The Olds Kiwanis Music Festival will be celebrating 30 years this spring and is starting to make plans on how it can mark the occasion.
Wendy Durieux, coordinator of the festival, told town councillors at last week's Policies and Priorities committee meeting that plans are tentatively underway to mark the anniversary by having students perform compositions from 30 years ago.
Durieux told councillors that the Kiwanis Music Festival is now the eighth largest festival in Alberta, encompassing 21 towns in the area and drawing between 1,500 and 2,000 participants.
“That's a lot of people coming (to Olds). But it is a wonderful way to bring people into our community,” she told councillors.
Durieux said the festival has a teaching/learning mandate and that students learn and grow from the excellent adjudicators that come to evaluate them each year. The festival also teaches music teachers how to improve their instruction.
Durieux said the festival is the only one in Canada that raises funds to go toward scholarships for students at the national music festival.
The Kiwanis Music Festival holds a benefit concert each spring with the proceeds going toward the second-place finisher each year at the national competition.
With the bowing out of corporate sponsorship to the national festival several years ago, volunteers in Olds decided to fundraise for the national competition.
Durieux told councillors that the town's contribution to the music festival goes a long way to the future involvement of students and said she hoped the town could continue that support.
The music festival cost about $39,000 to put on last year.
Durieux, who has taught music locally for 18 years and been coordinator of the festival for the last 10, said it is a great way to round out the community by giving it this focus on the performing arts.
“It is an invaluable way for each of our kids to be able to learn how to be in front of people, to set goals, to perform … they need to perform. It's a performing arts thing and it's just like going to a soccer practice, but never playing in a game. You have to have that game day, and the game day is the performance,” she said.
The town has been financially contributing to the festival since at least 1995 and possibly longer, said Barbara Hill, the town's director of community services.
