While the normal buzz of high school life moved throughout the halls, an unusual amount of buses arrived in front of the school and began to unload their cargo of students and instruments. From tiny piccolos to huge tubas and timpani, bands dragged their instruments from their own schools to the Central Kitsap High School music hallway to begin their competition.
“It’s [the] Olympic Music Educators Association, which is a division of the Washington Music Educators Association,” CKHS instrumental music teacher Micheal Woods said. “And we are the public school teachers in the Kitsap area, and we put on festivals and competitions so that students can hear each other perform and get comments from professional teachers other than the teachers that they have at their home school.”
The buses unloaded through the courtyard between the main and CTE buildings, and funneled in through a side door, where volunteers from the Central Kitsap band and orchestra were waiting at the front desk to greet them. These students then sorted the scores, or sheet music, of the bands into separate folders ready for the adjudicators.
“Mr. Woods sent out a handout,” adult volunteer Heidi Chertok said. “He needed some volunteers; it’s obviously a big day for this event. There’s lots of kids here, and so I just wanted to come and help out in any way I could. And [there are] a lot of moving pieces.”
Each band went through three sessions. First, they spent 25 minutes in the CKHS green room warming up.
“You want to be in tune when you perform,” CKHS band Sergeant at Arms Dani Watson said. “The longer you play, the more sharp you go, and the warmer your instrument gets. So playing for 25 minutes before — it really gets the instrument and you acclimated to the environment, which is important for everyone.”
Then, bands went into the Performing Arts Center, where student volunteers had set up their chairs according to a seating chart given at the front desk. In this session, the bands played their three pieces in front of the adjudicators, whose job it was to score them.
“I like competing for a good score and getting [to go into] clinic, and as I’ve gotten older, it’s gotten a lot easier, and I’m not nervous,” Watson said.
For their final session, students went to the CKHS band room and worked one-on-one with an adjudicator to improve their pieces. The adjudicators had 25 minutes to work with these students on whatever pieces they felt needed the most attention.
“As capable of a musician that Woods is, it’s really nice to have an outside perspective after hearing from him for three months straight on a piece, because we get a different perspective,” Watson said. “And get someone who can potentially explain things in a way that Woods can’t, and it gets across to students in a way that Woods can’t. And it’s a new person, so people are more receptive.”
With so many moving parts, the student and parent volunteers are a vital part of the team. Students take and sort scores, move chairs, direct students, make sure adjudicators have what they need, guard doors, and make sure that everything is moving along smoothly.
“Every time I come in, I feel like all the kids that are helping are really the ones who are the most organized, and they’re putting me in the right direction,” Chertok said.
Bands of all types and sizes were invited to play at the festival. Central Kitsap, Olympic, South Kitsap, Bremerton, Bainbridge, North Mason, North Kitsap, and Kingston high schools, along with Klahowya Secondary School, all brought between one and three bands to play.
“Most of us that are directors have been doing this every year for years,” Woods said. “The tricky thing is communicating
things that are unique to the space. So honestly, the biggest challenge is doing it during a school day, when other school activities are going on.”
A total of 16 bands played at the festival, a mix of concert bands, symphonic bands, and wind ensembles.
“The terms actually mean different things,” Woods said. “Concert band usually means a smaller group. Symphonic band usually means a group of 60 to 70 musicians, and wind ensemble traditionally means a group of 32 to 34, so it’s about the size of the group and the instrumentation.”
While students work together through the day, the festival still has some competitive elements. Each group is judged by two adjudicators who watch the band play, write notes, and score the overall performance.
“There’s different criteria, like intonation or rhythmic integrity or musicianship, and usually we use a scoring system of one to five, where one is good and five is not very good,” Woods said. “So, you get an assessment of all these different criteria, and then you add it together, and then whatever that averages out to be is what your score is.”
Despite the hundreds of kids, tens of volunteers, and dozens of extremely complex moving parts, the OMEA festival went off without a hitch. Next year, though it won’t be hosted at CKHS, the band will still attend and perform their best work.
“I just try to tell kids, it’s not any different from one year to the next — and let’s just be the best version that we can be by the time we get to festival day,” Woods said.
