By Donna Devlin, Volunteer for Publicity, Bronxville School Music Department

Sep. 14, 2016:  Oboist Michael Landy, a Bronxville High School senior, has been named to the 2016 All-National Concert Band. The announcement came from the National Association for Music Education (NAfME), which sponsors the All-National Honor Ensembles concert each year during its annual National In-Service Conference. This year's performance will take place on November 13 at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas.

Landy is the first Bronxville High School instrumentalist to be selected for an All-National ensemble and one of 150 instrumentalists chosen from schools across the United States and its overseas military bases to play in the concert band.

The concert program will also include performances by a symphony orchestra of 150 instrumentalists, a jazz ensemble of twenty instrumentalists, and a mixed chorus of 350 vocalists. Performers will be high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors who have qualified for state-level honor ensembles and who competed through video audition for all-national recognition. Landy was a member of the 2015 New York State Symphonic Band.

The concert band will be conducted by Dr. Paula Crider, professor emerita at the University of Texas, where she taught for 17 years and directed the acclaimed Longhorn Band. A veteran of 33 years of teaching, she now pursues an active schedule as a guest conductor, lecturer, clinician, and adjudicator.

Landy has been a private student of oboist Alan Hollander's, adjunct professor of music at Lehman College, since the fourth grade. He is a member of the Bronxville High School Band and of the Westchester Band, which gives outdoor summer performances in Scarsdale.

Landy's music studies are not limited to the oboe. Since kindergarten, he has been a piano student of Stephanie Ho's at Concordia Conservatory in Bronxville, where he has also studied percussion with Yousif Sheronick since the eighth grade.

Sharon Slote, former director of the Bronxville Middle and High School Bands, taught Landy for nearly a decade. She praises her student's "beautiful tone and exceptional sensitivity to style," adding, "Michael's virtually flawless audition for All-State was one of the best student auditions I've ever heard."

Landy's brother, Christopher Landy, BHS '14, was a 2013 All-National Honor Choir member and a winner of the NAfME's 2014 Student Composers Competition. Now a junior in a dual degree program at Northwestern University, he is a music composition major in the Bienen School of Music and a radio/television/film major in the School of Communication.

Pictured here: Michael Landy.

Photo by Donna Devlin for The Bronxville School