This is the Rouse (TX) High School Honor Band performing the concert band transcription of John Mackey’s Fission. If you’re a drum corps fan, you most likely recognize the music, which Mackey composed as Carolina Crown’s closer this past season.
Not only is the performance, which is a rehearsal run thru the band did before their concert performance at the Midwest Clinic, impressive, but the road Mackey took to get this composition prepared for Rouse to premiere was also impressive:
I frantically spent days revising materials, sending a new version of the piece to Ryan at the end of November. Yeah, I asked Ryan to give his students essentially a new piece about 2.5 weeks before the band’s highest profile performance these students would ever have. There was zero pushback, but can you imagine the stress I caused?
Ryan and the students worked their butts off, and the day before their Midwest performance, they played the piece for me – the first time I had ever heard it in person. This is the video of that run-through.
Rouse sounds amazing in a rehearsal room on an iPhone. Imagine what that sounded like in the concert hall.
