MISQUAH — Band camp opened Monday morning at Lakeside, and by Wednesday afternoon the evidence was audible from the water tower, as it is every July: the bright, hopeful, not-quite-music of thirty-some children rediscovering their instruments after a summer month away from them.

This year the sound comes under new direction. Hannah Moe, a 2014 Lakeside graduate who played in this same band as a girl, has taken the podium for her first summer, succeeding Phil Brekke, who directed the Pike bands for thirty-one years and retired in the spring to, in his words, “sit somewhere quiet for a while.” Ms. Moe inherits his baton, his music library, and his standing tradition of promising parents that melody will arrive by August.

“The first week is always the loudest and the worst,” Ms. Moe said, cheerfully, over the sound of a trombone section finding its way. “That’s not an insult. That’s just physics. You take a month off and a thirteen-year-old, and you get what you get. By the concert they’ll surprise everybody, including themselves. They always do. Mr. Brekke told me that and I didn’t believe him and now I do.”

The camp runs mornings through the end of the month and builds toward the traditional end-of-summer concert on the school lawn, the one event of the year at which the whole town willingly sits on folding chairs to hear children play, and applauds as though it had never heard anything finer, because in the way that matters it hasn’t. Mr. Brekke has been invited, and is expected, and has been warned he may be asked to stand up and be thanked, a prospect he received without enthusiasm and without refusing.

The band camp is one of several signs of a school year already assembling itself behind the summer. Paul Reardon will take over the science rooms in the fall; Megan Tollefson, a fellow 2014-era graduate, is minding the public library while Ruth Aune recovers (see News); and the district’s newly named fall spelling bee, the Doris Knutson Spelldown, is set for the last Friday of September in the same gymnasium where the band will, in six weeks, mercifully, sound like a band.

For now it does not, quite, and that is exactly as it should be. Ms. Moe asks only the town’s patience, and its attendance at the concert, and its understanding that the moose-in-distress quality currently issuing from the direction of the school is temporary, seasonal, and, in its way, one of the better sounds this town makes.