A History of Barnstable Town Band Conductors
2009 – Present – Patrick Riley
The Barnstable Town Band has been conducted by Patrick Riley since its 2009 season, including some time where he co-conducted the band with Alex Pendleton (see below). “Pat” is a former music instructor in the Dennis-Yarmouth Regional School District who is currently (2024) the Principal of the Truro Central School District. Pat oversees a wide range of BTB band members from High School age to Cape residents in their later senior years, amateurs and professionals alike.
While a music instructor in the Dennis-Yarmouth Regional School District (2004 – 2013), Pat guided fourth and fifth graders through their first forays with wind instruments. According to Pat, directing an elementary school band is an undertaking that requires patience — and, when a headache strikes, “a fair amount of aspirin.” Pat has also directed the Cape Cod New Horizons Band, which includes many older adults looking to dust off instruments that have gone untouched for decades. Some members are newcomers to music. A band dominated by seniors, however, comes with a different set of challenges, and sometimes requires a different type of patience. Such experience has well prepared him to be able to use the broad range of BTB backgrounds and talents from all over the Cape and bring everyone together to perform an assortment of marches, showtunes, and other concert pieces.
Pat made the leap from music to administration in 2013, when he was offered the position of dean of students at the Station Avenue Elementary School. “I really enjoyed working with different people across the school district,” he said. By 2015, he was Station Avenue’s assistant principal, and, in 2016, he became principal of Marguerite E. Small Elementary in Yarmouth. When the principal’s job at Truro Central School (TCS) was posted on the Dennis-Yarmouth district’s website, he applied. “I was really interested in getting to know a new part of Cape Cod,” Riley said. “I’d been in the Mid Cape for my whole career.” Pat is currently Principal of the Ezra H. Baker Innovation School is West Dennis.
2012– 2013 – Alex Pendleton
Alex Pendleton was originally a performing member of the Barnstable Band in his early days, but went on to co-conduct it in the 2012-2013 timeframe, alternating concert performances with Pat Riley. Alex is also a proud alumnus of the D-Y School District where he began his musical training as a clarinetist and conductor.
Alex has most recently been a music teacher in the Dennis-Yarmouth Regional School District for more than 20 years where he and his students have won various awards and championships after he had been appointed to the full time position of Band Director in 2004, and then going on to becoming Department Head of the Music & Performing Arts Department. Alex’s extensive teaching experience, along with his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Education has provided him with the valuable skills he effectively uses helping and educating. One of his proudest personal achievements was in 2013 when he was voted “Educator of the Year” by the faculty of the Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School. As the Music & Performing Arts Department Chair, he directs and oversees the 200-member Concert Band, Jazz Band, Marching Band, Winter Percussion, Color Guard, and other various music courses.
Along with his teaching responsibilities at D-Y, Alex is an active musician and member of the Cape Cod Music Educators Association, Director of the New Horizons Band, and co-manager of the All-Cape Jazz Festival.
2007– 2008 – Paul D’Angelo
Paul J. D’Angelo dedicated his life to performing music and encouraging the arts. His graduate degrees in Theater and Education were earned when he was a career music and drama educator in Norwell, Massachusetts. Previously, during the Vietnam war, he was a bandmaster in the U. S. Coast Guard and eventually retired as a Reserve Officer. He was fortunate to have studied with many world-class musical artists at the University of Miami, The New England Conservatory and with Nadia Boulanger and others in France. He performed with and led several orchestras and conducted more than twenty Broadway shows.
Paul owned Plymouth Music Inc., a retail music store where the six-teacher lesson program served many music students for fourteen years. He recently completed a musical comedy, “The New Emerald City” and an operatic tragedy, “Daughter of an Oath.” Both were reworked from the exit papers required by his Bridgewater degrees.
Recently, Paul was the 2024 Recipient of the Dr. Adrian Tinsley Award for Achievement in the Arts, Paul D’Angelo, G’85, G’90! This award is presented to a distinguished alumnus/na who has demonstrated outstanding artistic achievement or whose leadership has been exemplary in the preservation and promotion of the arts.
2006? – 2007? – Berke McKelvey
Berke McKelvey is currently an Assistant Professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston. In addition to being a past conductor of the Barnstable Town Band, he has been with The Moonlighters Big Band, the Cape Cod Sax Quartet, The Experimental Ensemble of Cape Cod and has taught music privately in the Cape area,
Beyond the Cape, he has appeared with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Opera Orchestra, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, and the Cape Cod Symphony. Berke has also performed with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Gladys Knight & The Pips, The Temptations, and numerous local jazz and rock combos. As a session musician, he has performed as a pit player in more than 30 musicals.
2004?– 2005? – Albert J. Madden
Al Madden [b. 1918 – d. 2018] had proudly served his country as a member of the United States Army during WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. “Al” was an accomplished musician and played in the Army’s 9th Infantry Division Band, Big Bands, as well as in the Barnstable Town Band for many years.
