Each and every year, the Joliet Township Orchestra is invited to perform at Bicentennial Park as the anticipated opening act. For the musicians performing, it can be a stressful and nerve racking experience since the school year has just began. While not many students attend the concert, an enormous amount of parents and siblings attend and enjoy it. Some parents even bring lawn chairs or blankets to sit on instead of sitting in the grass. The orchestra’s performance at Bicentennial is usually referred to as concert on the hill. This year it took place on Thursday, August 29. Music began to play at 6:30. The concert began with The Star Spangled Banner being played and accompanied by a man singing the lyrics. There was a piece titled Instant Concert. It contained about thirty various tunes throughout the entirety of the piece. It was a very fun and upbeat song to listen to. A few pieces later, a Beatles song was the next one to stick out to the crowd. It was an arrangement of Eleanor Rigby for strings. It was enjoyable and a familiar sound to all the ears of the Beatles lovers in the audience. There are some traditions to the pieces played by the orchestra. Two specific pieces are: Incantations by Richard Meyer and Palladio by Karl Jenkins. These two songs are played annually. Traditionally, the ending piece of the orchestra’s performance is Palladio. Coincidently, the piece previous to Palladio is majority of the time, Incantations. Both pieces are at a faster tempo; Incantations has an eerie tone to it while Palladio is more intense and repetitive. The Joliet Steelmen Strings did a wonderful job during their concert. Whatever difficulties that may have been faced during rehearsals, they seemed to simply vanish once the performance began.