About the Big Sky High School Bands

The mission of the Missoula Big Sky High School Band Program is to provide students a comprehensive music education through performance, to facilitate a lifelong desire for personal and shared discovery, and to awaken the supreme joy in performing music with a deeper understanding. The Big Sky bands provide unique curricular and extracurricular opportunities in multiple concert and jazz ensembles to about 140 musicians. The Wind Ensemble and Jazz Band, our flagship groups, regularly perform throughout Montana and the Pacific Northwest, as well as Hawaii, New York City, New Orleans, and Washington, DC. Notable past performances include the 2019 Washington, DC International Music Festival at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, New Orleans Concert Tour (2017), Livingston Jazz Festival (2017), UM Buddy DeFranco Festival (annual), EWU Jazz Dialogue Festival (2015), Honolulu Pacific Basin Music Festival (2014), New York Wind Band Festival (2008), Honolulu’s Aloha Music Festival (2005), and Holiday Bowl Music Festival (2001). Big Sky band students are consistently accepted into regional and national honors ensembles. In 2019, the Wind Ensemble premiered “Corpus Callosum” by Carl Wittrock on the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall stage in Washington, DC. In 2008, Big Sky premiered Christopher Stark’s “Dynamism of a Speeding Horse” on the Carnegie Hall stage in New York City. Big Sky continues to be involved in new music commissions, most recently with composer Carl Wittrock (2019), The National ASPIRE Commission Project, and with Missoula composer David Maslanka and a consortium of Montana schools for his “On This Bright Morning.”

Pictured below: 2019 Wind Ensemble

Washington, D.C. International Music Festival, 2019

New Orleans Band Tour, 2017, at Oak Alley