Sometimes things you hold onto long enough become great old memories! Thanks to Daryl (Moser) Kaufman for holding onto these Panthers so we can enjoy them as part of our 50th Reunion. Copyright The Enterprise, May 28, 1993
Doctors, lawyers, engineers, computer programmers, other professionals and homemakers will go back to Ardsley High School next week to honor a favorite teacher.
In a celebration of Ardsley’s “Greco Years”, named for former-band director Joseph Greco, 75 former students will play a June 5 reunion concert under his leadership.
Many will be playing their instruments for the first time since graduating. Greco retired in 1988 after 30 years of teaching.
“People that played in this band have a remarkable level of success in their private lives,” Daniel Harrison, a 1969 graduate and an organizer of the event, said Tuesday. “Many of us have been reflecting back on the things that have been very important to us our younger years and playing in the Ardsley High School band is near the top of the list”.
Greco is “excited” and “enthusiastic” about the concert.
“It’s a good feeling I get from these kids that they remember school fondly and I ’ m glad to be a part of that. They taught me as much as I taught them,” he said this week.
Greco, who was also the school’s golf coach, will have another reunion with former golf team members at Knollwood Country Club in Elmsford before rehearsal Friday, he said.
“My intention as a teacher was never to prepare students for the music profession. I always viewed my role as trying to get students to become consumers of music, appreciators of music. They went far beyond my expectations and I had high expectations for them. But they always exceeded them,” he said.
From 1958 to 1973 the band scored 12 consecutive “A” ratings at the NYSSMA (New York State School Music Association) competition at the most advanced level.
Some of the former band members remember a 1972 trip to Austria where the group placed first in international competition.
But all who were in the band in 1966 recall a surprise with the fondest of memories.
Band seniors borrowed the score for the Hindemith Symphony in B-Flat from Greco’s alma mater and convinced the high school principal to open the school during spring recess for rehearsals.
The work is viewed by experts as one of the most challenging ever composed for a concert band. A former professor of Greco’s rehearsed the band “all behind his back,” Harrison said, proudly.
Greco remembers it well.
“On the first day back I gave the down beat and they opened up with the Hindemith Symphony. I was flabbergasted. It was the greatest thrill of my life,” he said.
For next week’s concert, alumnus Mark Zuckerman wrote an original work and has dedicated it to Greco for the performance. It is called Note One Sentiment for Tribute for Concert Band.
The program includes Gustav Hoist’s First Suite in E-flat for Military Band, John Philip Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever, Westchester composer Percy Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy, American Civil War Fantasy by Jerry Billik and a feature for the trumpet section, Buglers’ Holiday written by Leroy Anderson.
Tickets for the 8 p.m. concert cost $10, $7 for students and senior citizens, and can be purchased by calling Ardsley High School at 693-6300, ext. 217, between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. weekdays. A pre-concert reception will be held at 6:30 p.m.
Proceeds will benefit the high school music department.