By: Kevin Dai
The marching band season has come to an end with its last competition being held at Fairfield High School.
Out of twenty schools at the competition, the MHS Marching Band ended second in their division and received two sweepstakes awards, overall awards for general performance and visual arts, Marching Band Director Chris Kaldy said. The band also placed second in brass and woodwinds overall. Kaldy was pleased with how the marching band did this season, especially with the problems they encountered, he explained.
“We had a lot of new people this year and so just getting everybody all on the same page and performing together and understanding how that all was gonna work out was definitely a challenge for us, but we made it work,” Kaldy said.
The North Bay fires were also a major obstacle because they canceled the first competition which disrupted the tempo of the band, and resulted in the first major competition being held in Fresno, according to Kaldy. This was a shock especially to new players who have never been to a competition before.
While the marching band season did not have a favorable start, it was only a matter of time before the band started to pick up its momentum. “Most of our competitions we didn’t really place that much. We didn’t perform up to the level that we all wanted to. It wasn’t until the last couple of competitions that we started actually winning stuff,” Trumpet Section Leader Harrison Lok said.
Overall, the band did well this season even if it wasn’t as good as they wanted to be according Lok.
Mellophone Player Michelle Wang and Clarinet Section Leader Lawrence Su felt that this season was not up-to-par with their standards. Wang felt that the reason for their poor performance was their efforts at practice. “Maybe if we practiced like we would have competed with passion, instead of just going through the movement. If we actually went through it like we actually wanted to sing,” Wang said. Su thought the performance of the band was too inconsistent. “It [The band’s overall performance] was just randomness. One competition we’d do super well and one we’d do really bad,” Su said.
To Clarinet Player Julianni Fernandez, the marching band season’s performance was right in the middle. However, there would be moments where the band would hit the ‘right spots’ and receive awards according to Fernandez. Fernandez thought that the increased frequency of sectionals, one-on-one time with your section leader, really helped improved the quality of the music and achieve those ‘right spots.’
Color Guard Captain Virginia Lien, who has been doing color guard for the past four years, feels that this season was overall less than average, but they still managed. “I think, since the beginning, we changed instructors, that kind of threw us off. It was all good at the end,” Lien said. “I think it could have been better, but it was more like how we didn’t give as much dedication as we have done in the past, but I’m very happy with what we came up with in the end.”
Although it seemed that the marching band season was not as great as many hoped it to be, the experience was an enjoyable one that one should do again according to Lok and Wang. The marching band kept a positive attitude which paid off as reflected by the results in the last competition according to Junior Jeremey Moncada.
“They finally got there and you know it just took a little longer than expected,” Kaldy said.
