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On Monday this week my high school band had the oppurtunity to play at the Boston Symphony Hall during the Heritage Festival of Gold (a festival for exceptional high school bands and orchestras from around the country).
It...was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. I'm sure anybody that has every been to the Boston Symphony Hall can attest to how incredible its acoustics are. Actually playing in it is even more extraordinary. After playing our warm up scale and hearing the reverberation in the hall we all knew that we were in for something extremely special. It's hard to describe, but in a way you are able to hear yourself and every other instrument at the same time, in a near perfect balance. Wow.
We'll be the first to admit that we were scared to death before the performance--we had heard some absolutely fabulous bands play. Although this wasn't necassarily a competition (the bands were given scores, but not ranked with the others--although the best was given the chance to play an encore concert that night) we still wanted to do our best. But we had thoughts of "we could never play that good!" and "we...really stink compared to them". Those things really lowered our self-confidence. But our band director gave us a "pep talk" so to speak, which helped boost our confidence without making us think that playing better then all the other bands was the main priority.
And I think I can say, without sounding arrogant or too egotistical, since this was a group effort, that we played fantastically. It was probably our best performance of those pieces to date--thanks to everybody in the band concentrating their hardest, the amazing hall, and our great director. We received a standing ovation, and a ton of the members of the band were crying as we left the stage.
We didn't play the the encore concert but it really didn't matter to us. We, a high school band, had the honor to play in on of the best concert halls in the world and we were able to come away from it knowing that we had done our best. It was an experience that I will never forget.
Posts: 290 | Registered: Sep 2002
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Thanks everyone, and yes, we did have a great time in the other parts of Boston. We didn't get to do as much sight-seeing as I would have liked to, but that's all right (most of the people in my group wanted to go shopping more then see the historic sights. Ugh.)
And the three pieces we played were:
Yamanobe no Michi by Itaru Sakai, a Japanese style march
The Promise of Living by Aaron Copland
And Chester, which was a tune originally written by William Billings. We played an awesome arrangement of it by William Schumann.
Posts: 290 | Registered: Sep 2002
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