With Chanute High School offering three forms of band and a handful of students producing their own musical tunes, the lives of many Comets have been influenced by music. CHS offers Marching and Concert Band, and recently added Jazz Band to their collection.
When students enroll in the band class, the first semester prioritizes Marching Band, while the second prioritizes Concert Band. Jazz Band is newly offered as a club. Some band class members have a preference over playing Marching or Concert band.
“Marching band music is never made to be particularly pretty. It’s made to be in your face, ‘we’re going to defeat you’ … concert band does something different in the ways that you make something very collaborative, and it’s in the moment, and it’s good,” senior Eric Blakesley said.
As a whole, band has overarching values and practices, but Concert Band seems to put an emphasis on them, according to Blakesley. “It’s something that everybody individually practices and then we all come together and we make this piece of art and it’s lovely,” Blakesley said.
Blakesley also commented on opportunities he has been afforded because of his involvement in band. “First of all, it’s helping put me through college, which is very nice, but overall I’ve made a lot of friends in band,” Blakesley said. In addition to growing his social sphere, band has given Blakesley many travel opportunities. “I’ve been to almost all corners of the United States now because of music,” Blakesley said. Music seems to have enabled many progressions within Blakesley’s educational expreience.
“If I never did music, I think I would not be near as excited about life as I am,” Blakeley said.
In addition to students dedicating themselves to the band, CHS has students that produce their own music, a creative method commonly referred to as produced or studio music. One senior has produced his own music on the online platform SoundCloud for roughly one year under the alias Awm Degausser.
What caught his attention and encouraged him to make his own music was spending large amounts of time online being exposed to ideas that his everyday life wouldn’t have presented him. According to Degausser, music has given him “less social anxiety and better vocal performance.” Degausser also commented that “just the process of putting yourself out there” when producing music has helped him in life.
Similar to Blakesley, Degausser mentioned how collaborative music can be and how satisfying the collaboration can feel. “I had a friend scream in the background of a song and it actually came out really good … the process of collaborating, but also making something silly into something cool, is fun,” Degausser said.
Despite Degausser and Blakesley having many differences in their respective fields of musical knowledge, both fields have similar fundamentals. “They’re two different things, but also very similar,” Degausser said. Both genres are enhanced by, and often rely on, collaboration and teamwork.
“You have to work together … otherwise it sounds awful, so it encourages teamwork in a way that I don’t think a lot of other things do,” Blakesley said.
CHS students say music helped them pay for college, make new friends, and overcome social anxieties. It creates communities based on collaboration and the arts. Music has a large influence on the lives of many in the millennia of human civilization, and it certainly doesn’t seem to stop when it comes to Chanute High School’s Blue Comets.