The 19th Annual District Concert took place on April 9 in the MHS gym, featuring performances by students from the district’s elementary, middle, and high schools. The gym was packed with spectators of all three levels of school. The whole concert was really nice with musicians playing famous songs like ‘Happy’ by Pharell Williams and many more popular songs.
The concert is all about building a community and also a way of recruiting younger kids to take band at MHS, Director of Bands Kylie Ward said.
“The concert is all about community, and it’s all about recruitment and inspiration,” Ward said. “So for the high schoolers, I wanted them to have some nostalgia and look back at where they started and have some pride in how far they’ve come.”
Ward was proud about how both of her classes combined together played very well during the performance, she said.
“So this was actually two of my classes that combined,” she said. “We’ve done this before and the first time we did it, it didn’t go quite as well. The music still sounded good, but they didn’t really connect. I think the thing I’m most proud of this concert was they sounded like they’ve been playing together every single day, because they just became one and they work together to make it sound really good.”
Since there were kids of all ages, Ward had to chose a song for her students to perform that people would recognize, she said.
“We purposely chose Pixar movie magic, because it’s songs that people would recognize, it’s songs that the kids would like and find super cool,” Ward said. “There’s a kind of mix of everything.”
The biggest challenge for this concert was combining two of her classes together, Ward said.
“Getting everyone to fit inside this room was also a challenge,” she said. “But I think that if people work together, things can happen like that and they did .”
The main goal of the concert was to play music that got the audiences’ attention, Rancho Middle School music teacher Michael Vieyra said.
“I wanted to play music that was capturing the audience’s attention, that they’d have fun playing, that they will learn from, and that would also impress younger and possibly even the high school kids by their level of playing,” Vieyra said.
Events like this are important as the involvement of students brings a lot of joy to the community, Vieyra added.
“There’s a lot of positive things that come from being a musician, and then the kids were involved,” Vieyra said. “You can see the different levels of their abilities, and it’s just all one continuation. And I want the kids — as many as possible — to continue and stay and to join in music.”
Performing in front of younger kids means you get to show how things are done, junior Cole Heraldo said.
“I think I don’t just speak for myself here, but a lot of people feel like, we’re the bigger kids here and we need to show them how to do things and what it’s like to be a high schooler in music,” Heraldo said.
Experience matters when it comes to perform in large crowds, he added.
“I think lots of experience comes with it,” Heraldo said. “Just having all that years of like putting out myself out there definitely helps.”
