Every year middle tennessee has its competition to pick the best band students in junior high school (grades 7-9 ) and high school (grades 10-12). (Although some school districts like ours have the 9th graders in high school and some have them in junior high, for fairness, all 9th graders get to compete in the junior high category.) For the auditions, students come early in the morning to pick up their audition number on a first come, first serve basis. Then they wait for many hours for their number to be called. The judges sit behind a screen so they can't see the student who is playing and they simply are given a number ID for their scoring.The students are given a piece of music several weeks in advance they must prepare ahead of time. Then during the audition, they must play this piece, two scales that are selected randomly by the judges, the chromatic scale, and then from one to three pieces of sight reading music that they are given only 20 seconds before playing. The exact number of pieces played depends on the judges agreeing among themselves that the student is skilled enough to merit going to the next more advanced piece. So you get some sense that you are doing well if the judges allow you to play the third sight reading piece.
The very top players make the gold band (24 in clarinet). The next set make silver band, and then for grades 7&8, there is an additional level called honor band as the gold and silver bands are made up primarily of 9th graders. Faithful readers know that in his very first year of playing the clarinet, our son made the 7&8th grade honor band, which really surprised us. Then last year, he was one of the few 8th graders to make the gold band. In this year's competition he did really, really well. Since I'm paranoid about how random people from around the world have been able to crawl to our blog despite our blog settings, I won't tell you his exact position, but he placed highly.
We are very proud of him, and wonder where he got his musical talent from.
