Over the past four years, Timberland High School and Freedom Percussion, an indoor marching group, have been hosting a percussion-only competition for high school groups called the “Midwest Marching Percussion Classic,” according to midwestmarching.com.
Before the school year starts, the marching band holds camps during the summer to learn their music for the competition season. However, the percussion section has a week before the rest of the band to prepare for their upcoming competition.
“The percussion section of the marching band has been preparing for this competition for the past six weeks, and we’ve put in nearly 150 hours of practice as a group, not to mention the additional time each student has spent mastering their own performance,” percussion director Neil Flannigan said. “Each student has their own way of learning and memorizing music, and they push themselves to improve each day.”
Marching band can take up a lot of time outside of school. Percussion students practice to be able to learn and perfect complicated rhythms, committing them to muscle memory.
“As an individual, I personally spent a lot of time outside school hours practicing segments of the music that I was not particularly comfortable with,” marimba player Bhavesh Krishnamurthy-Chandrasekaran said. “Whenever I was home, I would play random simple and complex drum rhythms to keep my hands well exercised and not get tired and numb before the next rehearsal.”
While the show is being performed, the clinicians walk around the ensemble and record themselves giving tips and comments about the performance.
“I was nervous about the comments from the clinicians, but I was excited to listen to the other bands perform,” bass guitarist Taylor Bobo said.
After the competition, the members of the percussion section were given the clinician tapes that they recorded, allowing them to review and improve their performance. This also gives them a chance to make goals for themselves.
“The goal that I have for our section is that we need to continue memorizing our show music and improving on how clean we are playing it,” battery section leader William Barbero said.
Overall, the Fort Zumwalt West percussion section placed No. 6 in their division and No. 7 with a final score of 77.625 out of all the bands.
