Musical Memories

By Keiryn Sandahl

On Thursday evening, September 8th, sixteen Concert Band students flew to Bangkok, along with eleven other schools, to participate in the Bangkok International Band Festival. Hosted by the International School of Bangkok (ISB), this year’s festival featured the bands of twelve schools, joined together as one mega-band of nearly three hundred students. Since the last band trip was in 2019, before COVID, almost no one knew what to expect.

It was past midnight by the time we arrived in Bangkok, lugging our instruments, and we caught a precious three hours of sleep before our early start the next morning. While everyone at Dalat was starting school on Friday, we were wandering, awed, into ISB’s theater. The stage had had several extensions to accommodate all the bands, and even then, only half the percussionists could play at one time. 

We then had the chance to meet the students from other schools who sat around us, and the guest conductor took the podium. Two hundred and eighty students picked up their instruments, and the band, like a gigantic organism, breathed, and played its first note.

At first, while the sound of hundreds of instruments made the auditorium ring, we struggled to play in unison, and we had to get used to each other and a new conductor. Some schools had only had a week to learn the pieces, while others, like Dalat, had been practicing longer. We had four pieces in our program: “Alegre”, a rhythmic Latin piece; “Old Churches”, which created the atmosphere of a medieval Catholic church; “Space and Beyond”, a medley of famous space-related scores; and “Chao Phraya March”, a recent piece by Thai composer Viskamol Chaiwanichsiri, who came to hear us play. In all, it took seven hours of rehearsal on Friday and another three on Saturday to turn hundreds of musicians into one band.

By the end of our rehearsals, everyone had aching lips and fingers. We had never played continuously for such a span of time. But sharing that fatigue, as well as being surrounded by strangers, built comradery amongst the sixteen of us; amid waves of unfamiliar faces, a familiar one, friend or not, suddenly stood out. 

By Saturday afternoon, the band finally meshed together, and all the hundreds of musicians could layer their sounds in time with the conductor, just in time for the performance. The audience encored our final, most difficult piece, and despite our tired mouths, we satisfied them. We filed out of the auditorium glowing.

We spent the next hour standing in the lobby. It only took a handful of percussionists, a shaker, and a few drums: soon they had started an improvised beat. Then Aydan Wong (9) took out his trumpet, stepped up to the ring, and added a solo. A trombone player from another school joined him, and the two produced a completely improvised harmony. As Daniel Willoughby (10) put it, “You just can’t put 300 musicians in a lobby with their instruments and expect nothing to come out of it.”

Despite having to wake up at 4:00 on Sunday morning, we returned to Dalat elated, with plenty of special memories we shared as a band. Many underclassmen, following the trip, voiced a renewed desire to take Concert Band next year.