We rehearsed Apple March, one of the AJBC set pieces in 1995. In fact, I played this one when I was a third-grade junior high school student. I heard its live sound for the first time in a quarter-century.
I’d like to quote the saying of Mr Koichi Sugiyama,
Music is a treasure box of your mind.
It recalled the scenery of the stuffy-and-humid 2nd music room of Oishi Junior High very clearly as well as my friends’ names that I hadn’t remembered for decades.
My attitude toward the band activity is obviously not nostalgia oriented. I rather prefer to have unfamiliar ones.
Actually, the library of my alma mater had two sets of 1995 AJBC set pieces, most probably due to an order mistake. I’ve kept one of them for years in my personal library. I took it out just for sight-reading practice,
Impressively, a quarter-century of my personal history is linked in front of me; my junior-high band teacher worked for another school after my graduation and he invited me as an instructor to its band. I worked there even after he was transferred, and ex-students of the band are now members of my community band.😌
As it was the training for the sight-reading, I, myself, didn’t read the full score before the rehearsal, which the conductor ought to do, of course. However, I still clearly remember the structure and content of the music even though I didn’t read the full score in my junior high days.
I found a new interesting fact: the full score and parts were engraved with the computer, but the condensed score was done with handiwork stamping. Engraving the condensed score needs much higher skills, it’s very easy to imagine the computer engraving technology then didn’t meet that.
One more impressive thing was that young community-band members easily play phrases that junior high members in the 1990s’ weren’t able to do even after a few months of practice. It should be not only by the skills of each band member but also as the result of the entire development of the band society for decades.
Occasionally looking back on the past can be a good thing as well.😌
