ONE of the busiest people on Guam during the next few weeks is bound to be Max Ronquillo Jr., the music director of the Guam Territorial Band, Guam’s official band.

He’s getting them ready for the 8th Tumon Bay Music Festival to be held from March 2 to 10. This event now draws musicians and musical groups from the CNMI as well as Guam, and brings professional adjudicators in from all over the place. The festival, started as a three-day event in 2005, expanded to five days the following year and now takes up more than a week of musicians performing at various locations in the island’s hotel area.

The band performs, but Ronquillo schedules and organizes the whole thing – a substantial undertaking. He has help, of course, but Max is the sparkplug, the enthusiastically peripatetic dynamo who is seemingly everywhere during the events various concerts.

Ronquillo, a music graduate of the University of Guam and music instructor at George Washington High School, has spent 20 years as a clarinetist and band master with the Territorial Band, which started out as the Guam Youth Band in 1976. They originally performed for the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter in 1977, and have since toured Australia and New Zealand, South Korea, the Republic of Palau, the United Kingdom, Japan and, in 2008 at the Olympics, in Beijing.

They’ve done Guam proud too, winning the 2005 Gold Award at the Australian International Music Festival and several other awards. They were the second-place winners of the International Lions Parade marching unit competition in 1998. Because of their performance at the Olympics, the band was invited to perform in New York at a youth music festival, and this year have been invited back to perform again.

Here on Guam, the band – no longer made up of just young musicians but includes players of all ages who audition for Maestro Ronquillo before they are allowed to join – can be heard in Cathedral and shopping mall concerts, Veterans Day and Memorial Day activities, opening ceremonies of various kinds, Liberation Day events and, in 1998, performed for President Bill Clinton’s historic visit to Guam. 

Just a few days after the Tumon Bay Music Festival concludes will they be on a plane to the Big Apple, where the band will perform in Central Park on March 19 and at Carnegie Hall the next day. If you know anybody in New York, tell them about those dates and encourage them to attend and support Guam’s musical ambassadors.

The band is rehearsing now for those performances because, of course, the way you get to Carnegie Hall is practice, practice, practice!