Scott Swanson
For the first time in more than a decade, Sweet Home band members last week participated in a band festival.
“It was new,” said senior Sarcon Majors, who’s been in band since sixth grade.
“We haven’t done anything like that before.”
“It was good,” said Shiloh Moore, also a senior. “We performed and we got to work with a professor.”
Elijah Heide, who took over the program at the beginning of this school year, said the visit to the the Great Western Music Championships held at Western Oregon University, in which participating bands are judged by college professors, is part of his mission to “re-grow the program.”
Heide, 25, knows what a quality music program is. A member of a family who tended more toward athletics – his sister was a scholarship softball player at Portland State who later played internationally, he got interested in music as a fourth-grader, though his start was a little rough.
“I started in the orchestra, playing (double) bass. I was forced into an instrument I didn’t enjoy. I had to have two basses, one for school and one for home, because I couldn’t take it anywhere. It was awful. I didn’t like it.”
In fifth grade he switched to band, playing the trombone. He stayed with that until high school, when he switched to the baritone horn as a high school sophomore and then picked up the French horn, a notoriously difficult instrument to play, as a member of the school orchestra as a junior.
“Everybody always expected me to play football,” he said. “My older siblings were really into sports.
“In college, all the rugby guys were, like, ‘Hey, want to come play rugby?’ I’m like, ‘Noooo, not really.’”
By the time he got to West Salem High School, Heide had decided to focus on the arts, particularly music.
“That was quite a turn for my family,” he said. “The band directors there really made me realize how much I loved music, just by their teaching style, and how motivated they were to making kids better musicians. That’s kind of what drove me to become a band teacher.”
By the time he was a junior in high school, Heide had decided he wanted to pursue music education. One of his high school teachers also taught at Western Oregon University, and because the school is known for producing teachers, Heide decided to go there. He earned a bachelor’s degree in music and then a master’s in teaching, graduating last June.
He applied around the state, but didn’t get any nibbles. Then a college friend, Ryan Graville, gave him a call late in the summer. Pat Johnson, who had led the band for the past decade, had resigned suddenly.
“(Graville) said, ‘We’re in desperate need of a band teacher,” Heide recalled. “I applied that day. I got a call the next day, asking for an interview.
“I didn’t actually see myself going to an impoverished community, but the opportunity opened up and I jumped at it. After a month I fell in love with it here. I just enjoy what I’m doing. I enjoy the students.”
Now he’s working to build the program, which has fallen on hard times.
The jazz band, which was the highlight of band concerts and was limited to select students, was cut this year by the administration because of lack of participation.
“There was just nobody in it,” Heide said. “They were down to, like, five people.” The concert band, which includes all comers at the high school level, was also greatly reduced in size from previous years, with 22 members – nine of them freshmen.
“I’m not going to lie,” Heide said. “We’re small.”
But that’s what he’s working to fix, he said.
“We have pictures of the 1980s and ’90s,” Heide said. “The band program was huge. I just want to re-grow it to a more stable place than where it is now.”
Hence, the band festival.
“As a musician, it’s very important to perform for other people who are not your family, not your peers,” Heide said. “It’s important to play in other venues than just your auditorium. Also, to go to a festival and watch what other bands are doing, what other schools are doing.
“That’s a huge thing of why I want to go to a festival – to show them, ‘Hey, this is what other kids your age, this is what they’re doing.’”
Moore said she switched from clarinet to tuba this year, and the professor who worked with Sweet Home at last week’s festival gave her a lot of helpful tips.
Majors said it was helpful to see “variety” from observing other bands.
Heide noted there is another benefit as well – for the teacher.
“Also, having one of the judges talk to the band afterwards – it was nice having a judge confirm everything I’ve been telling them in class.”
Majors, a percussionist, said Heide has introduced new things for band members.
“We listen to music as well as play it,” he said. “Mr. Heide brings up other pieces that we listen to on Mondays and Thursdays, as a way to expand our knowledge of music.”
Heide grew up in Salem, which is known in the music community as a town in which music has a high degree of respect and appreciation.
“There’s a lot of support for music in the Salem area,” Heide acknowledged.
At West Salem he participated in band, concert band, jazz band, pep band, marching band, symphony orchestra, musical theater “and I did choir a couple of times” – all offered by the high school.
He’s not shooting that high yet, but he wants to get the program to the place where the jazz band is back and he can have an audition-only band “as well as a band that everybody can be in.”
“Maybe, some day, we can even bring back the marching band.”