The 4,300-seat performance venue, about an hour north of Carnegie Hall, was eerily empty except for the nine uniformed judges seated behind thick black curtains.
Nervous and dry-mouthed, Ada Brooks raised the bell of her euphonium, a smaller version of a tuba, and prepared to play the note that might define her future.
“Take a deep breath,” she thought. “The beginning is the most dangerous.”
That's what Ms. Brooks had told herself before, as her ambition to play the euphonium professionally – an instrument not used in traditional symphony orchestras – had led to many stressful auditions, this time for her 10th with the U.S. Military, an institution that calls itself the nation's largest employer of musicians.
She practiced and …
Some elements of the audition were familiar to most orchestral musicians, such as performing behind curtains to avoid biased judges. Others were unique to the military: Two of the other four candidates said they had to lose weight to pass, and finalists were tested for coordination with marching drills.
Dozens of area military bands perform on behalf of the military at ceremonies, parades and holiday celebrations. About a dozen top-tier bands, including an ensemble from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, perform at inaugurations and during visiting foreign dignitaries.
Premier band seats are especially attractive, offering job security and a steady salary (starting salaries can be around $70,000) along with health insurance and other benefits, and those who secure them tend to stay there for years, if not their entire careers.
Brooks practiced three hours a day in his living room in Denton, Texas, using sophisticated recording equipment to point out imperfections in pitch and tempo.
At her audition, she performed excerpts from works by Schoenberg, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Shostakovich, as well as John Williams' Raiders of the Lost Ark soundtrack, with confidence and precision.
At one point, a judge asked her to be more eloquent. She repeated a few bars. After she played Boismortier's Sonata No. 12 with Sergeant Christopher Leslie, the band's principal euphonium player, one of the judges yelled out, “I think you can match his style and intonation more. Try it again.”
In the end, Brooks was one of two finalists who were asked to perform additional excerpts and face an interview with the judges. The final question was posed by the band's conductor, Lt. Col. Daniel Torben: “Why is it your dream to join a top military band?”
Brooks paused.
“You know, there aren't many options for euphoniums,” she said.
There was a big laugh.
After careful deliberation, Sergeant Leslie rendered his verdict: she passed.
Well, almost. Brooks had to complete more than two months of boot camp before he could become an Army musician.
Musical Mission
Brooks, 27, was introduced to the euphonium by her band teacher in eighth grade in Columbia Falls, Montana, when she thought it was “just a not-so-cool tuba” and no one cared about the limited career opportunities it offered.
By tenth grade she was a member of the all-state band and no longer planned on studying math, science or physics in college: she was determined to play the euphonium professionally.
She spent $7,000 on the euphonium and studied at Interlochen, a performing arts high school in Michigan for two years, then earned bachelor's and master's degrees in music performance from the University of North Texas and spent eight years in the Southwest Air National Guard Band, hoping to gain experience playing music part-time in the military.
When Brooks' unit was suddenly deployed to the Texas-Mexico border as part of Operation Lone Star, many of the musicians quit. “Our band shrunk to half the size it was,” she says.
During his 10-month deployment, Brooks worked at the armory distributing weapons from midnight to 8 a.m. Many of his bandmates handed out water to migrants crossing the border and sat with them until Border Patrol arrived. Preparing for the audition was tough, as Brooks was living in a hotel.
“I was practicing my instrument in my car,” she said. “It was absolutely miserable.”
Military life can often be a shock to musicians who have not served in the military.
“It's a little weird because you have to wear a combat uniform to play the tuba,” said Staff Sergeant Alec Morens, a tuba player in the West Point band, “and at the end they shave your head and you yell, 'OK, drill sergeant.'”
Rifles, not musical instruments
The sun hadn't yet risen in the Ozark Mountains of south-central Missouri, but the trainees of Company B, 3rd Battalion, 10th Infantry Regiment, were already marching. It was a chilly day in early January, with temperatures hovering around 1 degree Celsius, and a hazy mist hung over the troops.
“I left home to join the army,” the cadets sang in unison.
Brooks, now Specialist Brooks, believes the difficult experience was well worth it, previously saying “basic training is nothing compared to 20 years of performance work.”
But after six weeks at Fort Leonard Wood, with five more to go, Specialist Brooks looked exhausted. She loved the morning bugle sounds and rifle training, especially the precision that reminded her of practicing an instrument. What she didn't enjoy so much were the hours on her feet in the cold and the unusually hurried meals.
“While I'm here, I practice my jodi and my shooting,” she said, referring to the call-and-response rhythms sung while marching and running. She couldn't bring her euphonium and tried not to think about it. “It's like living a different life,” she said. Most of the trainees didn't know she was a musician.
