HARLINGEN — The thunderous announcements of the tubas seemed to herald the arrival of something glorious and beautiful, the seamless presence of clarinet voices sending their salutations into the sky above the Harlingen High School South Hawk Band.
Trombones pierced the afternoon air and the drifting sun flashed against the horns, saxophones and trumpets in a glamorous display of light and thin shadows.
The Hawk band Tuesday afternoon was in a dead heat leading up to the 79th Annual Pigskin Jubilee Marching Contest taking place Saturday at Bobby Morrow Stadium in San Benito.
Excitement tempered with grave seriousness was apparent on everyone’s faces.
“At South, there’s always a crunch before the contest,” said Reymundo Ruelas, 17, a saxophone player.
“We are making a lot of progress,” Reymundo said. “The music is very quick and light.”
Elizabeth Estrada, 17, concurred.
“We’ve made a lot of progress in a short amount of time,” said Elizabeth, who plays marimba.
She and her fellow marimba players had spent the afternoon in the South parking lot enriching the air with rolling melodies and thrashing cymbals as they rehearsed their show “Acts of Light” for the contest on Saturday.
“I’m a little nervous, but I think the band is really trying,” she said during a water break before returning to more rigorous practice.
Her place at the marimbas was a stationary one, but behind her the individual sections of the Hawk band maneuvered their way through their choreography.
Hands gripped instruments; their feet stepped right over left, right over left, right over left, then forward, right and to the back before returning to their stations, all the while counting as if in a chant, “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven eight.”
And the color guard with yellow flags rippling in rhythm not to the music – directors emphasized the importance of watching the band’s movements rather than listening to the sound – cast a sort of visual celebration of the show.
“Hey, color guard! Not too bad, but you can’t miss one!” said Jude Boughton, consultant and show designer, standing on a high tower with Band Director Roy Barajas.
“Can I get more of our ninth-grade baritones?” asked Barajas. “Ninth grade baritones. There we go. Set?
And then there was the tin-shaped ringing of the metronome – “teng-dong-teng-dong-teng-dong” – signaling another moment of rehearsal to mold the performance into a polished presentation.
“Looking pretty good, guard, not gonna lie,” Barajas said. “Here we go.”
Assistant band directors on the parking lot moved through their sections and directed students through finer details.
“Rehearsals are actually going really well,” said Assistant Band Director Alexander Jett.
“The kids are playing good every day,” he said.
One challenge they’ve all worked on is “understanding where the dot is, the coordinates in relation to everyone else.”
It all appeared like a sort of road map spread across the parking lot with positions carefully marked for each player and movement. Only those positions weren’t visible on the parking lot.
The musicians through hours and days of repetition and refashioning of things had the map and positions firmly imprinted in their minds, ready to superimpose them on the playing field Saturday.
