Imagine a room filled with the beautiful sounds of stringed instruments playing as one to create a wonderful and amazing symphony. That’s what the Bowie Orchestra was able to do for their Texas Music Educators Association’s Honor Orchestra Competition performance.

Every year, the Bowie Orchestra performs to receive the highest score possible for the TMEA Honor Orchestra Competition. The program records themselves playing different pieces and sends them to the TMEA Organization.

“TMEA is our state championship. We send in recordings of our orchestra to the organization and they grade us accordingly,” head orchestra director David Chisum said. “For this year’s competition, we played the Mendelssohn String Sinfonia No. II, the Tschaikowsky Serenade for string orchestra, and the Bloch Concerto Grosso.”.  

Chisum has only been in the Bowie Orchestra Program for three years, however his students hold high praise for what he has accomplished in such a short time.

“The program grew immensely since Mr. Chisum came in. We have become more organized and better musicians from his guidance. This has been the third year with him, so we have begun to understand how he wants things done to improve our music,” senior Lee Stone said.

The orchestra has drastically changed since Chisum’s arrival. The growth and ability of the program has increased significantly.

“Whenever we started off in orchestra, we were the level of a better middle school orchestra. We had a lot of improving to do,” junior Jocelyn Brooks said. “Since Mr. Chisum came, we have not only improved as individual players, but as an orchestra as a whole.”

The orchestra program continues to refine themselves under the council of Chisum, such as their ability to play, focus, and many other things that are necessary for a successful orchestra.

“We went from playing middle school level parts to professional grade literature, like pieces by Beethoven and Tchaikovsky,” senior Katie Stephenson said.

Due to Chisum, the orchestra has been able to improve greatly for the their TMEA Orchestra Competition performances. This year’s TMEA performance seems like it’ll be one of the best ones yet.

“Earlier this year the Philharmonic, our second best orchestra, received the best rating from every judge, as did our top group symphony in full orchestra and string.” Stone said.

They have been preparing for this year’s recording for months. Thus, the orchestra has high expectations for this years results.

“We’ve been working on the same pieces since August for our honor orchestra recording that we just did. Our ability to perform these pieces of music has significantly improved as we spent many rehearsals working on perfecting it,” Stephenson said.

Nevertheless, there are still areas that the orchestra needs to improve in.

“There’s definitely room for improvement. We’ve addressed what we need to fix and we fixed it,” Brooks said. “When we listened to our recording, we really need to look into our dynamics, tone, and other key factors to making a piece sound good. We need to be more aware on how each other play and playing as an orchestra, not as individuals.”

Improvement is required for anything. Orchestra isn’t an exception to this.

“We need to improve on lots of stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. With music you’re either getting better or worse,” Chisum said. “So there is always something you need to improve in. It’s really not anything specific.”

The Bowie Orchestra has worked hard to improve their ability and they hope to score as high as they can. The program recorded their performance earlier this month and should receive their results in the coming weeks.

“Regardless of whether or not we he had a superior rating in the competition, these performances provide more opportunity for us to grow not only as individuals, but to grow as an orchestra,” Brooks said.