Chrys Weedon | Entertainment Editor
Once a year, flocks of well-dressed high schoolers walk in groups through campus, untethered and without a tour guide. That’s because every Spring Term, Western hosts high school bands from across the state of Oregon to compete in preparation for their state competition. Outside of league festivals, the event at Western is one of the bigger festivals in Oregon. This year’s competition took place over two days, April 4-5.
Josh Mendoza, a sophomore music major and president of the band council, is in charge of the band festival this year. Mendoza kept in contact with band directors, scheduled the bands and coordinated the volunteers. “It’s a good experience for high schoolers to compete,” said Mendoza.
“I didn’t do it alone. I have Dr. Nail’s help, and (Josiah Glaser),” commented Mendoza. Glaser was the student responsible for the competition last school year.
Mendoza headed the competition this year because he is the president of Western’s band council.
“Usually the band council takes charge of the festival. It’s been like that for the past few years,” said Mendoza about the festival, “once I’m a band director, I’m going to have to host the festival for my school. It’s a learning opportunity. It gets you connected with band directors across the state, it gets my name out there for networking. It’s just an all around a really good experience.”
Usually, Western invites 32 high school bands to compete. This year is slightly different, however: 36 bands were included in the festival.
“(The bands) kind of move from place to place; they’ll show up, we’ll take them to storage … and then they’ll go warm up …” described Mendoza. “They’ll do their performance, where they’ll get critiqued by judges.” After being critiqued, each band will go with one of their judges to a clinic, where they’ll be given pointers and the opportunity to practice with the judge. Their judge will also tell them ways they can improve or things they may want to try doing differently when they go to competition.
“In Oregon, there is six different (school) classifications, there’s 1A, 2A, 3A, 4A, 5A and 6A,” said Mendoza. Each band gets judged on a variety of different things.
“Their quality of sound, that’s out of 30 (points), technique is out of 30, musicality is out of 30 and then other factors which would be appearance, their choice of music… the total score is out of 100,” Mendoza read off the scoring sheet. Each band is evaluated by three different judges, who all add up their scores. In the end, each group receives a score out of 300.
Choice of music can be important in terms of score.
“If you’re a really high level band, you want to be challenged” Mendoza said. If the pieces chosen by a band aren’t seen as challenging enough to the judges, it will negatively affect their scores. Each band has 30 minutes maximum to perform, and they are required to be playing music for at least 18 of those minutes.
Mendoza closed stating that, “If people want to get involved in (the festival), they can come volunteer.” Willing volunteers can contact Dr. Ike Nail at naili@wou.edu or Josh Mendoza at jmendoza17@wou.edu if they are interested in volunteering next year.
Contact the author at howlentertainment@wou.edu
Photo courtesy of Ashlynn Norton
