A History of Music and I, Part Six

Welcome to part 6 of A History of Music and I, this post will focus on high school concert band between 10th and 12th grades and All County Band for those years also. So freshman year band was interesting, but there was more in store for me as an upperclassman. My sophomore year introduced to me what would become a regular fixture until I graduated: student teachers. Each student teacher was around for a semester and each student teacher had their own way of going about music. A few of them even got teaching gigs at schools in the county, most notably Mr. Scott who took over when Mr. Kilby took up the mantle of band director at Severna Park High right after I graduated from high school, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Back to my days in the band. Another year of band at Meade High meant another year of at least one John Philip Sousa march, which was fine by me as I enjoyed his sound. So I don't remember as much of the repertoire we performed during those three years (thankfully I kept all the concert programs, ha ha!), but I do remember Mr. Scott leading the band through Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, which was interesting because there were so many time signature changes, and not all of them were 4/4 to 3/4, there were measures of 6/4 and 5/4 to contend with, and I'm pretty sure there were some time signatures where the eight was in the musical "denominator". Band festivals were interesting as we performed to be judged, but that meant I was out of school for the day and eating not school food. I seem to remember events better than what I played, I'm not sure how I feel about not remembering everything though. Anyways, I was in All County Band each year. Sophomore year All County Band we got our chance to play A+, a piece in which a few mistakes are allowed and mathematically calculated to ensure that even with mistakes the band still performed at an A+ level. Junior year All County Band was held at my high school, which meant I missed school while at school, whoo! Meade High band tended to do well with the amount of musicians in the All County Band while I attended high school. I forgot to mention in my last post that at graduation, the band and the orchestra play the Pomp and Circumstance procession, the recession, and a performance piece. The procession always took the longest as the graduating seniors were told to walk in at a stately pace while I enjoyed the recession more as there was more fanfare in the music and everyone had a pep in their step. I played all three pieces between 9th and 11th grades while in 12th I played only the performance piece. I never made first chair, but that was okay, 2nd and 3rd chair was good in a section of 12-15 clarinets.

Stay tuned, I'll be trying to recall my jazz band career next.