SEBASTIAN — When Caroline Colbert, Darren Ryan and Michael Ruggiano reflect on high school, their memories definitely will be accompanied by an entertaining soundtrack.
Colbert plays a mean flute and commands the ladies and one gentleman in her flute section with grace.
Ryan wields the euphonium – akin to a miniature tuba – as part of the Sebastian River High School Marching Sharks’ massive and powerful brass section.
This year, Ruggiano’s job is to corral the sprawling group on the football field during marching season as drum major, but his long-time weapon of choice is the trumpet.
All three also play in the school’s Wind Symphony, which they say stretches them as artists, but is less physically demanding than marching band.
“In marching band we play mostly rock and Latin songs, but in wind symphony, our range is greater and that’s one of my favorite things about wind symphony is the range of music we play,” she said.
Their symphonic music counts as an elective during school as a yearlong course, helping the teens juggle their harried schedules and still keep up with rigorous academic demands of their teachers.
On top of her practices during and after school, Colbert takes private flute lessons from Janine Jones, who teaches music at Osceola Magnet School.
“Band teaches you a lot about accountability, deadlines and being on time. I leave 15 minutes early for everything,” Colbert said. “I’m in the International Baccalaureate program, so I juggle a lot of balls, but I’ve learned to not make excuses for myself when I have a practice or a project due.”
Colbert, who moved to Sebastian seven years ago from Port Orange, Fla., plans to study either industrial systems engineering or nuclear engineering in college.
She’s looking at several schools in and out of state and hopes to meet up with some musicians at college to form a chamber music trio or quartet to play for events.
Wherever Colbert ends up, she’ll have her head in lots of upper-level math classes.
Music teachers push the correlation between playing an instrument and doing well in math.
The future engineer who has been playing flute since the sixth grade said she wouldn’t totally de-bunk that theory, but she wouldn’t affirm it, either.
“I’m not sure that it’s made me better in math,” she pondered, “But I know that band has made me a better student.”
When asked to identify three standout musicians from the Class of 2013, the school’s music director, Joel Pagán quickly honed in on these three as not only being exceptionally talented on their instruments, but also excellent students and model citizens in the ranks of the school’s music program.
During their high school careers, the three musicians have adeptly led their fellow marching band and wind symphony students up and down the field, from the practice room to the concert hall.
In early December, they will take to the stage and the aisles and the balconies with hundreds of other students singing and playing their hearts out to, once again, blow audiences’ minds at the school’s annual Prism Concert.
On occasion, the music even leads the merry band of musicians out of state to share their songs.
In 2011, a group of 100 of the students traveled to Washington, D.C., to play at the World War II Memorial. In March, their musical journey will take them to Indianapolis where the wind symphony will match their best against other schools from around the nation in the Music for All Bands of America National Festival.
Playing at that festival, Colbert said, is a huge honor. Ironically, it was actually last year’s wind symphony that sent in the blind audition tape that was judged tops by festival organizers.
Those seniors graduated, putting the pressure on the Class of 2013 to shine in Indianapolis.
As her last marching band season comes to a close, Colbert said she is going to miss the tight cadres of flutists she calls “her girls” (and one boy) and the camaraderie they’ve shared.
“My flute section is my family, we even have flute T-shirts,” she said. “There are so many little things we do, we even have cheers.”
An Honors Academy student at Sebastian, Darren Ryan plans to take his experiences studying music since the fifth grade to college where he’ll learn how to teach, and then return to a classroom where he’ll someday have his own clamorous bunch of kids playing off-key at first and learning instruments from scratch.
He moved to Sebastian from New York four years ago and, though he’s applied to Stetson and Florida State University, said he wouldn’t mind going back north to teach.
“I’ll go where the music is,” he said.
He looks forward to bringing up young musicians so they know the joy gets from performing.
“It’s definitely satisfying knowing that my music, our music, can move people,” he said. “And it’s definitely helps a lot to know that the community is behind us.”
In comparing marching band to wind symphony, Ryan said the spectator might think there’s more spirit or energy in the band music because of the number of musicians or the sheer volume of the music, but they would be wrong.
“I think the energy is still there in wind symphony, it’s just in a different form,” he said. “It’s just a more controlled, contained energy. The pressures are all this there just the same as on the field.”
There are fewer instruments in each section in the symphony. That means each musician must carry his or her load and that it’s much tougher to cover up mistakes.
Ryan said he listens to classical or symphonic music exclusively in his off-time from practice – it’s truly his passion.
“I love the literature of the music we do in wind symphony,” he said. “I think the literature makes it more challenging, also it requires endurance because the pieces are longer. It’s a lot more factors involved and it’s all worth it.”
Wind symphony gives Ruggiano a chance to blow the cobwebs out of his trumpet again, as he’s been serving as drum major of the band – the person who stands on a platform and keeps the time – all marching season.
“I don’t get to play that often. It was a big decision for me, actually,” Ruggiano said of his coveted leadership position.
Though it took time away from playing, the honor might help him get into one of the collages he’s applied to: University of Miami, Florida, Duke and University of Pennsylvania.
He hopes to pursue a career in interior design.
“I’m not planning on doing music education or music performance, but I’d like to keep up the playing,” he said.
In explaining what motivates him to play, for Ruggiano it all comes down to the smiles, the applause and getting the toes tapping in the stands or in the auditorium seats.
“I think we all take great pride in entertaining our community and entertaining our families,” he said.
