Halloween was our second Schools Day of tour. This has traditionally been a fun day to do school clinics, as kids are dressed up and generally in good spirits. But the Army Field Band Brass Quintet expected this year’s Halloween to be a little more bleak. We were scheduled to give our final recital of tour at 7:30 p.m. on Halloween night, which practically guaranteed an empty house.Still, we tried to go into it with a positive outlook. Each of us gave an afternoon masterclass to our respective brass studios at the Crane School of Music, which went over extremely well. A quick shout-out to Aaron and Bethanie, two trumpet students who played the Kennan Sonata mvt. III and Hummel Concerto mvt. I for Ward and me, and represented themselves and their school very well.
The class went great, although I always come out of them wishing we had more time. Other members of the quintet reported similar success, and we went back to the hotel, content that we may have added a few heads to what would surely be a sparse-to-nonexistent audience.
Our contact for the gig was the professor of tuba at the Crane School of Music, Chuck Guy. We would have performed on campus, but lack of available space sent us to Potsdam High School Auditorium. The hall was a bit small, but probably ten times as large as we would need for a gig on Halloween night. Or so we assumed.
When we came onstage to perform, we were surprised to see that several Crane School faculty, a decent showing of music students, and some community members had come out to hear our recital. Even better, when they found out we had a gig on Halloween night, many of our colleagues from the Army Field Band came out to support us. All in all, we had a larger audience than our previous recital, which we never would have expected. Many thanks to everyone who attended.
This is our first tour with SSG Lauren Veronie joining us on euphonium. In an effort to give her as much to do as possible, I rewrote my arrangement of Hometown Blues to include her. The Halloween recital was also our third performance of my two newest compositions for brass: Fugue and Variation and Lonely Beauty. They went over really well with audiences this tour, and I hope we get some more mileage out of them down the road. (If you’d like to hear them, visit the Music page).
After the recital, we drove back to the hotel for the annual Army Field Band Halloween party. The Halloween party has been the social high point of the calendar for a long, long time… since well before I got here. Halloween alwaysoccurs during Fall Tour, and almost everybody dresses up at least once every two years.
Costumes can be complex, and incredibly creative. People draw from recent movies, SNL skits, favorite song lyrics, political scandals, anything. The year the movie came out, my supervisor dressed as Iron Man. More specifically, he dressed as pre-Iron Man Tony Stark, from the beginning of the movie: he got all grungy, wore a battery-powered light under a torn white t-shirt, strapped himself to a car battery and carried it around all night.
I’ve seen three of my colleagues dressed as completely unrelated lyrics from Flight of the Conchords. I myself dressed as John McCain in 2008, alongside Sarah Palin, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. If that’s too highbrow for you, we’ve had robots, zombies, Swine Flu, Xena Warrior Princess, Gumby, Scooby Doo, cockroaches and human toilets. Look closely and you might see band members dressed as each other. Men wearing dresses have been known to shave their legs. This is serious business.
As I grew up, I watched kids lose their monopoly over Halloween. Halloween is as much for adults as anybody now. (If you haven’t noticed this, a brisk walk through any Party City will convince you.) But for the Field Band it’s a big deal. If you wandered into a Field Band Halloween party and asked someone why they get so into it, you’d probably get a small-talky answer: It’s just fun, it’s a tradition, I loved it when I was a kid.
But if you talk at length, you’ll start to hear about the 12-year-old they left at home who they’ve never taken trick-or-treating, or how many years of an 18-year-old’s life you miss on the road. As rewarding and meaningful as this job can be, Halloween is a reminder of the things we miss while we’re out here. Sometimes a parent in the band will fly their spouse and kids out to meet them for Halloween, and they always end up making an appearance at the party. Any kid that makes it to a Field Band party instantly becomes the center of the universe, for as long as they stay.We all love the Halloween party, but I think some of the band needs it, too.
