1st Draft of Project One
The band room is a sacred and safe place to every musician. We spend four years in the same room, making music with each other, bonding with not only the people around you but the instruments and your director. I met my best friends in that same room that I found my passion for music. I’ve been playing the flute for almost eight years, in which I was principal flute player in the Wind Ensemble and Symphony Orchestra and one of the top players in the Osceola All-County band. The classical music community is where I feel safest and the closest to being home, where I made a family to call my own. Every year is a new adventure, with new pieces, and new people that teach you a different lesson about your instrument and yourself. There are a multitude of concerts, events, festivals, and performances that come every year. One of the most pivotal performances of the year, for both band and orchestra, being the Music Performance Assessment, or M.P.A, which happens in mid-March.
In Wind Ensemble, the preparation for M.P.A begins in the summer July band camp, where the three pieces that will be performed are introduced and rehearsed for two weeks. We don’t see those pieces again until January, when the real preparation begins. My senior year we the three pieces we played were “Italian in Algiers”, “Council Oak”, and “Commando March”. In March, we went to Celebration High School to perform the three pieces. Each judge is given a judger’s sheet in which all of the criteria for that type of piece is pre-written so all they need to do is give a grade next to each category, which is one genre found in the M.P.A. However, that is not the only genre, there is also a professional audio recording of each song that is sent back to each band. There is also a voice recording of the judge’s comments that each band receives so as to get a more descriptive detail of the judge’s findings. Which is more helpful than the vague and uniform categories found on the judge’s sheet.
In Symphony Orchestra, M.P.A preparation is not as intense as in Wind Ensemble. We get our three pieces in late January and begin rehearsing soon after. When late March rolls around and we find ourselves at Oak Ridge High school performing the final movement of Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” and bowing to the audience. Much like for the Wind Ensemble the Symphony Orchestra receives a judge’s sheet, along with an audio recording of their performance, and a voice recording of the judge’s comments. On top of that, the Symphony Orchestra has video recordings of each director conducting his/her orchestra, with judges’ comments on their individual performance. The ratings themselves are a genre, being printed along with every other schools and hung up on the doors, ranking from “Superior” which is the best, and “Poor” being the worst. In Osceola county, superiors are a must, it is quite competitive between schools, leaving our goal to be to get straight Superiors.
To have participated in both Wind Ensemble and Symphony Orchestra M.P.A I got to witness firsthand the differences between how each performance occurs. It’s astonishing to find such large differences in seemingly similar groups. For example, there is a specific category of judging for sight reading. The sight reading is composed of the band or orchestra reading two brand new pieces, that they have never seen before. The differences begin here, while in Wind Ensemble the band reads an overture and a march, the Symphony Orchestra reads one concerto and one symphony. However, it doesn’t end there, the band goes into a separate room and continues with the proposed sight reading. While, in Symphony Orchestra, the group stays on stage after their performance and does the sight reading in front of the audience. There is also a difference in the post M.P.A setting, where in Wind Ensemble there is a Performance reflection assignment that asks you to reflect on the concert and analyze your performance with a various set of questions. In Symphony Orchestra there was no assessment or analyzation of the performance, only a group listening of the tape and reading of the judges’ comments. It is interesting to see how communities and sub-communities work together. Being a part of the classical music community but then also a part of the individual Wind Ensemble and Symphony Orchestra is especially fascinating. I’m thankful to get to experience the social differences and musical differences present in both ensembles.
