W.T. Sampson Elementary School made history as the first school to participate in Music in the Schools via livestream with the Navy Brass Quintet, Jan. 29.

The U.S. Navy Band, in conjunction with Defense Media Activity (DMA), is expanding the band's educational outreach program.

"As of today there are over 300,000 active duty Sailors serving in the Navy and each one has a specific job or rating as part of their identity," said Chief Musician Brandon Almagro, a trumpet player in the brass quintet. "Of those 300,000 Sailors, only about 600 are musicians. And of those 600 musicians, 174 are based in Washington, D.C. and serve alongside the five of us. Our job is to be ambassadors for the Navy through our musical performances and we represent the Navy as the premier musical organization of the entire Navy."

Using the facilities of DMA and the distribution of the Defense Video Imagery Distribution System (DVIDS), they can bring the outreach program to unlimited schools concurrently.

The Navy Brass Quintet livestream on January 29 was the first outreach program in the series. Department of Defense Education Authority (DODEA) W.T. Sampson Elementary School students in grades 3 through 5 were the first and only remote audience to participate in the webcast. Students from Centennial Elementary School in Ellicott City, Maryland, participated in the same event as a live audience in the studio.

During the event, students were treated to several music pieces including Antonin Dvorak's "Slovanic Dance Number Eight", J.S. Bach's "Fugue in G Minor", Joyce's "71st Regimental March", Chief Musician Colin Wise's arrangement of "Danny Boy", "Jive for Five" by Paul Nagel, the quintet's arrangement of "America the Beautiful", and Kevin McKee's "Escape".

"You'll hear a theme throughout our performance today of us taking existing music and adapting it for a brass quintet and that's something that we do quite a bit," said Almagro.

W.T. Sampson School students submitted many questions to the U.S. Navy Band via email and several were answered during the webcast:

1. How long have you been playing your instrument and how did you choose it?

"Speaking personally here, I have been playing for about 28 years I think," said Almagro. "That's a very long time, yes, seriously, 28 years," he laughed as children in the live audience responded in shock to his answer. "And I still practice all the time. I chose the trumpet actually because my friend in school was going to play the trumpet also and I thought, 'that's pretty interesting,' and my brother played trombone before me, and I just gave it a try and this is kind of where I ended up."

2. How do you stay in sync together?

"I don't know if you noticed while we were playing, we actually do a few things," said Almagro. "One of us or all of us collectively will kind of give a little bit of an ictus in conducting on our bell, a little bit of a nod to give a clear beat and we can see it and we can all sync up with that one instrument or all together. We can also listen to our own breathing when we start a piece. Since we don't have a conductor, we use our ears and eyes a lot more than we would sitting in a large ensemble. We don't have one specific person always conducting everything. Also, when we rehearse, one thing that we do is if we have a tricky rhythmic passage or something like that, we will actually write it in our part and we'll be aware of that and we'll listen for that and then try to sync up along with that at the same time. It's a process but you really learn how to communicate with everyone else in the ensemble."

3. Did you join the military just to play instruments?

"If you do the math, if I've been playing for 28 years, I was about 11 or 12 when I started, so I was a little bit too young to join the military," said Almagro. "I did start trumpet in 6th grade and then all of us here, we graduated from high school and we went to college and we all got music degrees and some of us even went past that and we have master's degrees or DMA's - a doctorate in music performance. We all became professionals on our instrument before we joined the military. Now, in the Navy Band in D.C., we have a very rigorous audition process and it's based on if there is an opening. If somebody retires or leaves the band, we will have an audition to fill that spot and sometimes you can have as many as 70 or 80 people, all with master's degrees in music or a doctorate in music, all auditioning and it becomes a very challenging process to get through. The five of us here all made it through that. Once we won the audition for the Navy Band in D.C., that's when we joined the military. So we became professionals on our instruments first and then we won a job with this band in Washington D.C. and, at that point, we enlisted in the military and we went off to boot camp."

4. Are you required to do as much P.T. [physical training] as people who aren't in the band?

"Because we are all in different performing units and have different ceremonies and concerts to play, we're not all collectively together very much at one time in our building," said Almagro. "It's hard for us to group P.T. together as a command. There's just a few times - like one of the promotion seasons- CPO365 Phase 2 - we do a lot of group P.T. around August and September, but beyond that, it's just on a personal level. We are still subject to the same requirements as the rest of the Navy or military as far as P.T. standards. We still do our pushups, our sit ups, and our run, bike or swim, so that is a part of our life. We do that cycle twice a year just like everybody else, but it's difficult for us as a performing organization to always be together in the same building at one time because there's so many performances going on."

5. How often a day do you practice when preparing for a performance?

"The concert band usually practices three or four times during one week for a concert that weekend or that Friday night," said Almagro. "Every once in awhile, if it's a very difficult recording session or - we just had our international saxophone symposium that we hosted that had a lot of very obscure, French-type music that was very difficult to put together - for that we would do two weeks of rehearsals and even that is the most we'd ever do. As far as a chamber group like this, if it's music we've played before we just get together and run through it and refresh our memory a little bit. But, as you become a professional musician, the time really gets to be less and less and everyone has so many performances that they're a part of and rehearsal time becomes a real issue. I don't know what time you start school, but our rehearsals are usually at 7:30 in the morning and that's pretty early to be playing a brass instrument. I think we adopt the idea that if we can get through a difficult piece of music at 7:30 in the morning, we can get through it in a performance pretty well.

One question from a Centennial Elementary School student may have lent itself to the best response of the session: How do you get through really hard sheet reading really quickly?

Chief Musician Colin Wise said that it is much like anything else you do, whether that be music or something completely different, likening his advice to the same ways you'd prepare for a marathon.

"The best way to get better at sight reading is to sight read, is to make yourself do it a whole lot," said Wise.


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