TOB

Saturday at the NMSU football stadium was the  Tournament of Bands, held every year. It is a marching band competition that starts out with 20-30 bands and ends with a final performance of the top ten bands in the competition. Half of the stadium fills up with people who love and want to watch marching bands perform their shows. It is interesting to be an observer at this event because you observe the bands and the people watching the bands.

I noticed that once a band starts performing, it is dead silent. almost like being at a tennis match, nobody is talking at all. I guess this is out of respect for the band and the performers. Ultimately the band performing has the entire stadium to their full attention. After a band begins performing you do, however, hear little whispers of people talking to one another deciding and judging on whether they like the show or not. I noticed the crowd cheering every time a huge hit happened. Meaning anytime the band hit a climax of loud sound, the crowd went wild. Also, when there was a solo, whether it was a flutist or a percussion solo, the crowd always cheered in recognition of the soloists outstanding performance.

It is always interesting to watch the awards ceremony to see who made finals. Not only does the audience find out the bands who made finals, but you also find out the bands who had the best sounds and visual work in their on field performances. Each time a band got an award, a different part of the stadium would cheer and jump with joy in celebration of their bands awards. I happened to be sitting next to Eastlake High School from El Paso, Texas who won 3 or 4 of the awards. So every 5minutes or so there was an outrageous amount of noise in my ears of yelling and cheering.

Hanks High School from El Paso ended up getting first at the competition. It is always interesting to see people go crazy over their favorite bands performance. And the amount of support each band has is astounding. It was also enjoyable to watch NMSU Pride Band perform their 2 shows with music from Queen and Michael Buble. Pride's second performance was really cool because instead of them starting their performance on the field, they began at the top of the stadium, just above each band who performed. So when Pride began performing the entire audience and bands were scared because they didn't know what was happening! But then the crowd went crazy once they knew that Pride was performing and doing something different!