Visiting musicians perform symposium
Fifty-four top musicians from high schools in Idaho, Wyoming and Utah came to the Kent Concert Hall this weekend for two days of musical practice and performance at the Tri-State High School Band Symposium.
The visiting musicians performed music they had seen for the first time on Friday.
USU’s Director of Bands Thomas Rohrer said the symposium is a recruiting opportunity as well as educational.
“When I was in high school, I wish I had something like this to go to,” said Nathan Ward, USU band secretary.
This is the second of the tri-state band symposiums, the first of which was in January.
Since August, the USU Band Council had been planning for this event, including sending the invitations to the high schools, choosing students from the nominations and inviting guest conductor Rob McWilliams.
In the mailer, the band council encouraged directors from the regions to choose their top five students based on their experience and talent.
The nominees were typed into a database to organize them by instrument and decide who would be the best choice based on descriptions from the directors.
McWilliams, director of bands at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, chose the music for the students to perform.
“You never quite know what the students are going to be capable of so you guess a little bit, but I felt like I picked the right choices,” McWilliams said.
After the performance, he commended the high school band directors for teaching them enough to get to this point.
“It was very enjoyable,” he said. “I was very impressed with the students in terms of their attention and their focus, and they worked really hard and really responded to things I was asking them to do.”
New to the event this year was a sampler from the different band ensembles before the tri-state band took the stage.
The one-hour sampler included the Wind Orchestra, Jazz Combo, Flute Choir, Clarinet Choir, Jazz Orchestra, percussion duet, Caine Saxophone Ensemble and Trombone Ensemble, and the Wind Orchestra and the Symphonic Band combined for the final number, “Godzilla Eats Las Vegas.”
The final performance had a PowerPoint display with pictures and captions to tell the story of Godzilla. All the musical numbers were songs the ensembles performed earlier in the semester.
After the sampler, the Tri-State band took the stage to perform five arrangements, four of which were chosen by McWilliams, and the other was conducted and chosen by Rohrer.
-ranae.bang@aggiemail.usu.edu