Our Year So Far

We are now starting the fourth week of the school year, and it's time to take stock of what we have so far...

This year, we have our largest marching band since the 1980s! 72 members strong, and we've already performed our first halftime show. We received great audience response, and watching the video afterwards, I can truly say I am very pleased with the results. This Friday night we'll be playing a Motown show that will feature the varsity and JV squads of the DHS Dance Team--almost 130 performers on the field at one time! It's been too many years since we've combined our efforts, so this show will be something special. We hope to see you there!

Symphonic Band is off to a great start. It's definitely one of the strongest SB's we've had since moving to three bands in 1998. We are playing some challenging music, and our performance at Potpourri on September 20 should be very exciting. We are playing a march by Henry Fillmore and a fanfare by my favorite composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams. I expect to be pushing this group all year to work on a higher level of difficulty than in the past.

The Concert Band is a bit small, but there are a number of very talented musicians. The challenge every year is to take students who come from several different middle school bands and mold them into a single, cohesive high school ensemble. That means we'll be working on a lot of fundamentals to get everyone on the same page. I will also be putting advanced players into small chamber ensembles so they can work on more technical music with our senior leaders during rehearsal time.

The Jazz Band will have their first performance this Thursday at Open House. We'll be in the bookstore lobby, playing classic tunes by legendary musicians like Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk. We're also learning all of our modes (dorian, mixolydian, lydian, and phrygian) so we can explore modal improvisation. Soon, we'll be narrowing down our repertoire to create a 3-tune set for the November concert.

The Music Theory class is very large this year--23 students. A big change is the conversion to a Mac-based music lab, which we share with the art students across the hall. We spent the period in there last Friday getting acquainted with Apple's GarageBand software. It was fun to see everybody so engaged in creating music by combing pre-made loops with their own ideas. This week we'll begin to hear their first round of free compositions--always an exciting time.

Wind Ensemble is going well as they also prepare a march and a fanfare for Potpourri. In addition, we've been working on some Renaissance music and a landmark piece by Vaughan Williams. Every year in SB and WE, we focus on two composers, one from the British tradition and one American. Last year we spent a lot of time on Percy Grainger and Aaron Copland; this year it's Vaughan Williams and Leonard Bernstein. You can look forward to hearing some of Mr. Bernstein's music this spring. In between, we'll study the music of African-American musicians and the Baroque music of J.S. Bach.

So, there's a quick update on what's been going on in the DHS Band and Music Theory program. I hope to see all of our students' parents and guardians this Thursday at Open House. Until then, best wishes for a happy and musical fall!