There's a reason why my high school's band was given the nickname "the best damn ram band in the land." The band was a very big deal not only for the students but a lot of the adults, especially on Friday nights. But football season only lasts so long, and what are we band kids supposed to do when we aren't marching on the field? To answer that simply, symphonic band and a little something called ensembles. Coincidentally, I got to be apart of one of the best ensembles in the school's history, we even had our own cool nickname: Alex and the Gals.

What are ensembles anyways? Well, an ensemble is a group of musicians who all play the same instrument. In my case, however, I'm a percussionist, so having a group of eight all playing the snare drum would be a nightmare. Instead, each member plays a different kind of percussion instrument. An ensemble usually consists of anywhere from three all the way up to eight people.

During my junior year after football season, I thought it would be a great idea to round up some of the people in my section to form an ensemble to play for a contest. The weird part is that for every one guy in the percussion section there were about three girls, so in the end, my ensemble consisted of seven girls and me. This coincidence helped us create our own ensemble name: Alex and the Gals. With any ensemble group, there needs to be an ensemble piece, and we had just the song. "Technology" by Jim Casella is rated around a 3 out of 5 difficulties, perfect for the group we designed. Here's an example of the piece, this isn't us but we weren't allowed to record our performance during the contest)

Miraculously we managed to score a 1 on our performance (on a grading scale of 1 to 5, 1 is the highest score you can receive and 5 is the worst score you can receive). This was amazing! Everyone on our ensemble was ecstatic, and this was a great way to send off the seniors in our ensemble. However I wanted to go all out my senior year, so a more difficult ensemble was destined to happen. A whole year later, with me on the timpani and seven other amazing people on my team, we were ready for another ensemble.

I never really looked at difficulty when choosing the songs, I kind of just wanted to pick whatever sounded the coolest both in my part and everyone else as a whole. After listening to a song titled "Overture" by John Beck I was positive that this was the song I wanted to perform. My band director seemed very hesitant though and asked me multiple times if I wanted to look at other songs or review the songs we had on hand, but I was certain that this song was the song we would be playing!

Only a couple weeks of practicing in I finally realized why my band director was so hesitant about letting us perform the song. It was extremely hard, specifically my timpani part clashing with someone's chimes part. The timpani (my go-to instrument) is an instrument divided into 3 or 4 drums all playing a different tune. This in itself is a difficult art to master but mixing it with the chimes part makes it incredibly difficult.

I'm about to get very technical about how this works so bare with me. There are multiple parts throughout the song where the chimes and timpani clash on purpose to give a sense of style. For multiple measures, the chimes will play on every quarter note and the timpani will play on the halves of those notes. Long story short, think about trying to count to a certain number out loud but the person next to you is spouting random numbers to mess you up, and that's basically what it felt like for both me and the person on the chimes. Our whole group got curious as to what the difficulty rating for the song was, so we finally asked him. His response: "Overture" was rated a 5 on the difficulty scale, the hardest songs you can ask for.

On the day of the performance everyone was on edge, the band director included. Almost no one at our school, let alone our division normally attempts a level 5 difficulty song. Despite the difficulty, despite the countless number of failures we had as a group, I was excited. During the whole performance, I couldn't mask the smirk on my face knowing that what we were playing was going as smoothly as it was. After the performance was over I couldn't help but think what score we got, and around 30 minutes later my question was about to be answered.

We got a 1! After all the hard work and frustration it was so rewarding to receive the highest score possible. In all the excitement I actually almost ran over another student by accident cause I wasn't looking where I was going. With all the excitement and triumph under our belts, we got our picture, grabbed our badges for receiving our score, and went home. I'll never forget the tremendous ups and downs that came with being in a band, and leaving with a high mark on one of the hardest songs possible is something I'll carry with me forever.