Symphonic Band Places First at Winter Park Festival

The top symphonic band brought home a 5 ft tall trophy labeled “grand champion” this past weekend after placing first at the Winter Park Ski-Music Festaval in their division. The festival included choirs, band and orchestras. In the band division, East competed against 15 other bands from eight different states. Band director, Kim Harrison was confident going into the festival and even more so after the performance.

“I knew that we were the best probably because of the way the kids played, and they played tremendously,” Harrison said. “We had a concert on Tuesday night with all five high schools and there was only one other school that came even close to us.”

East’s top symphonic band has 54 members, with most of them being upperclassmen and a few underclassmen. The band played the two pieces that they will play for state contest this upcoming wednesday. They were judged by a panel of music educators from Texas and Denver.

“This panel of judges that we played for in Colorado were very much more prestigious educators than we will have at our state,” Harrison said. “These guys were from dallas public schools and denver public schools, head of all the music of all the music in those two cities, so these guys really knew what they were talking about.”

Harrison takes band students on a trip every three years. This year, he decided on the Winter Park Festival for not only the musical experience but also to have a chance to ski.

“Our band is probably 75% male and a lot of them like to ski and snowboard, so we went up for three days of skiing and eating for under 500 dollars, when a ski lift ticket for one day is usually 100 dollars, because of this music festival,” Harrison said.

Although they placed first, senior Zach Williams found the real draw to this trip was the ability to ski.

“[Our playing time] was shorter than I thought,” Williams said. “I thought that the trip would have some playing in it but it was really more centralized around skiing which is okay with me. We went and played for about two hours and then we just went skiing.”