Why You Should Be Watching Sound! Euphonium: Trumpet Staccato and Geek Bravado

In the dark seating of a concert competition hall, students wait, curled up in their seats with bated breath and trepidation as they wait to see if months of exhausting rehearsal have yielded a nice comfy ticket to nationals or leave them to melodramatically weep in the seat. Unfortunately for Kumiko Omae, that’s not the case for her middle school band. A little disheartened and demotivated by disappointment from both herself and the emotional distress from her friend Reina Kosaka, she finds herself as a self-conscious first year high schooler with little direction.

That is, until she actually meets the Kitauji High School concert band who… aren’t really all that good. Not good enough to even enter competitions, in any case. After following a new acquaintance (another former music peer) to the band room and reflecting on her positive experiences in middle school, she turns around and decides to join in what turns out to be a fairly motivated task force. She, along with other new and old talent assemble under a new director to help turn things around and nurture the musical troop all the way to nationals.

Sound! Euphonium is nothing if not an absolute medley of love and winks towards its target audience of old and new band geeks, and it’s all too obvious that these experiences and characters come from a very real, special place in the director’s heart. This is certainly one of the many elements that help to differentiate the show from other airy school fair such as K-On by making it consistently much more real and relatable.

Its overarching aesthetics appropriately integrate constant expressive hand motion and facial expressions in a way that helps to give life to the concert and practice scenes. It’s kind of nice to see music kids be identified casually on screen by their connection to their instruments, further assisted by the very things they play, which sometimes contextually helps to reveal something about their personality and mental state. This is seen from Kumiko’s noncommittal but preordained interaction with the euphonium to newbie Hazuki’s similarly fated but brash crossing with the tuba.

The sound and score is, of course, loud, brash diegetic band fare that is appropriately lively enough to help carry the energy and narrative beats of the show with crazy trumpets and symbols accompanying nervous, stressed contemplation and light piano for more relaxed thinking.

With this MO, however, comes the true talent of the series: keeping you fairly consistently engaged with surprisingly real feeling characters and a high level of accessibility for those not in the locus of music nerds, even if it is admittedly much less personal feeling from my own perspective. It has plenty of references to classic band pieces and articulates the intricacies of band culture (the performance anxiety, social circles you develop, etc.) while still helping to define technical terms and educate the unwashed masses and even teach a cool thing or two to them

The background casts, which are usually cheerleaders with minimal lines in this type of light fare mostly seem to have unique looks and personalities that I personally look forward to seeing interact with each other throughout the series.

Although the show is about all things band, it’s almost if not equally as much about social nuances; what people think versus what they’re trying to say, the internal logic of a kid trying to juggle what is “best” as opposed to the popular opinion and what she wants. This is seen in multiple facets of Kumiko’s life, in everything from her taking out some random frustration on her mom to being both subtly and overtly emotionally swept up in important conflicting decisions.

All in all, the show has my attention as sweet, optimistic fare that also well articulates the challenges of trying to communicate and grow while trying to work towards a challenging goal.

Overall rating: 3/5

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