On April 6th the Wild West Honor Band attended a UIL event playing 3 music pieces and Sightread 2 other pieces in front of 3 to 4 judges, with months full of preparation, Honor band students were indeed prepared for what came ahead in UIL.

UIL stands for University Interscholastic League, for band students it is where they compete against other high schools by playing 3 kinds of music pieces which consist of 1 march and 2 selection sources. According to UILtexas.org, “Each year approximately one half million middle school, junior high, and high school students reap benefits of participation in the ten UIL music events.”

For concert season band students prepare months in advance for the competitions that happen around April. It takes about 5 months for students to figure out how to play 3 music pieces with perfect tone quality, great pitch, and great unity/playing-togetherness and many more things.

Students also need to Sightread which is where students receive a piece of music that they have never seen before and have about 8 minutes, with the help of the band director of course, to learn the piece and attempt to play it as best as they can. The Sightreading pieces vary on a difficulty scale.

The judges grading scale is from a 1, meaning an exceptional performance, met all of the judges expectations, and overall sounded great, a 2 which is they kinda met some of the judges expectations but not all of them but still did very good, and then a 3 which is where it wasn’t the best performance and that they could’ve done better.

Band UIL isn’t all that easy as you can obviously see. It may be hard, but in all honesty it is very fun especially with all of the suspense when you’re receiving judges scores and when you’re waiting to walk-onto a stage that you have never seen before and play your best.