Poised Performance

The Valencia High School Wind Ensemble achieved ultimate excellence for the fourth time at the New Mexico Activities Association’s Concert Band competition in Rio Rancho recently.

The group ended up with a score of 97.333 to claim the top prize at the gathering on Friday, April 11, at Sue V. Cleveland High School.

“We finished five points ahead of the next band, which is huge in band land,” said VHS Wind Ensemble director Nate Van Dam. “My main goal — I was just hoping to break 90 and get a superior rating.

“I told them in the warm-up room, ‘We’ve proved everything we need to just by the fact that we are here today.’ I was just trying to get them to relax a little bit before going to their performance. And then they laid down their best performance of the year.”

Van Dam said once the 24 students got settled and he stepped to the podium, the group was poised for a memorable performance.

“I felt it lock in. I felt it lock in on stage,” he recalled. “You know, we tend to battle some adrenaline, some nerves, and it can tend to let our performances get a little sloppy sometimes, but they’ve been getting better at handling that.”

Van Dam said he still had doubts afterward, though.

“Honestly, in the awards ceremony, they had just announced Deming in second place, and I leaned over to Ms. Stanbary, and ‘I go, yeah, I don’t think we got it.’ It was a little surreal when they announced us in first, honestly.”

The victory was the fourth top prize in the Concert Band competition for VHS, but the first with Van Dam as director.

VHS captured first place for the first time in 2015 in Class 5A and earned the 4A crown in 2019 and 2022. The group was also runner up in 2013, 2014 and 2016 and placed third in 2017 and 2018, according to NMAA records.

This year’s top finish comes in Van Dam’s first year as assistant director of bands, working with VHS director of bands Michelle Stanbary, who is also his fiancé.

The couple are both originally from the Chicagoland area in Illinois and moved to New Mexico four years ago.

“Yeah, we’re known as one of the power couples in band land here in New Mexico,” he quips. “We’ve sort of been in a rebuilding stage (with the program), and honestly, we can’t do what we do in wind ensemble rehearsal without the incredible fundamentals work that Ms. Stanbary does in the symphonic band.

“We like to say she builds foundations, and I build flying buttresses, right? Foundations can exist without flying buttresses, but flying buttresses cannot happen without foundations.”

Going into the school year, Van Dam said the goal for the group was to build as solid of a foundation as possible and to keep the students humble so that they “didn’t let up.”

“Our qualifying event for state is the Music Performance Assessment, which was two weeks before state this year for us,” he explained, “and even a week before that. I was like, you guys got to stay humble, stay hungry, because everybody else is pushing just as hard as we are.”

Van Dam and Stanbary emphasize excellence over competition in music classes with the idea that students can carry the experience on into life as well as potential careers in music.

“We always tell them ‘Somebody’s not going to win. Somebody’s going to come in last, and if that’s us, that is OK as long as we were judged fairly and we did our best.’ We like to say we use music to create better humans, and I think if you talk to most band directors around the state, they’d say the same thing.”