While he could certainly play the pop tunes of the big band era and beyond, it was his rendition of taps at veterans observances, memorials and funerals for which he will be most remembered, including the Cape Cod 50th anniversary of WWII and Korean War Memorial. Realizing in his later years that playing taps was becoming a lost art due to the use of mostly recordings, Madden would don his military uniform and play at veterans’ funerals upon request, countless times. In fact, in 2010 at the age of 92, he was invited by the Pentagon to play taps on arguably the melancholy bugle call’s biggest stage: Arlington National Cemetery, he thus became one of the oldest buglers, using the oldest horn, to ever play taps at the Arlington Cemetery.
in 2018, at the age of 100, Al Madden passed away leaving behind a musical legacy that began as a child at the age of 6 playing the bugle, trumpet and cornet that lasted a lifetime.
1969 – 1972 – John P. Hagon, &
1976 – 2004 – John P. Hagon
John Hagon may be the best known conductor throughout all of Cape Cod and the longest term conductor of the Barnstable Town Band – a term spanning some 30 years!.
John was a former clarinet player, having played the instrument since 4th grade! That inauspicious beginning would serve him well in later years as he entered into the music education field (first obtaining a Music Education degree from the University of Wisconsin, and later a Masters from Boston University) and served as an entry point to a good number of musical organizations, many of which he would eventually end up conducting! In fact, playing, teaching, and then conducting is the progressive theme that would play out repeatedly during his lifetime,
John first arrived on the Cape in 1967 as a teacher and conductor at Barnstable High School. By 1969 he became the head of the Barnstable High School Music Department through 1973. In 1978 he joined the faculty of Berklee College of Music in Boston, becoming the Chairman of their Music Education Department in 1981. However during all this time he continued his involvement in the Cape music scene, starting as a clarinet player for a year with the Barnstable Town Band in 1969 and becoming its Musical Conductor for about 30 years thereafter! Similarly, John began as a clarinet player with the 215th Army National Guard Band of Fall River some time after settling on the Cape and eventually began conducting that band afterward, as well.
His direct involvement with Cape music continued to extend across the mid-Cape area where he began conducting the Harwich Town Band in 1982 for more than a dozen years, while acting as guest-conductor with the Sandwich Town Band (ca. 1992). In 1995, John became the Conductor of the local Cape Cod Concert Band, where he was known to occasionally present Sousa-themed concerts which he conducted dressed as the famous march master, John Philip Sousa. In 2001, John ventured into the world of stringed instruments when taking the helm of the Cape Community Orchestra.
John is also known here on the Cape for any number of other musical ventures over the years, including taking on the task of Music Director for a number of the theatric productions at the Barnstable Comedy Club and the Academy Playhouse in Orleans.
1969 – Wilfred (Will) J. Harrigan
Will Harrigan has been involved with music in the Mid-Cape area for many years. He had been aninstructor of instrumental music starting in the mid-1970s at the (former) Middle School. His involvement with town bands included being the conductor of the Sandwich Town Band for a number of years in addition to his time with the Barnstable Town Band. He muscial involved included the Cape Cod Conservatory and the Berklee College of Music. Being also a reed instumentalist, Will played lead Sax with his local Mid-Cape musical group called The Flip Side. The group performed a variety of folk and blues music with a jazzy feel and included vocalists, guitar and keyboard accompaniment.
1974 – 1976 – Gary Thomas
1950 – TBD – Benjamin F. Teel, Founder
Benjamin F. Teel [b. 1876 – d. 1962] is credited with the original organization of the Osterville Band in 1950 which two years later became the Barnstable Band. From the late 1890s through at least 1922 he was the bandleader of Teel’s Band of Boston and became the Bandmaster of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company prior to 1908. Around the time of WW1, he began recruiting about 80 trained musicians for the new Massachusetts State Calvary Regiment to enlist as part of the US Army and offer their services to the US War Department for either guard duty at the Mexican Border or to be sent to France with a calvary unit.
In 1932, while he was a resident of Centerville, he was the organizer and the original conductor of the Cape Cod Band during their initial public concert at the Hyannis Theater on June 5, 1932. The band was comprised of musicians from all areas of Barnstable County. The performance included a soprano guest artist and a performance by the State Teachers’ College Glee Club.
Benjamin Teel, as well as his father, were in the real estate business in Boston for many years before he and his family became residents in Centerville around the 1930s. He then became intimately involved in the real estate business on the Cape. In addition to his development of the Cape Centerville Estate, he helped initiate the Cape Cod Board of Realtors where he was an executive officer for 20 years and served as its president from 1948 to 1951. He also served as a director for the State Board for Real Estate Appraisers, the state and national Board of Realtors, and the National Secretaries Council of the Board of Realtors.
Mr. Teel was also a civic minded individual, having been a member of the Hyannis Rotary Club and the Roxbury/Washington Lodge of the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons, as well as the Board of Musicians Association.
Given the aforementioned experience, it was not an unfamiliar task when Benjamin Teel while still a resident of Centerville, undertook the organization of the Osterville Band in 1950 as only the second town-affiliated band on the Cape. Three years later, in 1953, the band was renamed The Barnstable Band and in 1955 the Town of Barnstable voted to raise and appropriate approximately $1000 for the erection of a shell bandstand on the grounds of the Maritime Academy in Hyannis. Benjamin Teel was appointed to be part of the committee to work with the Selectmen to carry this out. But that is the beginning of another whole story.
