Flute, baritone, saxophone

Marching band is the reason I started asking neurological questions in the first place.

A field show asks you to hold two separate things in memory at once. There is the music, and there is a drill chart of coordinates that changes every few counts. You execute both while walking backwards, in step, with a hundred other people.

Nobody in the band thinks of this as a cognitive task. It just becomes possible, gradually, through repetition, until a show you could not play in September is automatic by November.

I play flute, baritone, and saxophone, depending on what the show needs. I also help new members with marching and playing technique, and I build props for the field shows, which is a side of band nobody sees from the stands. A show needs things constructed, painted, and moved on and off a field on a schedule.

Our band has won awards across California, including at the Heritage Music Festival in Los Angeles in 2025. We have performed at the San Jose Veterans Day parade, Newark Days, the Halloween parade, and a long list of others.

Full performances are posted by our parents’ organization, which films the shows: AHS Band Parents Organization on YouTube.

Symphonic band is the other half of the year, and it asks for close to the opposite of marching season. Nothing is memorized and nothing moves. The whole difficulty sits in tone, intonation, and blending into a section instead of projecting over one.

Chairs are decided by audition each year.

Playing a solo is different again. There is no section to hide inside, and every choice about tone and timing is audibly yours. Here is a solo flute recital, recorded on a phone at the microphone.

In spring 2026 I recorded and submitted a preliminary audition on flute for the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra. I did not advance past it.

I am leaving the recording here anyway, because the preparation was the most concentrated month of practice I have done. An audition recording is a strange format. There is no audience to play off and no conductor to follow, so the only thing carrying the performance is whatever you have internalized about tempo and phrasing. You also get to hear yourself the way everyone else does, which is uncomfortable and by far the most useful part. I recorded the excerpts many more times than I expected to, and nearly everything I fixed between takes came from listening back rather than from anyone telling me.

I intend to audition again.

I improvise solos in jazz band on both flute and alto saxophone, and we play out: Fremont Street Eats, the Fremont Unified Film Festival, and other community events around town.

Jazz has been the hardest adjustment of the three ensembles I play in, because it asks for the opposite instinct from the other two. Marching band and symphonic band reward precision against a fixed target. The part is written, the interpretation is largely decided for you, and success means matching it. In jazz the chart is a starting point. You are expected to phrase behind the beat, to leave notes out, and at some point to play something that is not on the page at all.

Taking a solo in front of a crowd at a street food event is a different kind of nerve from playing a concert. Nobody came to hear a high school jazz band. You are competing with conversation and the smell of food, and the only thing that earns attention is committing to an idea and finishing it. Learning to do that badly in public is the only route to doing it well, which took me most of the first year to accept.

I have spent two summers as a teaching assistant at Tri-City Band Corps, working with intermediate and advanced flute students on tone, breath support, articulation, and whatever technical passage they were stuck on that week, and getting them ready for upcoming concerts.

Teaching an instrument turns out to be an exercise in diagnosis. A student who cannot play a passage is rarely failing at the passage itself. Usually they are breathing in the wrong place, or tensing a hand, or hearing the rhythm wrong two bars earlier. Finding the actual fault instead of the visible symptom is most of the job.

Through the Tri-M Music Honor Society I tutored middle school band students, working with them on music that sat just past what they could comfortably play. That range is the useful one. The piece is learnable, but only with help.

Several of them are in high school band now.