The chatter of the crowd washes through the auditorium, merging with the blurs of notes from the instruments on stage. Abruptly, the lights dim, and the audience hushes. At a thunderous rumble of stomping from the musicians, the conductor suddenly appears, stopping to bow before stepping onto the podium. The baton is raised in the air. A moment of silence. And then: music.
Performing onstage for the first time is often a magical experience for amateur instrumental players. It is this understanding that spurs Bellaire’s orchestra director Ms. Laurette Reynosa to host the “Hauntcert” every October, inviting middle school orchestras from around HISD to perform alongside Bellaire students. This year, about 40 students from T.H. Rogers and Lanier came to collaborate in pieces including “In the Hall of the Mountain King” by Edvard Grieg and “This is Halloween” from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.
As the younger players file to their places beside the Bellaire students onstage, they are often overcome by excitement and awe. When seventh grader Fiona Wang first sat down, she could not help breathing, “Wow. This is so cool.”
Wang has played the violin for one-and-a-half years and holds a position in T.H. Rogers’ second highest orchestra. “I think it was really cool watching how the older kids adapted to us and how we could adapt to them as well,” Wang explained. For Wang, the Hauntcert was a success in that it reminded her of the camaraderie of the orchestra “environment.”
The Hauntcert has a different, although no less valuable, impact on the older students. “It was fun to see the little people play and have them get inspiration from us,” Bellaire senior and current concertmaster Jake Magilke recounted. “I think the value in [the Hauntcert] is getting more experience and gaining more confidence in your playing. Watching older people play is inspirational for [the middle schoolers] because they have somebody they can look up to.”
And for some, such as sophomore Alexander Starnes, the Hauntcert brings back fuzzy “nostalgia.” As a violist in the Bellaire orchestra program who once sat where Wang and her TH Rogers friends did, Starnes had a unique perspective. “I was looking up at these kids before, right?” he said. “They’re better than me, and I’m aspiring to get to that level. And now I'm the one there; I’m the older kid,” he remembered. “It was honestly pretty cool to see that that’s where I was before.” He also noted that the Hauntcert “helped [him] grow [his] passion for orchestra and music” and want to “keep getting better.”
At the end of the night, the energy of the Hauntcert seemed still just tangible in the air as exhausted musicians, both middle- and high-school alike, began packing up. Despite their differences, these students had brought their own unique experiences in order to create one that united them all: the making of music. Because, in the orchestra, as Ms. Reynosa says, “Everyone has a part to play, and we all rely on each other to be successful.”
