Peeking into band

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Whitney King

The band sets up props for their performance at The Festival of Bands at Gupton Stadium on Sept. 22. The Festival helped raise money for charity while judges rate the bands from different schools on their overall performance. “The Festival is more of a show,” Driskill said. “It’s all about how your performance looks and whether or not the show comes together.”

Janet Nava, Reporter

Band placed seventh out of 10 in Austin BOA contest. They also got third in class and won outstanding music performance in class AAA. The BOA or Bands of America is a competition where schools from Leander ISD and schools around the state compete to go onto Grand Nationals. There are different ranks for certain categories; such as music, visual, and general overall.

This year 26 bands competed in BOA Austin and ten bands made it to finals, including Cedar Park. French Horn sophomore Matthew Driskill was proud of the performance overall, but felt there was room for improvement.

“It was the best performance, however, due to technical problems with our synthesizer, it lacked and we haven’t finished our show yet,” Driskill said. “But this piece has a lot of potential and can be a very inspiring and amazing piece.”

The band recently performed their newest piece at the Gupton Stadium Festival Of Bands on Sept. 22 before BOA. There were 10 high schools and six middle schools that came from Leander ISD. The Festival Of Bands is a fundraiser to help raise money for charity during and after the Band performances. French Horn sophomore Chris Knox likes going to competitive events and experiencing them first hand.

“It was kind of cool to watch other bands and to see what competition is and what they’re like,” Knox said. “If someone hasn’t been to a competition they would be able to see what competition is like in real life.”

Band starts working for competitions before the school year even begins, this year band started back up on July 30. And two months in, they’re still working hard for more competitions, such as the advancing BOA and invitationals.

The preparations for summer band consists of 1-1 ½ hour of crossfit, fundamentals (marching), lunch, music, and then the new piece for the halftime shows. This is done everyday till the first day of the new school year. French Hornist sophomore Kellan McPhail enjoys performing especially after all the hard work he’s done.

“Summer Band is fun but it’s more work than fun,” McPhail said. “It’s not that fun while working but when you’re in that stadium and everybody eats up every note you play, that’s when you’re really proud.”