Once canceled, Hagerty band camp returns to a heroic soundtrack

Jeremy Williamson is talking about how there are no real villains in this story when just a few feet away conductor Brian Kuperman’s arms rise above a cavernous black auditorium stage and the music from more than 100 pieces of windblown wood and brass cranks the volume up to 11 all at once, walloping Williamson with a blast wave of sound. It’s the score from Marvel’s “The Avengers,” and it practically shakes the heavy curtains in the wings. 

The longtime Jackson Heights Middle School band director laughs, because it’s too appropriate. 

“Our theme this year is ‘Superheroes and Villains’ and that wasn’t done on purpose,” Williamson said. “It wasn’t meant to be a metaphor, but some people might interpret it that way. This is what we were supposed to do last year.” 

He says “supposed to,” because last year he was supposed to be here on this stage. So were a combined 250 or so other teachers, students and volunteers, but sometime just after spring break, after a stalemate between band directors and school officials attempting to agree on plans and pay ended in the camp not being approved, the band directors announced: there would be no Hagerty High School band camp for 2024. That’s where the band students and directors from Jackson Heights and Lawton Chiles Middle, and directors and student volunteers from Oviedo High School, Hagerty and beyond would normally be in the early summer break. 

The outcry from parents was immediate. 

“He was really disappointed,” parent Kathryn Jory said of her son, Henry, who was about to attend his last band camp before learning it was canceled, which OCN originally reported on last June. “It was really disappointing to be like, ‘Sorry, you can’t do the last camp.’”

Mariana, an incoming 8th grade clarinetist and jazz saxophonist from Lawton Chiles Middle, found out by an email while she was on vacation in another state. 

“I was really sad, because I was really looking forward to going into the 7th grade and really being prepared for the next year,” she said. 

“I didn’t know it was going to be canceled,” she said. “I was really shocked. I was like, they’ve never really canceled it.”   

The questions were immediate as well. Even Oviedo Mayor Megan Sladek, whose two children had both attended three years of middle school band camps, said she didn’t understand what could have caused the camp to suddenly be canceled. 

“Some of the band camps were approved, and some were not,” Sladek said in the wake of the announcement. “And no one seems to be able to tell me what the rhyme or reason is.”

A band with no arrangements

For a long time, Williamson said, camps were more or less making their own plans, financing the camps through student camp fees, and making things work. But they had to be approved through the school system, which had become more challenging in recent years. Last year suddenly the system broke down, he said. 

According to the assistant superintendent in charge of middle schools in the county, Demetria Hayes Faison, the decision to cancel camp came from the band directors after disputes over “plans, fees and compensation,” but Williamson said the cause was more complicated, as was the idea of heroes or villains of the situation.

“If we took a time machine to 10 years ago, all the camps were running through the band boosters,” he said, with the county giving individual camps more leeway for running individually. “Then the pendulum went to this extreme, almost micromanaging. Things became unruly almost.”

“It was affecting all the campuses in the county, but for whatever reason it affected us more,” Williamson said. 

The sudden cancellation, though it was ultimately announced by the band directors, still disappointed them. 

“It was sad, upsetting, kind of a letdown,” Lawton Chiles Middle School Band Director Grace Kuperman, wife of Hagerty’s Brian Kuperman, said, remarking on the first non-pandemic shutdown she’s seen the camp endure. “We’ve been doing the camp since before I’ve even taught in the county. Jeremy’s been doing it probably for over 20 years.”

Spanning the gap

The camp, band directors said, is a valuable bridge from summer into fall, introducing some younger kids to instruments for the first time and, for others, giving them specialized instruction that they can’t get during the year. But most importantly it keeps their brains learning over the summer, Grace Kuperman said. 

“They’re actively learning, they’re using their brains, but it sets them up for next school year, so we’ve already got a chunk of kids who already not only have their instrument, but they already know the fundamentals and they can help the kids who didn’t come to camp,” she said. “It bridges the gap between our school years, so it’s super valuable.” 

“They’re learning new things, especially from the high school volunteers who are really helping,” Mariana said. “They get inspired here and then they really want to be in band.”

And it’s an important and necessary experience for high schoolers looking for required community service volunteering credits, Grace Kuperman said.  

“We really couldn’t do it without the high school help,” she said. “They help reset all the rooms. They’re also in the rooms playing and helping reinforce good habits. From our camp they’ll get about between 40 and 50 hours which is a huge chunk for nine days.”

