Gateway marching band scores hit at championships

Gateway scored a hit with “Headphones On.”

That’s the title of the show presented by the high school marching band this season, and it impressed judges at the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Marching Band Association Championships to the tune of an 87.575 score out of 100, good for sixth place among 17 bands competing Oct. 22 at Norwin High School.

Presented as a stylized musical journey through the decades, “Headphones On” is based on a score by Chad Heiny, a composer whose work includes arrangements for school districts in the region. The original title is “Mixtape.”

“We wanted to adapt it to work in our context and kind of be our own, unique thing,” Sean McMasters, Gateway director of bands, said. “We kind of changed it to be the feeling of putting on your headphones and kind of zoning out for a little bit, being transported by your favorite playlist or your favorite couple of songs.”

At Norwin’s Knights Stadium, Gateway’s show opened to the familiar, infectious cadence of Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” a perennial audience favorite since its 1979 release. The music that followed pertained to the performance’s premise, as explained by McMasters:

“The girl is looking for the right playlist for us to play during the show, and she skips through Beyoncé’s ‘Crazy In Love,’ Toto’s ‘Africa’ and ‘I Want You Back’ by the Jackson 5. Then once the show gets up and going, there’s a little original music. Chad wrote a fanfare for us to play at the beginning.”

Next came a mash-up of Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit In the Sky” and Michael Giacchino’s Marvel Studios theme, and the show continued with “Father and Son” by Yusuf Islam, whose stage name was Cat Stevens when the song first appeared in 1970, before wrapping up with another hit from the same decade, Electric Light Orchestra’s “Mr. Blue Sky.”

A week before the championships, Gateway hosted a PIMBA competition, and the band also performed “Headphones On” in competitions at Baldwin and Moon Area high schools. Along the way, McMasters and his instructional team picked up pointers.

“Each judge has a specific area of the marching band world that they focus on, and they, week to week, give us feedback on ways to make the show more cohesive or easy to understand, or enhance it,” he said.

McMasters works for Gateway teaching band and orchestra at the elementary level, and many of his high school band students are eminently familiar to him.

“I started with them in fourth grade and have seen them grow up. It’s a pretty cool part of the job,” he said.

He complimented his musicians who are in Gateway’s Class of 2023.

“The senior class has been great this year,” McMasters said. “They led the rest of the band, showed a lot of maturity and, I think, represented the band really well.”