This past Friday and saturday I, and a few of my fellow bandmates, participated I the Durham High School All-County Band. This band is similar to the middle school All-Stars Band in which most of us participated in 8th grade year.
The premise of the All-County Band is to have musicians from every high school k the county (with the exception of Jordan, for some reason) and bring in a guest conductor to teach us a few songs in two days. Needless to say, this is not the easiest thing to do. Friday, everyone met at Riverside at 8am for the first day of practice, which lasted until 3:45. That’s nearly 8 hours of practice time, with about 1.5 hours for breaks.
Our conductor, Ed Keifer, has been a director for 20+ years at the high school and college level. He is also a published composer, and we even played two of his compositikns for our concert. It’s a very interesting experience to be taught a piece by its composer. It does, however, make is practice even harder, because he knows what the piece is supposed to sound like, and was relentless in having us play it correctly. Luckily his personality kept the mood light. I swear he has ADD, because he would start to count off for us to play, then randomly stop and remind us of something or write something on the board.
As I was looking around the room during practice, I realized just how big the band was. I heard that there was about 70 kids, compared with Riverside’s band of about 20. Curious, I asked my friends how many were in the band at their school. All of them said numbers much too low for a band. I overheard many people remarking about how they didn’t have certain instruments in their bands. It would be nice to have a bassoon, an F Horn, and more than one clarinet in our band.
The only problem with the Band were the incredibly uncomfortable chairs we had to sit in for 7 hours.