A quiet perfectionist, Sergeant Brooks struggled with the barrage of scolding that characterized basic training. She dealt with it with a smile, which resulted in drill instructors yelling, “Hide your teeth, Brooks!”
“I didn't know how to respond when they yelled at me,” she says, “but then I realized they weren't really angry; they just do it all the time.”
As the company arrived at the armory to receive its rifles for target practice, the trembling trainees stood at attention. “The Soldier's Creed!” the drill instructor shouted.
“I am an American soldier,” Specialist Brooks replied, along with his troops. “I am ready to engage and destroy the enemies of the United States in close combat.”
Music and the military have long been closely linked. For centuries, drums have been used to set the pace of marches. Before the advent of radio, fifes and drums were used for communication on the battlefield. America's first military band, the United States Marine Corps Band, known as the “President's Band,” was formed by an act of Congress in 1798.
During the Civil War, band members would put down their instruments, pick up their weapons to fight, then start playing again, said Loras John Cissel, a senior musicologist at the Library of Congress. By the early 20th century, music was considered important for boosting military morale.
“Music only after food, water and ammunition,” he said.
Direct combat encounters by military band members are becoming increasingly rare, but not uncommon: In 1941, all 21 band members aboard the USS Arizona were killed while loading ammunition onto the ship's guns during the attack on Pearl Harbor, and on September 11, 2001, the U.S. Army Band assisted in search and rescue efforts at the Pentagon.
Quiet Confidence
With the possibility of combat in mind, the musicians undergo the same training as infantrymen. On a cold morning during basic training, Specialist Brooks and 136 other soldiers prepared to rappel from a 40-foot-tall wooden structure called the Confidence Tower.
The 1.5-mile march to the tower was mostly silent (talking was forbidden), with the loudest sounds being the crunch of ice under our boots and the scrape of our camouflage uniforms against our heavy packs.
Because music was cut off at boot camp, Specialist Brooks hummed Gustav Holst's Suite No. 1 in E-flat major while she ran. Before arriving, she copied lyrics to songs like Florence + the Machine's “Dog Days Are Over” into a notebook so she could have a radio playing in her head. As she prepared for field exercises, she and her roommates sang the show's theme song, “It's the Hard-Knock Life.”
The rhythm that Specialist Brooks had had to yell so many times during their march to the Tower of Confidence remained in her head.
Sitting in the trenches
Sharpening your knives
The enemy jumps out
I had to end my life.
Die and kill, die and kill
Why don't you die?
“I like the singing parts, but the violence parts are a bit shocking,” she later said.
By the time the trainees reached the tower, two had been disqualified for moving too slowly, and several others had failed to scale a small training wall nearby. Brooks, a specialist rock climber and caver, was unfazed.
The wind shook the tower and the wood creaked. As Specialist Brooks reached the top, one of the drill instructors sitting near the cliff called out to another. “Get to work on Ezophagus,” an affectionate nickname the instructors had given her, a play on “euphonium.”
Specialist Brooks knelt on the edge of the tower's top, she smiled widely, not bothering to hide her teeth.
During basic training, she tried not to think about the things she missed most at her home near Dallas: baking her favorite blueberry muffins with chia seeds, drinking leisurely coffee, and watching movies on the couch with her dog and three cats, Kiwi, Biscuit and Momo.
When it was time for Specialist Brooks to depart Fort Leonard Wood, her boyfriend arrived with his euphonium, and she was already playing a solo before she had even eaten her first meal outside the base.
“Utilizing Taxes”
In April, two months after completing boot camp, Brooks, who had graduated with the rank of staff sergeant, attended her first concert as a member of the West Point Band at the school in North Salem, N.Y. She had rehearsed with the band twice and was now nervously adjusting the ornate pin on the lapel of her black blazer.
“Do I look good in this?” she asked. Taking a peek at her concert uniform in the mirror, she said, “It's exciting and weird to see myself dressed like this.”
The concert's songs were chosen to honor West Point traditions, and by the time the band played “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” the audience was cheering and singing along.
Conductor Colonel Torben wrote in his master's thesis that music helped the army fulfill its public relations mission of generating trust and confidence among the public. “This is your tax money,” he said proudly midway through the concert.
After a rousing encore of “The Official West Point March” and John Philip Sousa's “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” her first concert with Sergeant Brooks' band came to an end, with a look of joy and relief on her face.
As the musicians mingled with the enthusiastic crowd, Sgt Leslie spotted Sgt Brooks. “Congratulations,” he said, with a collegial nod that was a far cry from the neutrality with which he'd judged her audition eight months earlier. Brooks, holding a bouquet of flowers, was beaming.
She grabbed her collar and asked her bandmates, “Is anyone else warm enough to wear this uniform?” As the adrenaline began to fade, she said it felt surreal to play with a military band. “It's going to take me a while to get over the imposter syndrome.”