It is a tradition for all three of the Orono High School bands to go on a tour every year. However, only the Wind Ensemble was given the opportunity to visit Chicago April 17-19.
The Wind Ensemble will play as part of the Percy Grainger Wind Band Festival, which takes place twice a year: one week in March and another week in April.
Band members will be performing in the Symphony Center. “The Chicago Symphony is one of the best orchestras in the world, so it will be really cool to be playing on the same stage they perform on,” sophomore Chase Olsen said.
“[Wind Ensemble] was one of the four high school bands in the country that was invited to play at this festival,” senior Grace Knudsen said.
The Wind Ensemble will be playing “Gumsuckers March” by Percy Grainger as one of their four pieces. Percy Grainger is considered to be one of the most important composers of wind band literature.
They will also be playing “Flourish for Wind Band,” Bach “Prelude and Fugue in G Minor” and “Passacaglia.”
“‘Passacaglia’ is a pretty hard song and I know that I’ve had to stay after a few days to work on some parts that were difficult for me. I think everyone has worked really hard on it and it will be great,” Olsen said.
The band has been practicing “Gumsuckers March” since the beginning of the school year, and performed the piece at their December concert.
“[At the Symphony Center] all bands get a maximum of 22 minutes to perform. For every minute you go over, it is a couple thousand dollars. It is a very prestigious place to be playing at,” senior Alex St. Dennis said.
Additionally, most of their pieces have been in the works for months. They have played many of them in front of a live audience at previous band concerts, contests or festivals.
“‘Prelude and Fugue in G Minor’ is the only song [that] we haven’t played in front of an audience, but we have been working on it for a long time, so I feel like we are prepared to perform it,” St. Dennis said.
The ensemble has performed many of these songs at the Wright County Contest, in which they scored superior rankings on all of their musical selections. A superior ranking is the highest ranking that can be given to a band.
The Wind Ensemble was also invited to the Lake County Festival. “The Lake County Festival [consists of] a lot of bigger schools, but we still played better than a lot of them,” junior Dan Wall said.
At the Lake County Festival, “Mr. Arnold said we were comparable to the top bands, which is really impressive considering that they are from bigger schools and have a larger selection of students to form their band,” Olsen said.
“It is really cool that we are able to compare with schools of that caliber.”
