The audience will settle as the conductor begins, and then everyone will finally hear the soft clarinet and trumpet solo echoing throughout the auditorium as the bands begin to play. On Dec. 7, the FHN concert and symphonic bands will play once more in their annual winter band concert.

“It shows what the concert band does,” freshman trumpet player Caleb Johnson said. “It shows that we’ll be a good band that the audience can look forward to for coming years. Basically, we can show people what we’ve got. We can hype people up for upcoming concerts.”

This year, the concert band will be playing pieces such as “Allegro and Dance” by Mozart, a piece called “Rain” and one called “Wingwalker”. The symphonic band will also be playing three pieces: “Nutcracker Suite”, “Perthshire Majesty” and “Ruckus”.

“They’re really pushing to push themselves as musicians classically, so what I like about this particular concert is it’s very formal, everybody dresses up and it’s about enjoying some classical music, which is not… as widely popular as some other things, so it’s cool to kind of go with the traditions of what’s entailed there,” band director Rob Stegeman said.

According to Stegeman, this concert is not only a more classical concert, but it also normally includes some kind of song people would hear around the holidays, without the song always being associated with a religion. For this concert, that song would be “Nutcracker Suite”.

“I think it’s been a fun challenge to do the Nutcracker Suite,” Stegeman said. “That’s really the bulk of the difficulty for symphonic band. For the concert band, it’s our ballad, it’s our slow one, ‘The Rain.’ That’s actually probably the hardest thing on the concert, and it was an area I knew they needed to grow in to be more lyrical and more gentle, so they’ve been working really hard on the ballad. And it’s fun because a lot of kids at the high school level don’t always want to do something slow and pretty, and they’ve really come to enjoy that and work on that. That’s been really cool for me and for the concert band. And the symphonic band playing a really fundamental classical piece has been quite a challenge, and it’s been really fun and rewarding.”

Both bands have been practicing hard to prepare for the concert in order to showcase all of their hard work and to give both the community and school something to be interested in.

“It’s just really fun to produce something and be proud of it,” senior french horn player Emily Helmick said. “Every concert, my feeling at the end is that I gave it my all and I produced something beautiful for the audience. As a performer, that’s really all you ever want to achieve.”