If you are reading this, there’s a chance you are a musician. And whether you are an accomplished professional or an amateur, you are able to read and play music. Think about how you learned to do it and who taught you. (more…)
The Los Altos Community Foundation celebrated their Honorary Founder John W. Gardner’s legacy at the 2016 Gardner Awards Dinner on April 7th. TACO was recognized (more…)
TACO Founder Cathy Humphers Smith will be honored at the Los Altos Community Foundation’s Gardner Volunteer Award Dinner on April 7th.
The Gardner Award is given to outstanding volunteers in our community who have exhibited civic entrepreneurship and service. Cathy will be honored for her 5+ years of leadership and dedication to TACO, and for all of the work she has done to make TACO such a huge success.
Join TACO members on April 7that 5:30 at the Crowne Plaza Cabana Hotel (4290 El Camino Real, Palo Alto). Tickets to the event can be purchased (more…)
Prima Vista is Italian for ‘first view’ and in music it is also called ‘sight-reading’. In TACO, we sight-read as an orchestra every time we get together, playing through a piece of music for the first time as a group. How do we do it and why is it important
Join TACO members on Sunday, November 29th from 4 to 5 pm. to sing-along with our orchestra! We meet at the Los Altos Youth Center (LAYC), 1 North San Antonio Road, in downtown Los Altos. The LAYC is between the city hall and the library, and next to the police Read more…
To understand the importance of the existence of TACO it is necessary to understand the meaning of its absence. Without TACO possibly hundreds of people will have wasted thousands of hours of music practice, rehearsals and recitals, and countless dollars on lessons. Hundreds of musical instruments would be collecting dust Read more…
If you’re lucky enough to already know how to play an instrument or brave enough to want to learn to play an instrument, you’ll participate in one of the most effective ways to reduce stress: play music. Alone or with others, to play music is to transport yourself to a different place. Read more…
The TACO fall season opened with old favourites from Vivaldi to Beethoven, Borodin to Rossini, interrupted by a Flash mob dancing to You Got The Power. You never know what surprises you’ll find at a TACO gathering! Musicians who come to our reading sessions will enjoy varied new musical additions Read more…
TACO musicians gather on May 25th and June 29th for regular sessions to play marches, waltzes, symphonic favorites, jazzy tunes and orchestral arrangements of popular songs. Some of the planned rehearsal music will also be performed at a summer concert with the original Really Terrible Orchestra at the Fringe Festival Read more…
TACO is performing with students from the Music Educators Workshop Ensemble (MEWE) at San Jose State University on Thursday evening, April 24th. But you wonder, “TACO is a social sight-reading orchestra and does not perform!” As a matter of fact, TACO musicians have enjoyed occasional public performances when the audience Read more…