “Because,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

The second half of the program begins with Connecticut-born Eric Osterling’s delightful march, “Bandology.” First published in 1967, “Bandology” has become a staple among American bands and an audience favorite.

Moving across the world to the Great Hungarian Plain, PCB next performs movements of Puszta, written by Jan Van der Roost. The music is subtitled “Gipsy Dances,” and each is full or color and excitement. The ancient chant "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” might now be a well-known hymn, but it has undergone some major changes in the hands of composer Reber Clark, whose setting of “Hymn of St. Jame” the band will perform next.

Music from The Lion King will close out the performance.

The band invites the North Country community to hear this performance on Friday evening at 6 p.m. Admission is free. Rain location for the performance is Snell at the Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam.

You can also hear PCB this summer at the Madrid Dam Concert Series on July 18 at 6 p.m. in Madrid and in Lake George on July 21 at noon, where Potsdam Community Band will open the Lake Geroge Community Band Festival.

Potsdam Community Band is open to all those who play a band instrument. The group plays 2-3 concerts each year; the next concert will be in January. Anyone interested in playing with the band can visit the website, www.potsdamband.org, or contact PCB’s Personnel Manager, Ron Berry, at 315-265-2883.

PotsdamCommunityBand@gmail.com, www.potsdamband.org.