7th Grade Band's Winter Concert

I am a 7th grader in Band, and just recently, we had a concert. This is the 2022 7th and 8th Grade Concert as told by a band kid. 

The 7th and 8th grade Band is directed by Mr. Michael Morris. The concert took place on 13 December 2022.  

To decide where we would be in Band, we had to do a playing test at the beginning of the year. Basically, we would play sheet music and depending on how we played those pieces, we would be assigned our parts in the songs.  

For dress code, we had to wear white or a light color on top and black or a dark color on the bottom. That was straightforward, but there were more details to the dress code, including how gentlemen had to wear a tie and ladies could only wear leggings under a skirt. There were also a few more adjustments like, no white socks, no sneakers, and no jeans if they weren’t a dark color.  

Before each piece, a student gave a speech about what we were about to play. The speakers were Cael Javier (me), Amiya Mohan, Christian Leon, and Andre Llubit.  

The pieces we performed on stage were:  “Caribbean Christmas”, an Afro-Cuban arrangement of the carol “Angels We Have Heard on High”, “The Chipmunk Song”, a novelty song written by Ross Bagdasarian which is also the last Christmas/Holiday song to reach No. 1 on any U.S. singles records chart, “Chanukah: The Festival of Lights Overture”, which is an arrangement of traditional Hanukkah songs which are often sung during the Festival of Lights, “Fireball”, a piece by Brian Beck to challenge the musicians rhythmically, stylistically, and musically.  

Before we went on stage, we thought they forgot about us because Orchestra and Chorus took at least an hour. Apparently, we were just impatient. We had to wait in different classrooms while the other two ensembles performed. The classroom I was in was wild. It was just kids running around, blasting music from their phones, dancing, and somebody apparently got sick.  

None of the people in Band looked nervous when we got on stage, so that was a good sign. When we played the music, we sounded good, with few to no mistakes. It was exciting because it was our first concert at North for some of us.  

That was my point of view of the 2022 7th and 8th Grade Concert. An orchestra or chorus student might have told you a different story, which is why I think it was special to me.  I also enjoyed it because performing on stage in front of many people is an opportunity that not many people get.