Wind Symphony

Wind Symphony is the top band at Kennedy and it is very hard to get into. You have to physically audition for it. But there are a few different ways you can do your audition, you can do it in person with either Mrs. Fleer or Mr. Wacker, depending on what instrument you play, for example if you are a wood wind player or are in percussion you would do your audition with Mrs. Fleer, and if you are a brass player you would do your audition with Mr. Wacker. You can also do it on a recorder that one of the directors give you, or you can do it the way everyone prefers to, on Charms, which you can do at home as many times as you want.

The auditions are usually difficult, there are several scales you have to play, for example this year we had to play (all in concert key) the flat scales of: Bb, Eb, and Ab; the sharp scales of: G and D; and of course our C scale and Chromatic, and all of them have to be done with as many octaves as your instrument allows. So for flutes all of them have two octaves except the C and chromatic which have three.

The next part of the audition is the etude, every year it comes from a part of one of the All- State etudes. This year it happened to be the fast etude, which was very difficult. An example of the flute one is at the bottom, it went from the beginning to the first note in the fourth line.

A couple things that made this piece every difficult was that it is very fast plus it has a lot of sharps, and it also has double sharps, which makes it even more confusing. It also jumps octaves while slurring which is a very hard thing to do.

Even though the audition music is hard, being in Wind Symphony, or even just trying out to be in Wind Symphony pays off. And it shows Mrs. Fleer and Mr. Wacker that you really care about being in band and about becoming a better player.