Student musicians collaborate at band festival

The opportunity for any team to become greater than the sum of its parts rests on the ability of individuals to listen and recognize how they compliment each other.

Music is nothing if not an ongoing confirmation of that truth, as dozens of young musicians learned earlier this week as they converged on Polson High School for the annual Northwest Band Festival.

Each year, high school bands from Polson, Libby, Hamilton and Stevensville join forces to create music with a few experienced guest directors. During the festival, the four schools pair up with another band to create two separate large bands. Each year the bands rotate, so every three-year rotation each band has worked with every other band.

The event gives students a chance to play music alongside strangers and be conducted by new faces. It pushes students out of their comfort zone, said Gary Gillett, one of this year’s guest conductors.

“They are used to their director and their band, and so now they are put together with another ensemble and we have to figure out a way have those kids become a new ensemble,” Gillett said. “They have to adapt quickly to both the sonic surroundings around them and personal attributes of all of a sudden sitting next to a stranger and trying to figure out how to make music with this new director.”

Gillett was a band director for 41 years until he retired as a band director at Sentinel High School in Missoula. He’s participated in the festival once before, and he said he was impressed with the skill and discipline of this year’s cohort.

The students rehearsed for two days before presenting a concert for the host town Tuesday evening. Gillett said playing all day for two days can be grueling, especially on trumpet and trombone players. He said that despite the long hours, the students practiced and listened diligently the entire time.

“They bought into it, and they were here and present the whole time,” Gillett said. “We had a great time and we grew a lot musically.”

The other guest conductors were Nathan Stark, director of bands at Montana State University, and Robert LedBetter, director of percussion studies at the University of Montana.

Since each band often has a few more percussionists than the combined bands need, extra players were siphoned off into a percussion group led by Ledbetter.

That group opened the concert with a piece called “Highlight” by Phil Faini, which featured a couple special solos.

The combined Libby and Hamilton bands played a three-part Cowboy Symphony, a suite from the well-known musical “Hamilton” and a piece called “Clowns! Clowns! Clowns!” The Polson and Stevensville combined bands played “Folk Song Suite,” “March of the Belgian Paratroopers” and closed the show with a John Williams arrangement called “The Olympics: A Centennial Celebration.”

The trip can be especially tiring for students traveling from afar. As the concert ended around 8 p.m. the students from out of town began loading the buses to go home. Traveling always leads to important team building, but hosting has a lot of positive aspects too, said Rich Sawyer, the band director at Polson High School.

After the festival, Sawyer said the improvement in both his students playing and his own teaching is palpable.

“There is a lot of growth,” Sawyer said. “You get all these ideas from six other directors that maybe you missed or you haven’t leaned on for a while, so its nice to get different ideas and to have them say the same things you are saying at the same time, because it backs you up too.”

Reporter Peregrine Frissell can be reached at (406) 758-4438 or pfrissell@dailyinterlake.com.