Motivated by his incredible passion for music education, Tracy Wright does it all.
He’s been the Director of Bands at Ringgold High School since 2016, and was director at Ringgold Middle for 23 years before that. He heads to Seattle to assist with director programs at the Western International Band Clinic, as well as the American Band College, a master’s program in Ashland, Oregon. Wright also is part of multiple educator and director associations as well, not to mention being involved with his community, church and family (though not necessarily in that order).
On top of all that, Wright frequently travels with his band to perform all around the country, using Super Holiday Tours as his guide. We asked him all about his love for student travel, the importance of music education and the challenges he’s had to overcome.
Tell us about your student travel history!
We’ve tried to do a healthy balance of concert band performances, as well as jazz band, as well as doing parades. The Chicago St. Patrick’s Day parade, the New York City Veterans Day Parade, which we’ve done several times, and then some smaller, locally based parades like the Atlanta Christmas Parade.
Why is student travel important to you?
Well, musically, it gives us a goal to work for. Getting the opportunity to perform at your state convention or a regional conference of some kind, that’s a huge accolade and a tremendous goal. But also, those years where those opportunities didn’t come your way, it is important. It gives us a goal. It gives us something to work toward. The community gets behind it here, helps us in raising funds and sponsoring students to go, and to give those students an opportunity like when we played at Carnegie Hall four years ago, nice things like that.
It’s taking students going to places they’ve only read about or heard about. From a very small town in northwest Georgia and going to Chicago, New York, Toronto, Washington DC, going to Fort McHenry to play the national anthem, where the national anthem was written. It makes things come to life for the students, for them to stand in Ford’s Theater or outside the White House or see the Statue of Liberty or to get money that has the queen on it instead of the President’s. That’s part of the education of any human being, is to get outside your own bubble in your own area. And hopefully you bring back things to your community that are going to make the people around you better. And, it gives you more appreciation for what you have locally.
And what do you enjoy about it personally?
When we travel and we’re on the bus or stopping to eat somewhere and we’re trying some local, iconic food of another city our kids have only heard about—whether it’s pizza in Chicago or Primanti Brothers sandwiches in Pittsburgh or going into a New York deli, or even in Toronto going to their Chinatown. Having those experiences to try other things, to sit down with kids and to get to know them outside of the band room and the rigor of everyday rehearsals, and to get to know their parents and their families a little bit better. That’s all a huge and very important aspect of traveling.
Do you have a particular travel highlight for you?
We played at Carnegie Hall a few years ago, and it was significant. Playing at Carnegie Hall, I mean, you’re talking about a place where Tchaikovsky conducted the 1812 Overture. His most iconic piece, he conducted on the same stage where you’re performing. Leonard Bernstein got his conducting debut there with the New York Philharmonic. Count Basie and Led Zeppelin play there. Every genre of music has performed on that stage. John Philip Sousa conducted and rehearsed on the same stage. And it’s not only historic, but it’s aesthetically and acoustically beautiful. But also, when we were there, that day on that trip, we went to the 911 Memorial in New York City, and the day we were there, this just happened to happen: It was the 40th anniversary that the original World Trade Center was opened. It was not intentional and they told us about it when we got there. Here we were in literally a sacred place, there on the grounds of that, and a lot of the students, the students were not even born yet when 911 had happened. And then on our program that night, we performed “American Overture for Man.” We perform “God of Our Fathers” by Claude T. Smith, and “The Invincible Eagle” by John Philip Sousa. So it was a patriotic program that we performed that day and everything just tied together in an incredible way on that trip.
On the flipside, are there any big challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Obviously, COVID-19 protocols. We were hybrid on a hybrid schedule for quite some time and unfortunately, that put a kink in travel. We ended up not traveling last year and we had plans to travel back to Carnegie Hall. My seniors last year were in eighth grade last time we went to Carnegie, so I told them, “Before you get out of high school, I’ll take you back.” I had no idea that we were going to experience COVID-19 and the challenges that came with it. And there was such a mixed opinion within my a students and their families about vaccine mandates and mask mandates. So the seniors came to me and said, “Can we travel this year? Can we go to Florida? It’s wide open.” So we go to Florida, and it was a fun trip. It was good for us to get out and do a trip, and we ended up going to Walt Disney World, doing a parade. We also went to Universal and it was like, finally, a little bit of normalcy and we had a great time on the trip. But yeah, that was a big challenge.
And how has Super Holiday helped you with travel?
Oh, they’re tremendous. They will listen to me, and they offer great suggestions about dining and lodging and venues and things to sightsee. And if there’s something that I think that I would like for the kids to do or see, they will make it a part of our trip. They’re very accommodating.
They understand how bands travel. Bands travel different than other student organizations. Even different than choirs, who don’t have to worry about everything from tubas to marching percussion, or timpani or any of the big stuff like that. Super Holiday takes care of those things and makes sure you have the equipment you’re going to need on site, and they only bring in the best topnotch charter companies. They take care of and make sure you’re aware of things like, a lot of cities have bus parking rules and laws that I would never know about. They understand that, and, “Hey, listen, when you go in this place, your students are going to have to show an ID, or they’re going to have to go through metal detectors. Make sure they don’t have a lot of stuff in their pockets, it’s going to slow the process down.” So they’re very accommodating, they get it, and they just take good care of us.