In one of my previous articles “School Spirit” I had talked about the instruments we played in our school. Now, in grade 7, I had the privilege of being able to join Intermediate band for grade sevens and eights! There are over 60 students in our band and we get together to rehearse our songs every Tuesday at lunch. Earlier this winter we had our annual LBP music night where the Intermediate band and choir as well as the primary choir, organized an assembly to show the school what we have been working on. You can imagine the participants’ excitement!
On Wednesday March 11th we were lucky enough as a band to participate in Music Alive event for this year. This is one of the largest student music festivals in Canada with over 15,000 students participating over a span of 10 weeks! Just so you know, one of the goals of Music Alive is to celebrate the joy of sharing musical experience. That’s exactly what I was cheerily looking forward to as we were preparing for the day.
I find it always exciting to get out of school for some fun activities. How about you? I bet you feel the same way – liking school trips! The day of Music Alive, all of the band members were ecstatic as we assembled in the music room of our school to get our instruments ready and to eat our snacks, then at 11:30 we piled onto the bus and made our way to Newmarket Theater. Once inside the lobby, we assembled our instruments and then were escorted into the theater. We took up a substantial amount of seats due to the sheer size of our band! At 12:00 the emcee came on and introduced all of the bands that were going to participate. Today there were only four bands including us because like I said they fan out the sessions.
The LBP students settled into their seats as we were the second band to perform and listened to the music. When it was our turn we went with flutes at the front, then clarinets, then Alto Saxophone’s, then trumpets, baritones and trombones. I am a flute and Venus is an Alto Sax. We played the songs Can Can and the Tempest. Both songs are really good but my personal favourite is the Tempest by Robert Smith! After we had finished playing, the Adjudicator came up and did a mini workshop with us to make our pieces sound better. Our adjudicator was a very accomplished musician named Susan Barber Kharo and she helped all of the other bands too. At the end of the day we had listened to great music and learned a lot. Maybe when you think of orchestras you think about boring classical music but boring classical music was far from what any of the bands played. In fact the song Rolling in the Deep by Adele was played as well as an Irish jig, Man in the Mirror, and the Thriller by Michael Jackson!! Also the band might play the well-known song “Uptown Funk” next year!
All in all it was a great experience, all participants seemed to be having a great moment and sharing that with everyone a bonus. Kudos to Music Alive 2015 organizers and sponsors!!
Musically yours,
Serena Wambura.