The help from older kids, plus more individualized instruction, also helps accelerate younger students in a way that doesn’t happen during the school year, the band directors said, bringing even new musicians up to speed so quickly that they can perform, if ever briefly, a concert at the end of camp for a crowd of hundreds. 

“Here we do in nine days what it would take us nine weeks to do during the school year,” Grace Kuperman said. “The difference is here we have teachers for every instrument, whereas when we start the school year it’s just me, or it’s just Mr. Williamson, and so we’re teaching nine different instruments in the one class at the same time. To let those kids have small group instruction [at camp] is just invaluable.” 

The instruction is so accelerated, incoming 8th grader Sara said, that it’s hard to believe a concert can come out of it. Today is concert day, the final day of camp, as the bands, split into groups of beginning, returning, advanced, all get to be a part of that moment that 58 clarinets, 23 trumpets, 21 percussion instruments, 20 trombones, 19 French horns, 16 tubas, 15 flutes, 12 saxophones, eight euphoniums, four bassoons, three bass clarinets and one solitary oboe send a sound rising to the ceiling above, swelling an auditorium with “The Imperial March,” the theme from “The Legend of Zelda,” or maybe just an acoustically massive rendition of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

Finding a solution 

The solution to the band camp conundrum, hashed out over the past winter, was about a new, consistent set of rules for all camps, Williamson said. It all came together with the help of band directors and county schools officials. 

“Miguel Alba [director of teaching and learning], Mike Rice [assistant superintendent], along with Dr. Lindsay Williams [fine arts and music curriculum specialist], those three people had a huge amount of responsibility and really deserve the credit of getting the ball rolling,” Williamson said. 

The changes that helped solidify a plan came from the big pieces, Williamson said. “How people were able to be paid, what entities we could use for payment, facility usage, camp insurance, things like that. They basically gave us a dollar amount per hour that we could pay people. We could negotiate what we were doing for planning time. I think the county realized how that flexibility allowed the camps to really do what we were striving to do, which is give the best experience for the kids.” 

But he also credits the band directors from all the schools involved at Hagerty’s band camp for making the change happen. 

“Because of us the county came back and the county actually put stuff in writing, they put procedures in writing, which didn’t exist before, and because of that all the camps are benefiting,” Williamson said. “Unfortunately we had to be the ones that drew the line in the sand.”

“It’s a celebration” 

In the final hour of rehearsal in the morning the sound from the stage swells and falls over and over again, a heavy, deep tactile resonance filling the room. It sounds like a concert band. 

“These are all the beginners,” Williamson said of the 70-some younger kids filling the black stage chairs. Most of them hadn’t picked up an instrument before, he said. 

Within an hour the empty auditorium audience seats would be filled 15 rows deep. There’s no curtain, no spotlight on the floor as Williamson, microphone in hand, welcomes the crowd in darkness. The lights, a flood of them, are on the nearly 100 kids behind him. 

“I’m not going to get too much into the weeds,” he says to the crowd. “But it’s good to be back.” 

And with that, a dozen-plus horns and clarinets rise and the Beginning Jazz Band lights out for the 1930s, with “B-Flat Blues Warm Up” arranged by Williamson himself. 

In a few moments the larger Beginning Band behind them suddenly issues a baritone bellow drawn out in one long powerfully ominous note that rises like a monster then falls in a heap. Then it returns even louder, rising higher. Then the percussion jumps in, a slow tock-tock-tock, then snare drums. Then, picking up speed, flowing up and down through three notes, you realize the monster is a warm, weighty version of “Hot Cross Buns,” the first song a child might learn on a recorder flute. And every note, woodwind, percussion and brass, is rising together. 

“They come a long way in a very, very, very short amount of time,” Hagerty Band Director Brad Kuperman, brother of Hagerty’s Brian Kuperman, said after the show. 

Sara, who spoke before she went out on stage, first chair trumpet with a jazz solo thrown in, smiled through braces about how far the campers had come. 

“In the beginning I was concerned how we were going to pull this off,” she said. “And today, I’m proud of my section.” 

Finally it’s time for the pros, the advanced band, with a little help from some older friends, bouncing and gliding their way through “Down Home Blues” and “Hey Elephant” before the main event, the first arrestingly ambitious note of the “Star Wars” theme soaring over the audience and up into the stage rafters before the campers, 120 musicians now, blast off to an odyssey in the stars.