The young musician sits in his chair, sweat forming on his left eyebrow. He wipes the nuisance with his polyester suit as the conductor enters onto his podium. He raises his hands, scanning the band for confirmation that they are ready to perform the piece.
This was the scene on January 30th when eight Jesuit-Ursuline Ranger Band members joined in unison with selected TPSMEA All-State Band members at the Charles W. Eisemann Center for Performing Arts. Beginning on the preceding Friday, the select members of the band rehearsed and met with other top musicians from the state, ranging from grades 8-12.
Among the students on the trip, Daniel Ritter ’17 revisited the unique experience of All-State for the third time. He explained that, “This was not my first time at All-State. I also attended my freshman and sophomore years. I didn’t really do anything differently from the past years except maybe doing more homework to avoid make up work the next week.” Ritter, along with his other seven classmates on the trip, took time out of their hectic school-weeks to go on the trip.
A departure from the normal routine, from daily band rehearsals, the All-State band is “kind of like the Pro-Bowl or the All-Star game of band,” remarks Mr. Zane Crownover, Assistant Director of the Jesuit-Ursuline Ranger Band (JURB). He continues, saying, “The best students from around the state compete and the best are selected… With having so many musicians in one place, you can do much more challenging music.” Ritter, in the same vein, sees that, “The music we played in the all-state band was more challenging than most of our band pieces, although probably not harder than something like Incantation and Dance. Although the music is challenging, the biggest difficulty is the time constraints. The regular band has several months to perfect concert band pieces while the all-state band has just 2 days to learn a lot of difficult music.” Additionally, Zach Watts ’17 added that, “The music at All-State Band is generally faster and contains more dynamic contrast than most of the music that we play in the JURB, and this difference in the music is audible with the relatively heightened skill levels of the musicians compared to those here in the JURB. I found most of it quite fun, although I wish that we had more time to be able to practice the music instead of sight-reading most of it at All-State.”
However, the trip’s demanding schedule comes with a sweet reward: time to relax. Watts’s experience when he wasn’t in rehearsal consisted of “[doing] homework and [eating]”, but others used it to play video games on their computers or iPads (or do homework – I wasn’t the only one). On Friday night, the directors took us to Dave and Buster’s for dinner and to have fun. Overall, it was a great experience, and I would definitely do it again.”
