• The McKinney High School Percussion Ensemble performing onstage last spring. (Photo: Troy Foster)
• The McKinney High School Percussion Ensemble performing onstage last spring. (Photo: Troy Foster)
• The McKinney High School Percussion Ensemble performing onstage last spring. (Photo: Troy Foster)
• The McKinney High School Percussion Ensemble performing onstage last spring. (Photo: Troy Foster)
• The McKinney High School Percussion Ensemble performing onstage last spring. (Photo: Troy Foster)
• The McKinney High School Percussion Ensemble performing onstage last spring. (Photo: Troy Foster)

McKinney, Texas – While many students will be traveling during the weeklong Thanksgiving break in late November, the McKinney High School Percussion Ensemble will have already hit the road and returned by the time that annual November break arrives.

They have been named winners in the prestigious Percussive Arts Society’s International Percussion Ensemble Competition and as such have earned the highly coveted invitation to perform at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention (PASIC), to be held Nov. 8–11 in Indianapolis, Indiana.

The McKinney High School Percussion Ensemble rehearses music for their upcoming PASIC performance.

“The PASIC invitation is kind of the peak achievement that a high school percussion program can get,” said MHS Percussion Director Tyler Nechamkin, “so, to see that happen is honestly very exciting. It’s a really affirming achievement that shows the program is in the right place and headed in the right direction.”

When most people think of band percussion sections, they likely picture drum lines blasting out beats in front of student sections at Friday night football games—and that’s certainly a big part of it.

The McKinney High School Percussion Ensemble has six pieces to prepare for their upcoming PASIC performance.

But, to the layman, the world of percussion presents an often unfamiliar, yet vast landscape of instruments, rhythms and arrangements that extends well beyond snare drums and school fight songs (as wonderful as those things are).

The McKinney High School Percussion Ensemble deployed a broad array of percussive instruments to great effect last spring while performing the intensive, complex compositions featured in their entry into the Percussive Arts Society’s International Percussion Ensemble Competition.

The McKinney High School Percussion Ensemble rehearses music for their upcoming PASIC performance.

To enter the contest, schools from around the world submitted live, unedited recordings up to 30 minutes in length, that were evaluated by a panel of judges. MHS submitted three pieces, and now that they have been chosen to perform at PASIC, they are hard at work preparing a program of five new percussion pieces, plus one that was featured in their contest entry—all in the midst of a very busy football marching season. It’s a lot of music to take on.

“The PASIC concert is at the beginning of November,” said Nechamkin, “and none of that music has anything to do with our marching music, so we’re doing double duty. We’ve played some rehearsals on this [PASIC] music here and there on Saturdays and on Mondays after school when we don’t have marching band. Now, we’re going to shift gears and do some marching music and some of this music during class to try to cover all of it.”

The McKinney High School Percussion Ensemble rehearses music for their upcoming PASIC performance.

For senior Nick Shields, the volume of work hasn’t diminished the joy of the accomplishment. “We don’t usually have to balance marching and ensembles at the same time. So, that’s been a unique challenge, but I think everyone is balancing it extremely well. We had success with marching stuff already, but … now we get to enjoy preparing our concert. We already won, so this is us just getting to have fun.”

Sophomore Lily Smith said that the workload is helping her develop as a musician. “It helps you grow in a lot of different ways because you have to learn to pick up a bunch of little skills really quickly,” she said. “We put in a lot of time—after school, during school, before school, just on our own. But, it’s a very rewarding process because you get a lot better.”

Members of the McKinney High School Percussion Ensemble stand among a veritable maze of percussion instruments as they prepare music for their upcoming PASIC performance.

Nechamkin takes pride in the fact that winning a contest wasn’t even the goal in recording the percussion pieces last spring. “The goal was to have recordings that stood the test of time that we could be really proud of,” he said. “And, this is like our masterpiece of a recording for our percussion program. Our students really bought into just making a really, really good performance out of the pieces. And, that resulted in being competitively successful as well.”

So, while the weeklong break from school that everyone enjoys in late November will be nice, one can bet that the road trip to Indianapolis in early November may prove even sweeter for the members of the MHS Percussion Ensemble.

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