“It’s always a treat to perform for the audience at beautiful Emmaus Community Park,” says Douglas Bolasky, Macungie Band Assistant Conductor.

The Macungie Band presents a concert, 6 p.m. June 30, Emmaus Community Park, Emmaus.

“It’s like an old-time community park with pavilions, a baseball game usually in process, folks at the swimming pool and most especially when the train goes by in the distance,” Bolasky says.

Concert-goers will enjoy a variety of music, from Broadway show tunes and overtures to ragtime and marches and a commissioned work that celebrated the band’s 150th anniversary in 2004.

Jerome Kern’s 1927 musical “Showboat” is considered by many theater historians to be the first of what was to become known throughout the 20th century as the Broadway musical.

Guy Jones’ arrangement of “Selections from Showboat” includes such popular pieces as “Old Man River,” “Only Make Believe,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine,” “You Are Love” and “Why Do I Love You.”

Throughout the 20th century, two composer-lyricist duos dominated the scene: Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II and Alan Jay Lerner and Frederic Lowe.

Lerner and Lowe’s “My Fair Lady” premiered in 1957. Robert Russell Bennett’s concert band arrangement “Selections from My Fair Lady” includes “On the Street Where You Live,” “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” “Get Me To The Church On Time” and “I Could Have Danced All Night.”

As the 20th century drew to a close, Broadway musicals began to mimic their operatic counterparts in that spoken dialogue was no longer the only vehicle for advancing the plot of the show.

Claude-Michel Schonberg’s “Les Miserables” borrowed from the operatic works of Richard Wagner the idea of using specific melodies for specific characters.

Hollywood composer-arranger Warren Barker penned a “Medley from Les Miserable” to include “At the End of the Day,” “On My Own,” “Master of the House” and “Do You Hear the People Sing.”

The band performs David Bennett’s “Mississippi Suite Overture,” a medley of themes from each of the four movements of composer Ferde Grofe’s 1926 work “Mississippi Suite.”

After a brief introduction, the famous “Father of Waters” theme is heard followed by a march with rollicking phrases intended to portray the antics of Huckleberry Finn. After the reflective “Ole Creole Days” the work ends with an enthusiastic depiction of Mardi Gras and an elegant “slow drag” reminiscent of the grand balls held by the genteel Southern aristocracy.

“An Ellington Portrait” by Floyd E. Werle, former chief arranger of the United States Air Force Band, incorporates some of Ellington’s best-known works.

The audience will be regaled with such popular selections as “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart,” “Azure,” “Solitude,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Mood Indigo,” “Caravan” and “In a Sentimental Mood.”

Scott Joplin, the “King of Ragtime,” proficient on several instruments including cornet, guitar, banjo and mandolin, was most recognized as an accomplished pianist. The Macungie Band performs one of Joplin’s lesser-known works, “Palm Leaf Rag,” composed in 1903.

Historically, the traditional concert band was a merger of brass bands, which accompanied military regiments, and the wind section of an orchestra with performance of marches, an important part of the American concert band repertoire. As such, marches are interspersed throughout the concert.

To mark the Macungie Band’s 150th anniversary, the band engaged Lewis J. Buckley, Conductor Laureate of the United States Coast Guard Band, to compose a march that would incorporate the various musical styles which occurred since the band’s establishment in 1855. The premiere performance of the “Macungie Band Sesquicentennial March” occurred in August 2005 conducted by composer Buckley.

Sergeant Louis Saverino, tuba player with “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band, composed “March of the Women Marines” to celebrate the establishment of the U.S. Marine Corps Women’s Reserve (1943).

The audience will enjoy additional marches such as “The Caravan Club,” a circus march by Karl King, and “The Klaxon” by circus bandmaster Henry Fillmore, as well as several selections by John Philip Sousa.

Composed in 1926 at the request of then Detroit, Mich., Mayor John W. Smith, Sousa composed “Pride of the Wolverines,” declared the official march of Detroit.

Early in 1918, while Sousa was paying a visit to Allentown, he was invited to Camp Crane (site of the Allentown Fairgrounds), a World War I training ground for hundreds of volunteers of the United States Army Ambulance Corps (USAAC), who would become battlefield medics and ambulance personnel evacuating wounded from the front lines. Asked to compose a march, Sousa obliged with a piano score of “The USAAC March.”

Nearly five decades later, well-known musician, conductor, composer and Allentown Band trombonist Ray S. Wetherhold retrieved a copy of the piano score from the U.S. Library of Congress and created a band arrangement. The march debuted in 1967 at the 50-year reunion of the surviving USAACs, performed by the Allentown Band under the baton of Sousa Band alumnus and Allentown Band conductor Albertus Meyers.

The concert closes with the Macungie Band’s traditional finale, John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

“Macungie Band - In Concert,” 6 p.m. June 30, Emmaus Community Park, 1330 Chestnut St., Emmaus; Tickets not required. Information: https://www.macungieband.com/

“Classical View” is a column about classical music concerts, conductors and performers. To request coverage, email: Paul Willistein, Focus editor, pwillistein@tnonline.com