GRANGER’S symphonic band recently performed at the region festival on March 27. These performances are meant as a grading scale for the whole band, and they’re judged based on how they performed as a group. Mr. Spalka, the instrumental music teacher, says they follow a different grading system compared to PBL in school, for example 1 is superior and a 5 is poor. 

These margins are very slim, and the band needs to try their best to score a better score. They do have numbers that have “-” and “+” which are half points between numbers which help them out, so these results are interesting. 

The first thing to mention is that if Granger were to compete at state, the band would need to earn a score of 1 and -1. 

Unfortunately, Granger’s band fell just short, because they earned a -1/-1 — barely under the required amount. However, Mr. Spalka received good feedback about their performance. One of the judges (who that has been judging for a while and seen many of Granger’s previous bands) says that this is the best Granger band so far. 

Mr. Spalka is proud of these students. “It’s a challenge given our location and demographics. What we do we here is modern classical music, which isn’t interesting to a lot of kids. Other schools have a lot more resources to learn music and students have private teachers and multiple instructors teaching at the same time. It shows how hard the students at Granger work, given all they accomplished without that same support,” Spalka said. 

Sergio Ortiz (12), a tuba player, says he was less worried about skills and more worried about his nerves. But some of those nerves were calmed down before showtime with reassurance from Mr. Spalka and pointers from judges from their performance at a BYU game.

“The judges helped give pointers and helped the band overall,” Ortiz said. Along with considering pointers, he was also mentally preparing all along. Ortiz can focus 100% of his mind on the music and playing correctly. As to his reaction to the score they received, he says that it was a pretty fair score. 

“We did way better than we thought we would,” Ortiz said. But he did say that being the best Granger band so far feels really nice, and he hopes that they still get better.

Brian Wilkey (12), a flutist, also had similar words with worrying about the game, but more specifically the start of their performance. Wilkey then says that the beginning is overall harder than the rest and sets the vibe of the remainder of the performance. But once that was over Wilkey says that his mind was calm, but also blank since he was only thinking of the music ahead and hitting the right notes. 

He was happy about the score at the end and disappointed about not making it to state. However, he was glad about the judge’s compliment and how comparing their school to previous bands at Granger made them better. 

Emmanuel Barrientos (10), a bass and clarinet player, was more worried about himself and trying to not squeak with his instrument. While he never squeaked, the thoughts going through his mind were his hope for making it to state and out-performing other schools — especially Hunter High, since he is originally from there. 

Although they did not get to state, the symphonic still did well. “I thought it was OK. We could’ve done better,” Barrientos said. He was happy hear about the band’s performance and grateful for Mr. Spalka’s assistance through it all.