My First Band Performace/Concert

 Recently, on Tuesday, March 14, I had my first ever band concert. My performance was with the whole band, and was the first experience I had playing an instrument on stage. I was slightly nervous, but everything went pretty well & smoothly.

I play the tenor saxophone with my school band, and there are 2 other tenors who play in our band. Since I joined Stanford this year, I am in beginning band mostly with 6th graders. This concert was with every band at our school, beginning, intermediate, advanced, and jazz band. I liked the fact that each class could see what the others classes were working on, and see the differences with each song.

At the concert, we played 3 pieces, Infinity Concert March, Aztec Sunrise, and Skygazer Fanfare. Out of the 3, I feel like we play Skygazer the best, since it is the hardest piece we have and we spent the most time on it because of that. The first song we played, Infinity, is an exciting piece which is supposed to feel like a marching band starting far away and getting closer with the dynamics in the song. Aztec is the slowest out of the three, and is based on a sunrise in Mexico, it builds up towards the finish at the end and also has dynamics. Our last & hardest piece, Skygazer is a pretty fast tempo for us and has different sections which highlight different parts of the band.

We also had a few advanced band members join our pieces just so that we would feel more "safe" having such skilled musicians playing with us. 

Of course, we did make a few mistakes, and the ones which I felt needed the most improvement on were the entrances after long rests in the piece. And example of how I messed up is when I started playing way too early in our Aztec piece, while it was supposed to be a drum solo. Thankfully, I did not play the note loud enough for anyone to hear, and was able to stop myself after a few seconds.

Overall as a band, I think that we did really good it being our first performance ever, nothing terrible happened. We could work on our timing and staying more together, but I think that it was a pretty solid performance. Surprisingly, there were also no squeaking of any instruments, which is an accomplishment for us, as we do have squeaks somewhat often.

All in all, I am pretty proud of myself & everyone in the band, our first concert was a success and I am excited to play with the people in our band for the next few years. I am happy how our performance went, and am also happy of how I personally played.