Over the years, the SCHS music department has grown in many ways. From participating in school-wide activities to representing SCHS in competitions, the choir and band programs have an important presence in the school community, and most students are not fully aware of what the choir and band does beyond football game performances.
The band program also competes in multiple competitions each year. Still, they rarely get much recognition as the competitions are primarily attended by the musicians’ families.
Senior Julianna Arias, the head field conductor of marching band, feels there are times when the team feels overlooked despite putting in just as much effort into their after-school practices and competitions as many other sports do.
“Honestly, it does make us feel really frustrated at times,” Arias said. “We are dedicating a lot of our time, having to allocate different times to do homework, and overall just to be regular teens alongside a heavy marching band schedule. It’s kind of frustrating when we’re not recognized for the same effort.”
Senior Lukas Leu, the drum captain of the marching band, expressed similar sentiments as Arias at not receiving the same acknowledgment as other sports.
“The music program does advertise a lot, but the school rarely recognizes (it). If we won something, they wouldn’t say it on the announcements, but say if football won a game, they would say that,” Leu said.
Despite the struggle, the music department is trying to advertise its competitions, performances and overall presence on campus to build recognition. SCHS music instructor Johnny Erdman addressed their attempts to publicize their activities.
“We have social media. I send out a lot of flyers and emails kind of promoting all the great things that we do, whether it’s winning awards or doing a world premiere of a brand new piece of music,” Erdman said.
As a result of increasing promotion, marching band’s participation level has seen a slow but steady rise throughout the years since COVID. Before COVID, they had 90+ participants, but when the lockdown hit, the number of students declined more and more. Since then, the numbers have increased, growing to new heights this year.
“We’ve had more and more members every single year. This year is one of the years that I think is the most amount of people we’ve had in the band since COVID,” Leu said. “That’s a huge accomplishment for us. We got to move up a division. Divisions in marching band are by how many members we have, so the higher the division, the more members we have.”
Conversely, SCHS’s choir had some difficulty gaining participants, but with much effort to advertise, they were able to grow the choir population.
“There were conversations behind the scenes about whether or not we want to continue offering choir,” Erdman said. “Right now, there isn’t a strong system of choir existing in the middle schools, whereas at all of our middle schools, we have band and we have orchestra. There’s that feeder system of having students continue from middle school to high school.”
According to junior Ira Sudhani, who is a second-year choir student, the participation level last year was so low that they considered merging Concert Choir 1 and 2. While there were many reasons for the lack of participation, Sudhani attributes one of the main problems to not being able to attend and perform at external venues.
“The problem is we’re not able to go to a lot of these (venues) because we don’t have the funding,” Sudhani said. “I think that’s one of the biggest issues since we don’t have the funding for it. We can’t really do much with choir, and that is why it’s so subdued or not as recognized.”
Though the music departments’ two programs differ in their needs between lacking viewers or participants, they both point to something more significant: they need more support and recognition from the school.
“The biggest factor is giving all sports on campus equal respect for their effort,” Arias said. “It is not an easy task to do what we do, and by giving all sports their mutual respect – whether that be on the field, during practice times or just everywhere in general – I think that will really help them out.”