Bronco Pride 03-03-08

Horns up!

That’s what I remember from this year’s MCEL Music Festival. I heard the command issued by Hill City Junior High musicians, and many times our Bronco instrumentalists raised their horns with the crispness and precision of a military salute.

Of all the wind ensembles I watched, we were the only school who demonstrated such showmanship – which only began with the wind instruments. Our bands, our choirs, and our vocal soloists all followed suit with a higher standard of performance.

The results speak for themselves: out of thirty-seven Hill City performances, nineteen earned a I, and two earned the highest mark of AP, or Advanced Performance.

The results of the day and the level of preparation I saw in our musicians made me very proud to be associated with these wonderful students. They performed in duets, trios, and in fours. We took small ensembles and an entire 7th and 8th grade chorus. Our students often sang and played from memory, and always they did their best.

I had a chance to visit with other league principals and was discouraged to learn, overall, that the number of participants at this year’s League Music Festival were down, especially in band and instrumental areas.

In our league junior high schools, band remains one of the few, (if not the only) true elective. This is one of the biggest differences between junior high and high school: high school students have many choices of electives. They are free to pick and chose. In Junior High, you can either be in band or not be in band. Increasingly, I am learning that many students at this difficult and very impressionable age are choosing not to be in band.

But this article is not about those students. It is a tribute to those kids who stuck with the hours of practice, the sometimes tedious rehearsals, and the incredible difficulty of trying to make some piece of wood or medal make not only a recognizable noise but, you hope, play a beautiful series of music when everyone is watching, listening, and judging.

I played the trumpet in junior high, and I quit band as an eighth grader, over what I attributed to a personality conflict with the teacher. I now see the decision to drop coming more from a need to have some control over my adolescent life. Band was my only elective, and as a skinny eighth grade trumpeter, I suppose I liked the attention I garnered from turning my back on my band teacher.

So it was with a great deal of pride that I watched our brave 7th and 8th grade students at League Music. They had every opportunity (and perhaps even some peer-pressure) to quit, but rather, remained, applied themselves, and excelled. It takes an amazing amount of courage and perseverance to play or sing a solo or to perform with others in front of a judge and audience – more courage than I had in junior high.

So, let us all commend our singers for opening their mouths, and our instrumentalists for the spirited way they raised their horns before a song. They all put on quite a show and gave us one more example of Bronco Pride.